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Yesterday I made my first dollar on Google Adsense.
And it’s only taken me 21,928 page impressions.
That’s not great, really, is it? I mean, don’t get me wrong - I’m pretty excited. We’re not really at Steve Pavlina or Darren Rowse levels yet, but we’re getting close.
But that’s an awful lot of impressions to reach that most wondrous of numbers.
The First Rule About Adsense Is: You Do Not Talk About Adsense.
We’ll come to that in a minute. This website was born on March 30, 2008. I’ve been with Adsense since about mid-April. My monthly traffic - both in unique visitors and page views - isn’t bad for a new blog, especially considering the somewhat sporadic content in the first couple of weeks and that I’ve spent a grand total of zero on promotion.
I have done a little bit of marketing via the social bookmarking sites - more on that in a moment - but apart from that, it’s the usual blogger essentials of word of mouth, making a genuine effort in the blogging community (particularly your niche), search traffic from Google, and so on.
Using the data provided by Wordpress.com Stats - which was activated on my site on April 4, 2008 - here’s chart that shows my page views:
I’ve spent a fair amount of time tweaking the layout and design of the Google advertisements on this site and I’m at a place now where I’m quite happy with them. When I first started, I really had no clue, but I quite like where everything is now.They’re not too in your face. They’re not too blatant or off-putting, and the Google engine delivers content that is, more often than not, entirely valid.
It’s worth noting that I made $0 from Adsense in April, and that more than half of my total has been made in the last 7 days. This tells me I’m on the right path with regard to both the layout of this site and the placement and design of the adverts. (Darren Rowse has some great advice on Problogger with regard to all of this.)
How does my site get such a reasonable amount of impressions, at least relative to its age and status? Reddit, mostly. Some Digg, some Stumbleupon, and some Del.icio.us.
Some of this has come from articles I’ve submitted myself, others from articles that others have been kind enough to submit for me. The latter is far and away the better method. While most of the social bookmarking sites are okay with you submitting your own stuff on an occasional basis - some, like Sphinn, even welcome this if the content is relevant - a few, like Stumbleupon, are directly opposed to it, and will even go as far as preventing your account from submitting things from your own site if you do it too often.
Also, it just looks better if material has been submitted from somebody else.
If used correctly, however - and I’ll be writing more about this in the future, possibly as a guest post - submitting your own material to some of these sites (notably Reddit) can be extremely fruitful if you know what you are doing. I’ve had two of my own submissions make the front page of Reddit, both of which went semi-viral, and this obviously translates into a reasonable amount of immediate traffic.
It’s worth noting, as the numbers on this page testify, that the vast majority of traffic that comes to you from any social bookmarking site is of the ‘in and out’ variety, with visits that generally only last for a few seconds (at most). The best traffic, far and away, is still that that comes from word-of-mouth, niche links, and organic searches.
The Second Rule About Adsense Is: YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT ADSENSE.
Finally, and this is important. While I think this stuff is of some interest/use to new bloggers, I’ve been mindful to be very aware of Google’s pretty strict Terms & Conditions with regard to the discussion of Adsense revenue in this article. If you plan to do this yourself, while it appears okay to occasionally talk about rough numbers - Jeremy Shoemoney, after all, has gone as far as putting up his $132,994 Adsense check for all to see - and page impressions are totally your own business, any discussion of the more relevant Google Adsense data like click-through rates, eCPM etc, is a very big deal indeed. Breach that contractual agreement and more than likely you’ll lose your account with Google. Not only are Google themselves very on the ball, but you know how the world works - there are plenty of people who’d love to rat you out.
I’ve been careful to avoid those pitfalls here. But if this page, one day, just suddenly disappears, you’ll know the Google Police have got to me.
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