I have a blog. It is less than a year old, has 8 post in it and it has not been updated for nearly 9 to 10 months. The blog has no regular readers, no subscribers, minimum incoming links, has a Page rank of 1 and absolutely no comments. Traffic to the blog is about 10 uniques per day all by courtesy of Google. It took about 3 weeks for this blog to register it’s first hit from Google.
This blog makes about $15 per month from Adsense, which means the daily average is 50 cents. That 50 cents does not mean I am getting 5 ten cents clicks daily from the 10 hits. That would be a fantastic 50% CTR which I doubt any Adsense publishers can achieve. No, the total clicks I get is not more than 13 per month. There are weeks that I don’t get even a single click. The fact that it can make around $15 is because most of the clicks pays more than a dollar each.
I don’t complain about the lack of earning from this blog because I know it is my own doing. If I had worked as hard on that blog as I had been working on this, earnings would have quadrupled. I also understand that if I had used any other way of monetization other than Adsense, I will not be even seeing 50 cents per month. 10 hits per day isn’t exactly a gold mine.
So you see, it is vital that you understand the reasons why some blogs makes so much and why some blogs makes so little. My reason was simple and straight forward. Yours could be a lot more complex but when you think deeper, it all boils down to common sense.
First, Understand Your Own Blog
Strange as it might sound, lots of people do not even understand their own blogs and what they plan to achieve with their blogs. If you have a blog, go now and start pondering over it. What do you want your blog to do. Make money from CPC Ads like Adsense or money from promoting affiliate products?
Money can be made from Adsense even if you have low but targeted traffic because it cost them nothing to make a click and you get paid. To promote affiliate products, you need a larger base of visitors because affiliate products involves forking out money. Only about 3 person out of a 100 are willing to do that.
Then, Understand Your Traffic
Once you understand your blog, then you will have an easier time understanding your traffic. For example, traffic to a blog which has been optimized as a meta blog, that is a blog about blogging, will not make much from Adsense. That is because most of the visitors already has a blog and most are already blind when it comes to seeing Adsense Ads.
If you do not already know, Adsense are for noobs and newbies who have not even found out that there is another browser called Firefox. These are the people who clicks on everything in their way because they have lots of fun discovering new things in the Net.
Someone who has already matured to the state where they are ready to start a blog, thus searching for information on blogging tips and landing on your blog, will already know about Adsense. God forbid if they will be clicking on any Adsense Ads from now on.
On the other hand, if you are getting tons of these traffic, then you have a good chance to make money from promoting affiliate products like eBooks about blogging, Blog Themes, Blog Hostings and any products related to improving their blogging experience. Remember though, for every 100 clicks, only about 2 or 3 will actually buy something.
Understand your traffic, understand how they normally convert and you will save yourself going through a lot of stressful hours.
Change To The Right Traffic
If you now understand your blog and you feel the traffic you are getting are not the ones that will benefit you, you can change your traffic.
Yes, you actually can “change” traffic midway. It is always not too late to change traffic. All you need to do is to optimize your new keywords and it is easier than doing it on a new blog. If your blog already has some authority and Page Rank, no matter in what niche, you can write a post on a totally different topic and chances are that post will get indexed and ranked within the next 24 hours.
Change your Blog Title, change your meta descriptions, change your anchor text when doing your link building. Google will detect the change very quickly and you will see a change in your traffic within a few weeks. It does not even matter if your URL has nothing to do with your new keywords. Your blog is already a trusted one so Google will grant you that trust.
Know The Reasons Why Your Blog Do Not Make Money.
If you dig into my archives, you will see some very old post by me complaining and ranting about my blog going nowhere. It was a period where I did not know or understood the reasons why. Once I learned and knew why, I was at peace with myself and every one else for that matter.
It is important that you know the reasons for knowing gives you a chance to change. With the right knowledge you can apply the right remedy. Even if you are too damn lazy or uninspired to make the change, you will not feel bad because you already know why.
Like me, you can always postpone what should be done today till tomorrow. The fun part is, there is always a tomorrow and we will never run out of it. That’s why I love how God made this world to be.
Wow, Costa,
Change To The Right Traffic is exactly what I did with the blog in my website URL above. What started as a purely personal blog turned into something much more and I get well over 1000 unique visitors a day now. My AdSense fluctuates between 300 and 900 (lower end lately, probably due to the recession).
