If you’re a blogger or web publisher you’ve no doubt had it drilled into your head over and over again that content is king and if you have any hope of making a living online then you’d better be sure to write some insightful and, more importantly, unique content for your sites. In my experiences this is mostly true but if your aim is to earn money from Adsense then things might not be so cut and dry.

Take this page about backpacking Canada that is a part of my budget travel site as an example. It was never my intention to whack up a useless page such as this filled only with ads, a brief blurb about Canada, menu items that can’t be clicked on and a ’site coming soon’ statement. I can’t believe I’m actually even drawing attention to it because I hate pages like this. It’s my secret shame!

I had intended to build a full Canadian section of the site, really I did, but just haven’t had the time. One of these days I will, but in the meantime the page has been an interesting little case study. It gets a little bit of traffic from Google and has a massive Adsense click through rate. While it hasn’t made me rich or anything, it’s earning a lot more than it deserves to.

I never intended to build this page solely to raise my Adsense earnings, things just sort of turned out that way. On one hand I’m quite pleased with the little bit of surprise income it generates, but on the other hand it doesn’t add any value to anyone but me and I feel sort of like a spammer.

It seems as though sites have popped up all over the web that give just enough information to rank in the search engines but not nearly enough to be useful. They’re plastered in Adsense and I wonder sometimes whether Google’s mighty ad program might be clogging the internet with spammy websites such as my own uber crap Canadian backpacking page.

What say ye?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I made a pitiful attempt to monetise Travoholic.com with Amazon way back in 2003-ish and still have yet to sell a single thing through them. I resigned myself to the fact that my site would remain a hobby and any dream of being able to make a dime had been crushed by my lack of book salesmanship.

I didn’t know anything about the world of SEO and didn’t know that webmaster forums even existed so when I was put onto Adsense by the guy that runs 2 Camels, I really didn’t have a clue what to expect. For all I knew, my site only got a few daily visitors so getting them to click on these ads seemed like an impossibility.

Google Earnings History

When I got my first ever click for 0.03 back in November 2004 I was completely amazed. I even thought that 3 cents for a click was a huge amount when compared to the payouts of CPM banner ads that were in rotation at the time of 0.00000000001 per visit or something crazy like that.

More clicks made their way to my wonderful wee Google ads and by the end of November I had earned nearly $20. This was an amazing amount of money to me considering I didn’t believe it was possible to make money from my site at all. In December I made $30 and was dancing in the streets because I had broken the $1 a day mark. In January 2005 I made $70 and I my first Google cheque arrived and things were about to get serious.

February and March saw me earn $175 and another cheque rolled on in. I started hanging out at the Digitalpoint forums, discovered the world of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), made some tweaks and I thought things were about to take off.

Well, things didn’t take off. They tanked. For the rest of 2005 I struggled to make $50 a month. I had started tracking my stats and it turns out that all the wonders of SEO and changes I made caused my site’s traffic to drop off drastically. I never figured out why my changes caused my traffic to plummet but things eventually picked back up and I earned close to $100/month for much of 2006. I’d had added another 5 websites to my repertoire by now so not being able to go past the $100/month mark was frustrating.

In January 2007 the traffic for many of my sites shot up and earnings followed and things have been going well ever since and steadily improving along with the number of page views. For me, as you would expect, my Adsense earnings improve as traffic rises. I don’t spend any time tracking or tweaking individual ads because I’m too busy doing other things but when I get everything set up I’ll start doing this and let you know how it goes.

I had my first $20 day in July so I know it’s possible. I’ll be happy though if I can rake in $15 per day steadily by December. It feels like a long way from $250 to $450 in less that four months but I’m working on overhauling one of my sites at the moment and I think that will make the difference.

So that’s the history of my sometimes dysfunctional relationship with Google Adsense. We’ve had our ups and downs but I’ve bought him flowers and I think we’re on the mend.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!