Making money through blogging experiment - second month November earnings report
By fiLi • Dec 4th, 2007 • Category: Making Money
Following up on the “Wordpress SEO : Jump-starting a new blog - from zero to 600 unique visitors/day in one month” problogging experiment I’m currently running with a fellow blogger and the “The problogging experiment - first month earnings report” I issued after last month, here are some details about the second month of the experiment. You can take a look at Wispid and see how it’s setup. A very simple and straight forward strange world-news blog.
A few things happened during this month.
- The biggest one was the earthquake Google PR update that penalized Pay-per-post and Text-ad-links with a PR drop, sometimes going straight down to PR0. While some bloggers maintained that they suffered no major traffic lose, I’ve noticed how those PR drops impact the blogs they link to and their authority. Wispid’s authority came from a few other problogs that got a PR drop from 5-6 to 0, and the traffic began to drop, showing 50-60% decrease in incoming Google traffic.
- The second thing we did is that we stopped submitting posts to social websites, which was a massive source of traffic that helped previously boost the blog to over 1000 daily pageviews. Why? we thought it was time to try other sources of traffic and it was honestly making us tired. But, we did incorporate some of the blog’s post into other blogs through semi-auto related-posts entry, and so the incoming traffic switched from being mainly about Google Search and social submission sites to getting direct traffic from fellow blogs. It’s interesting seeing the variance in traffic behavior and how those move around in the blog. Traffic is now about 450-500 unique a day with double+ pageviews. Subscriber count went down as well …
The earnings stats are not very impressive, but they do - surprisingly - continue to go up (previous month compared against current month):
- Google Adsense - from 32US$ down to 15.60US$.
- Kontera - from 19US$ up to $42.15US$.
- Widgetbucks (still experimenting) - from 10US$ up to 26.92US$.
- Shoppingads (still experimenting) - from 4US$ stayed the same with $4.43US$.
Report:
- Combined CTR went up from ~%6 to ~7%, but ECPM went down. Total earning were ~90US$, up from 65US$ last month. With the traffic decrease and all the changes we made, that’s not half bad.
- Less incoming Google traffic means less people clicking on Google Adsense ads.
- Kontera continues to do extremely well on that blog. I’m not sure why.
- Widgetbucks went up 250% and it has a lot to do with a small experiment I did using sexy Widgetbucks ads that seemed to attract a lot of clicks. There was a massive decline in earnings towards the end of the month, and I could only attribute it to the Widgetbucks announcement on ProBlogger that they’re only receiving clicks from US-Canada traffic.
- Shoppingads just doesn’t seem to work out. They’ve been having spam issues, their ads disappearing and reappearing spontaneously. I mailed them twice and on both occasions got an apology reply after a few days saying they’re making adjustments. I don’t know, it doesn’t look good, but it might change.
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Got some feedback or want to share your thoughts? I’m interested. Hopefully, more next month.
Is it not against Google’s TOS to put Adsense and Kontera on the same page?
No problem as far as I know.
TOS has changed a while ago.
Thanks for sharing. These numbers are very interesting.
I wish some of the top bloggers in Israel would share some of their earnings. That would be very interesting…
That might be interesting but have little to do with this “experiment”
It does a little - sharing those kind of numbers allows people to get a better sense of what’s available and how to do things better.
BTW - I strongly recommend you remove all Textlinkads referrals from your site and stop using them. Google’s been penalizing websites using them, Pay-per-post and the likes. It’s just not worth the money.
Since I have not noticed any change in traffic from the search engin I see a reason to remove them yet. On the other hand, no TLA were sold on my main blog.
hey dude!!thanks for sharing a wonderful experience with me
I am contacting you about your post in the Google Webmaster Indexing Ranking Group…
Your website is doing something that I have been searching for quite some time… I imagine you have been physically altering the php code for this blog software… I would suggest that you take full advantage of your page rank drop… and change the titles on each and every one of your pages to relevant terms… do not alter your php code anymore!!!
If I could I would like to speak to you about your site… you can follow me through the link I posted here… I hope I am not getting excited for the wrong reason… but I believe you have hit a sweet spot…
Okay… I should elaborate… your page rank dropped from 3 to 1 so you say… you currently have over 600 pages which are not supplementary… Why you are reporting a traffic drop is beyond me… if you’re internal pages are gaining page rank then effectively you have more pages in good standing with the search engines… Perhaps you have lost traffic because your pages are irrelevant when compared to what people are actually searching for… the last time I had a site do what your site was doing traffic shot through the roof… but I had different content than you… I was advertising products… and I was able to cache in on a few very popular search terms… perhaps if you revisited some of your pages which are nested deep within your site and stopped blogging and went after some more popular search terms you would do better… I would die to have pages deep within the interior of your site with a higher page rank that your main page… you have lucked out big time from my point of view… I think you just need to rework your content which is deep with your site… and perhaps do not alter your code anymore…
If you currently did not have 600 pages in the supplemental index than what I am saying correct… however… you have a page rank 1 currently on your main page… it is incredibly rare to have more than a few pages in the main index with a score like that… If you previously had about 60-200 pages in good standing with your page rank that’s what I would consider reasonably normal… but now you have 600+… that’s quite a stretch from what I normally se for a page rank 3 site… your website is doing the opposite of what most websites do…
Sorry said it backwards and tripple posted…
I said,
“If you previously did not have 600 pages in the supplemental index…”
I meant to say…
“If you previously did not have 600+ pages in the main index…”
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