Ooh yes! Each time I see a new post in your blog, I keep wondering how many hits you are going to get for that post. All your articles are so keyword targeted, and it’s really great.
Adsense always perform a bit badly during the opening months of a year. It starts peaking around mid year and ends with a bang during the festive months. That’s my observation anyway.
*clap*
I feel personally responsible for this post
. Thanks for the answer in the other. Starting yesterday the 8th Chitika will now display for non-searching traffic as well.
The thing is I am a perfectionist in a way, I want everything to be ordered and good looking on my blog and some of these ads seem out of place and in a way “ruin” my look.
About the affiliates you are right I can’t expect with a PR0 to rank high in Google at least for now, although for the past 5 weeks Google went from 12% traffic on the blog to over 70% of the traffic now comes from google, or that’s around 30-50 visitors per day depending on the games.
I guess that’s still not enough to generate any sales, and I guess yeah I feel a little desperate, because I put a minimum of 2hrs per day in this blog. Compared to another one that I have, I spend no more than 30 mins a day there and it actually makes like 50$-60$ from CPCs.
I know I wont give up cause, I like what I blog about, and the experience as a whole, I just wish I could be rewarded for my efforts a little bit
Thanks for the post once again.
P.S Btw I did change some of the keywords as you said, and the posts I have been submitting, and looking over the keywords people use in Google to get to me are now mostly about football/soccer predictions, barclays premier league predictions and free tips/predictions.
Damn right you are responsible.
Every body likes predictions. I think the secret is trying to figure out how the majority phrases their words when searching for these predictions. Knowing how gamblers are, if your predictions are accurate, the blog can grow just by word of mouth alone.
It just takes one big winner to tell his friends that he got the winning tips from your blog and news will spread like wild fire.
So as long as you keep going are always “ahead” of the game, that blog is going places.
I still have this feeling that it’s jinxed
,because it’s going better only on stats, like traffic ,but no sales.
But I will keep your advice and few more that you need a decent traffic to generate sales.
Okay, ultimate secret to getting your first sale, thought you would have figured out by now
Write a kick ass review for each of the products or the sites you are promoting. Give tips on how to best utilize the products or sites. Talk all about the good, little about the bad.
When writing use a really keyword related title, like “Where to place your football bets” or “The best football betting site” You get the gist.
Think what people will will use when they are looking for a site to place their bets. The closer you can get to those terms the better.
Use those exact words in your opening and closing of your first paragraph. Use lots of synonyms or words related to football betting in the second and third paragraph. Close your article with the exact words.
Anchor you affiliate links cleverly. Use what IMers describe as ‘Call To Action” words, like, “Increase your winning odds here!” or “Bet Less but Win More Here!”
Bold them, use a different font color, make it as visible as possible to get people to click on that link.
Once they click, even if they do not sign up, you already have your affiliate link cookies in their computer and that is part of the battle won.
How do you think I manage to consistently sell the 7 Dollar Scripts? I did a whole series of posts teaching people how to use their WordPress blogs to sell their own products.
Hey Costa,
Thanks for the ultimate secret tip
. I will give it a shot, although I do get 200-300 clicks a month on all banners combined with 0 sign-ups.
But seriously I appreciate your help
. One day u would have a great PR dofollow backlink from me, that’s for sure.
Seems that you are doing quite well with your blog
Not as well as i want it to be…yet.
Thank you for giving me some enlightenment here. My blog is around 9 months old and I haven’t earned anything. Perhaps I have to change my current approach on my blog.
Hi Walter,
For the blog of 9 months, I must say you are not doing too bad. You must have spent most of these 9 months socializing and making lots of friends.
You have garnered a community of very attentive readers who really read your very well written article. You have really put into practice what probloggers teaches about blogging you will make all blogging gurus very proud. If you keep up your effort, you will be a great and well known blogger in the very near future.
However, there will be a problem monetizing the blog.
First, all those who comes are your friends who already has an established blog themselves, so they will not be clicking on your Adsense Ads, (which by the way, is not in the right format)
and
Second, you have become their trusted friend so you will be conscience stricken if you start promoting affiliate products to them because you do not want to be seen as a money grabber and you wan to keep your reputation as a goody blogger.
So there isn’t much chance of monetizing the blog (or any blog that’s similarly created like yours) but you can go the Leo Babauta’s way. Wait until yo become as famous as him, write your own book and then use that blog as a launching pad. I mean it.