AdSense Earnings Adventure

Round 2

2008-01-03T06:27:00.000-05:00

Back again - a year later - with another article that should prove as popular as our launch article! This time we've switched to affiliate marketing via Commission Junction, with AdSense sprinkled throughout. As I mentioned below, I threw up some test pages with CJ ads last year and they did really well - I just had no traffic by that point. It will be interesting to see how they perform during this coming traffic spike.

Over the past year the site made around $500... half AdSense / half CJ (only on the shoes page.) It's neat getting cheques in the mail regularly for doing no work (I didn't touch the site until a week or two ago.)

Interestingly enough, after an initial Click-Thru-Rate of 0.2% during the surge, CTR climbed to 2% with roughly 100 uniques/day on average.

It'll be interesting to see how things go this time around! Time to go get Dugg / Stumbled / Reddited!

Thanks to Christina for the great article!

Change of Tactics

2007-02-26T09:05:00.000-05:00

84,000 unique visitors

$70 AdSense

Traffic has settled down to roughly 1,300 uniques/day.

It doesn't take a genius to see that my Click-Through-Rate is extremely low.

I have to give the thumbs down to AdSense, at least if you're serving a tech-savy crowd. For one, Nerds all browse with AdBlock or something similar enabled (heck, I've got to admit, so do I.) Secondly, I had a ton of trouble getting it to serve up proper Ad content because you cannot 'ban' certain keywords from the Ads you'll get. For example, I'd keep getting ads for 'transvestite boots' and stuff like that, and the only way to prevent that content was to painstakingly ban each domain 1 by 1. My list is pretty big right now. I can understand why Google runs it this way, but it's a significant flaw of that model.

Instead I've discovered what appears to be a service right up my alley. It's called Commission Junction and it basically links you with stores, where you can advertise that stores' products right on your site, with nice clean photos and not too much text (Amazon has a similar service, but not available in CAD). If a surfer on your site clicks on the Ad, and goes on to buy something, you get a certain percentage of the sale. They have a number of advertising companies that fit perfectly with the Fashion4Nerds cause (that is, they're well known (Gap, Shoes.com) and they have free shipping type deals and more importantly free return shipping if you don't like the product or it doesn't fit. This is key I think - I would never order clothes online otherwise.

This may be the way of the future. I've woven the 'ads' fully into the content of the site. In fact, if you're surfing with an AdBlocker, the site won't make much sense - there will be no images on it at all! This could be the way to go... but I've kept some AdSense banners just in case.

To start I've changed over the shoes section to the new format. I'll run it for a day or two, and see if I can make any sales. If it does, I'll re-jigg the whole site. Regardless, I'll let you guys know how it works out...

Keep on rollin'

2007-02-14T11:45:00.000-05:00

As of this morning, my results from the start of this venture:

72 000 unique visitors

$50 AdSense revenue (ick!)

2 gigabytes of bandwidth used

Kinda freaky to think that almost 100 000 people have seen something I created. The Internet is amazing.

I got a ton of hits from Iceland - I guess I must have been featured on a news site there. StumbleUpon lately has been driving a lot of traffic to me, it was definitely worth adding my site there.

The Geek Method talked about my Top 10 list in their latest PodCast (number 17). They did a great job - I cracked up at several points!

I'm in talks with a couple of companies about partnering - we'll see
what comes of it.

Finally, a friend suggested that since I was pimping my hosting provider Dreamhost so much, I should give out my promo code. So here it is: NERDS. Enter NERDS for the promo code and you will immediately save $50.00 on any hosting plan you choose (this site uses their $7.95/month low-level Crazy Domain Insane plan.) Disclosure: By entering NERDS you also save ME $50.

There, I've sold out. :)

What a day!

2007-02-12T22:29:00.000-05:00

40 000 unique pageviews.

4th place on Digg main page!

2nd place on Reddit main page!

SlashDot still ignores me! (that's OK, save it for later)

$25.00 in AdSense (which is delayed by many hours... only seeing 1/4 of my pageviews)

I'm not rolling in the dough, but it has been a blast so far.

So I finally got Dugg around 11:30AM EST. Traffic ramped up and was causing a 1-3 second latency when accessing pages. I put a service call into Dreamhost and they were GREAT, got back to me right away - latency went back down, and they said they were monitoring it closely for the rest of the day. Not bad for their lowest-level Crazy Domain Insane plan.

Traffic tailed off as I got kicked off the main Digg page (but keep on Digging me so that I can get on the Top 10 Diggs in All Topics (need 300 more!)) but then picked up as Reddit kicked in.

Tons of comments on both sites - definitely an interesting subject for peeople - although I vastly prefer Reddit's more mature chatter.

I've also gotten a ton of cool (and a minority not so cool) emails supporting the site and offering suggestions. It's kind of neat that complete strangers are willing to help out with the site!

More in depth analysis tomorrow as I learn to use Google Analytics to see where people are going, and where they're leaving the site. Preliminarily, it seems 'shirts.htm' is the most profitable so far.

Ideally, SlashDot will pick me up tomorrow or later next week to keep the traffic flowing.

Anyone want to do a SlashDot submit for me? (you benefit too, because you can link to your own site if Slashdotters click the submitters name.)

Gimme Some Feedback!

2007-02-12T07:31:00.000-05:00

By now my traffic is picking up, which should result in an influx of visitors to this blog!

Welcome everyone! I recommend checking out my very first post describing what this blog is about.

