June 13th, 2009 | 
Author: Sorry it has been a while since I updated my progress with the 100 bucks challenge but just so you know I had a day last week which hit $76 from this 1 blog which was pretty awesome. Since then unfortunately, I have been at the mercy of the Google dance and have seen the blog drop from the top 5 in Google for the pahrase European cruises down into the deepest darkest recesses of the index. I don’t know why Google do this but I am hopeful it will bounce right back up again.
The upshot of this is that both traffic and Adsense income have dropped back down to between $30 to $40 a day from this blog. During the dance I noticed I am getting a lot more traffic from keywords that it previously didn’t rank for and a lot more long tails as well. This has kind of balanced up the blow of losing all the traffic from the “european cruises” keyword a bit.
Thankfully I am still seeing some great CPC on the blog. I had one click last week of over $4 which was pretty amazing really and my average CPC is around $1 but it does change from day to day.
Hi Steve,
I stumbled upon your blog through an organic search in Google. I read through the majority of your “100 Bucks Challenge” and noted that you couldn’t share information regarding your Google Adsense account for particular information (i.e. CTR, CPC, Impressions)…however after looking through your entire website, I have not seen one screen shot of gross earnings. How can these people believe you without solid evidence that you earned any money? You show your Google Analytics and Awstats statistics but you do not show daily or even month Adsense revenues…it would be nice to see a screen print out of gross earnings (just black out the important information). I really find it hard to believe that you are even making $20 per day with your “European Cruises” site.
Thanks!
Fair enough George.. I made a concious decision initially not to publish my adsense earnings from this challenge. I decided not in fear of breaking the Adsense TOS but because when I see Adsense income on sales pages my initial reaction is always “fake”.
There is always an element of trust involved and you have no reason to trust my word at all. The main point is that I want other people to try it for themselves and hopefully then they can see what is possible.
Having said that I was waiting to hit the $100 day and then publish my earnings without the sensitive info but I haven’t had one from the blog yet. I may publish my best earning day soon though.
Me too, i think it is unlikely you can be raking so much.
Note that I think you have posted wonderful contents.. they are really useful articles for webmasters like us. However, I somehow feel that the earnings are a little skewed.. it seems too easy to earn US$40/day with just 30 articles? I’m sure you will get there no doubt, but it definately needs more time and content.
Well unlikely, you have to remember that when a site has pages that rank highly for good competitive keywords not only do you benefit from the boost in traffic but also from the huge boost in CPC. Your pages become targets for advertizers looking to do Adsense placements and that can be very lucrative.
This is the whole reason why I concentrate on promoting fewer pages for valuable keywords than trying to go for low hanging fruit. Don’t get me wrong, the less competitive 20 cent keywords all add up but the beauty of the process I outline is that you start to get $2 clicks and more. A lot of people find that hard to believe but honestly, it is true!