February 3rd, 2009 | 
Author: Adsense is finally running on my blog and I have started experimenting with just 3 blocks and search block as well. I have 1 block in the left sidebar, 1 at the top of the 1st post and another at the bottom of the post. The search block is in the right hand sidebar near the top.
In compliance with googles Adsense TOS I can’t divulge actual figures about the adsense but I can say in these early days that I am seeing some reasonable income considering the amount of traffic and am on track with regard to CTR and CPC.
Over the coming days I will experiment with different types of adsense, placements and colour schemes and will continue to monitor using channels. My cash cow guides contain a lot more detail about how to use channels, testing and setting up adsense for maximum income if you are interested. My task is to try and squeeze as much income from my adsense placements as possible without resorting to silly gimmicks or making the site look ugly.
As for traffic, after seeing a dip in traffic over the past few days I saw a bit of a surge today as more posts are getting indexed and ranked higher.
I suspect over the coming days that I should see this trend in higher traffic increase more. I have also made a more accurate asessment based on my current income figures that I will now need approximately 400 articles to reach my $100 a day goal. All of this is perfectly doable and although it will be a lot of work, it will be worth it.
Steve, do you have a loose formula that correlates the amount of articles you write to the amount of money made with adsense? As in, if I wrote 200 keyword rich articles I could expect 50.00 average? Just wondering if that has any play in the outcome. Cheers!
Hi Peter, yes I do use a formula but it is far from scientific.. If I know the average CPC for the niche and if I aim for around 10% CTR and work on the assumption of an average of 5 visitors per post on average then I can figure it out. Some articles might not get any traffic and others might get 20 visitors a day or more so I just figure an average over the site.
If my goal was $10 a day and the average CPC for the niche was 50 cents at 10% CTR:
10/0.5 = 20 clicks per day
using 10% CTR
20 clicks = 0.10*(number of visitors)
OR
Number of Visitors = 20/0.10 = 200
using average of 5 visitors per article
Number Of Articles = 200/5 = 40
So 40 articles should give me my income goal. However, as always the reality of CPC and CTR can vary and so you should use this as a rough guide and hone it down when you start getting some feedback from your stats.
I see. That does make a whole lot of sense. Also I was wondering, at what point traffic wise would you think it wise to start adding the adsense blocks to your site? 50 uniques average per day? 100? I’m wondering because one of my micro niche blogs is starting to average between 60 and 70 uniques per day but I don’t want to scare them away by throwin up ads too quick.
I also have another strange dilemma to throw your way. I had a blog that was parked for over a year. Not one post in 13 months to be exact. I checked to find out that adsense was bringing in about 14.00 per month from the site. OK here’s my dilemma. Since I saw this, I decided to slam content at the site again and do some more SEO to increase traffic and grab more clicks. Since I started that process I have the same traffic numbers but my CTR is way down. Is this because people are reading the content more and that content is distracting them away from the adsense? That is perplexing. Would love to know what you think.
Peter,
That is the perennial problem for Adsense sites.
On the one hand, you need good interesting content to get a lot of traffic to your site.
On the other hand, you don’t want your content to be so interesting that people don’t click on your ads.
I’ve gone down the ‘good content’ route, have thousands of visitors but a CPC of under 10 cents. This provides me with a comfortable living because my low CPC is matched by huge traffic.
I’m very interested to see how Steve gets on taking a different strategy.
Pearson
interesting project – found your thread on the WF and am now reading and reading (currently halfway through).
besides adsense – do you plan additional income streams and maybe also a newsletter (sending out monthly news on discounts or general travel information) or even an ebook with travel tips etc?
Looking forward to end of march for the final results.
Good luck!
I will be looking at adding a forum and using other interactive techiques like picture galleries etc.. There is a lot of scope in this niche for creating stickiness.
Hi Steven,
I’m sure you know of John “Mr. VRE” Reese’s famous Adsense video right? This one: http://www.seoelite.com/Lessons/VRESitesBlueprint.htm
In that video he talks about how he was able to generate roughly $526,000 from Adsense within just one year.
So let’s do some math…..
$526,000 / 365 = roughly $1441/day
According to your strategy, 400 articles would create $100 daily, which means the daily value of each article is $100/400 = $0.25.
So to generate $1441/day, we would need $1441 / $0.25 = 5764 articles.
If I’m being optimistic and pretend that each article costs $5 to outsource, in total we would need to spend $5 x 5764 = $28,820, and this kind of money is something that the average guys and gals can’t really afford….
In addition to that, according to John himself here: http://www.warriorforum.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=75941&whichpage=2
he spent less than $3000 (i.e: programming + ghostwriting) to generate that kind of monstrous income…..so it’s considerably a lot less than the $28,820 that I came up with above…..so something doesn’t add up here….how do you think he was able to do this feat?? He said he didn’t do any black hat stuff either…..
Hmmmmmmmm…..any thoughts??
I wouldn’t like to say how John managed to only spend $3000 for those results. It is feasable I suppose that his content was really good and his backlinking campaign was so good that he hit the top spots for all the most highly searched keywords. His CPC might also be a lot better because of hitting those top spots as well.. I think this is more a question for John himself though.