Hopefully I'll get some feedback on the site. I'm particularly interested in suggestions for improving monetization or site flow. Hope to hear from you soon!

Site Launched!

2007-02-12T02:14:00.000-05:00

Here we go... submitted to Slashdot, Reddit, Digg (already at 7 Diggs in one hour) and a couple of others. Someone posted my entire "Top 10 List" in the first Digg comment... d'oh! Oh well, I never read comments, others won't either.

Keeping my fingers crossed Dreamhost can keep up. I'll write more in the morning...

Income Projections

2007-02-11T14:56:00.001-05:00

I've been trying to estimate how much money this venture could pull in. As I said, from what I can tell, a typical Slashdotting is 50 to 500 thousand visitors. Globally I've heard AdSense click-through rates are usually 2-4%. Most of the keywords I'm targeting (shoes, pants, etc…) pay out 50 cents. So here's what I've been figuring so far:

MINIMUM money I could make:

50 000 unique visitors, 1% click through (nerds are known to be poor ad clickers, and will have ad filters), $0.20 per click for my ads.

50000*0.01*0.20=100.0

$100. Ouch.

MAXIMUM money I could realistically make:

500000*0.04*0.60=12000.0

$12 000. This figure would leave me content. I wonder where the actual numbers will lie… stay tuned. I launch tomorrow!

Making a catchy headline

2007-02-10T13:23:00.000-05:00

I've been crafting my submission for Digg, and didn't realize there was such an art to it. Just do a Google search for Digg headlines, and you'll find a ton of suggestion sites.

In light of what I've learned from these sites, I decided to create a 'Top 10 Fashion Tips for Nerds' article, and link to that from the news sites. I'm a sucker for Top 10 lists, and it's been proven many others are too, so that will hopefully further increase the interest in the site. Hopefully the people that read the article will stick around and browse the rest of my site...

Best time of the week for news of a site to 'break out'?

2007-02-09T17:55:00.000-05:00

I want my site to hit the nerd news outlets on a slow news day, so it doesn't get overlooked by some other sensational story. This will be tough - I don't think I have much control as to when I'll get picked up. I've decided it is also probably better to launch early in the week. I know that my tech browsing goes way down towards the end of the week with weekend activities coming up.

I think I will submit to all the major news sites late this Sunday night. That way if there's some sort of delay, even if I get publish by Wednesday that should be fine. In my non-expert opinion, I would hate to get published and make the main pages Friday night. I'll report back here the time between submission to publication. Oh, and by the way, I'm submitting to these sites: Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Fark, and Furl.

IE6 is the bane of my existence!

2007-02-08T19:53:00.000-05:00

Huge web development tip: do your testing from IE6 from the get-go.

The site was finally finished, the layout approved by my coterie of nerd-testers, but as one last check I booted up IE6 on an old computer (IE7 was a mandatory install so I didn't have convenient access to it for testing on my development machine) and the layout was completely trashed in that browser. I could never be a fulltime web designer, issues like this would drive me nuts.

+1 week delay. Sigh...

How to deal with a Slashdotting / Dugging

2007-02-01T14:53:00.000-05:00

The game plan is to make a big splash with the debut of the site. Hopefully a full on Slashdotting/Dugg. But all that traffic can be a bad thing - will my servers be able to take it? It's a tough question - I'm using budget shared hosting from Dreamhost, so I doubt their servers will put up with much abuse. How much abuse am I expecting? Well I've read that a typical Slashdotting can range from 50 000-500 000 unique visitors over a couple of days. My biggest fear is the site not being available due to an overloaded server. There are several free mirroring services (Coral, Mirrordot) but I'm worried they won't show my ads properly.

In the end, I think I'll be OK going just with Dreamhost. My site is completely static, and doesn't have any high-resolution images or large files to download. I hope this isn't naïve - if Dreamhost crashes right when I get popular it'll pretty much kill my whole plan, as I doubt many Nerds are actively searching for a site like mine.

Welcome welcome...

2007-01-26T20:29:00.000-05:00

Hello, thanks for stopping by! This blog will chronicle my experiences creating an ad-supported website. If it isn't obvious, my idea is to create a very easy-to-use resource for Nerds and other fashionably-challenged people to use to improve their fashion sense (for the benefit of woman-kind everywhere!)

I think this site could make some money. Why do I think that? Well, I'm banking on two reasons:

1. On the Web, my target market, Nerds (males aged 18-35) are highly organized and have high surf-rates(?)... that is, they routinely share web links, and they routinely surf a ton of new sites everyday. How do I know? Because I am a one.

2. If I'm reading about a product, I will occasionally click the nearby Ads to see how much something costs, what else they have available, do they have my size... etc... I am betting a certain percentage of my fellow Nerds will do the same.

I don't expect to make much money, or fame, but it should be a good experience, and fill a niche that hasn't been filled so far on the web. The hosting costs are minimal ($9/year actually through a Dreamhost deal), so why not give it a shot? I'm pretty sure I'll be able to get a ton of hits - my main threats as I see them are inappropriate ads served to my pages that have nothing to do with my content, and the fact that a lot of Nerd surfers will filter out ads automatically.

I've created this Blog to track my progress, and to share with everyone out there the issues of creating a site, monetizing it, and getting it Slashdotted/Dugg. I'll also give some insight into the revenues available from AdSense for a site like this - since that was the first question I thought of when I started this project. I have no idea what to expect, but it could be a fun ride.