Thursday, December 14, 2006

Brief Adsense Success

I've been using Adsense on this blog for months now with minimal success. I've blogged about it before here, here and here. I've found it to be designed entirely around Google's needs and not mine. The ads chosen for my site have not been ones I would choose for myself and trying to groom them to what I want has been futile. This week, however, I experienced the kind of success that I've read about on other blogs.

Most mornings I get up, grab my java and sit down to read the Wall Street Journal on line. I can usually find something to blog about there. Tuesday I found a great article on the Nintendo Wii's success as a holiday gift item and wrote this post. In no time at all I was linked on the Wall Street Journal article page and the hits started coming. Better than that, Adsense decided that this post needed ads dealing with the Sony PS3. My click through rate increased by a factor of 10. I went from a 0.65% rate to a 6.5% rate on that one post. I still made only a few bucks, but the difference was staggering.

I'd read on other blogs about tricks to make Adsense pay off for you and I had tried many of them with very little success. This was the first time I saw a huge jump. If I had been able to run these kinds of ads on my site all along, I'd have made well over $1000 by now instead of still scrounging around for my first $100. Unfortunately, I'm an inspirational writer. If you've read this blog for any length of time, you'll see that my topics are all over the place. I have tried in the past to focus, but I've always gone back to scatter shot topics. I just can't seem to help it. It turns out that this blog is more therapeutic and cathartic than it is a financial investment.

In any case, I've had a brief glimpse of the El Dorado one could have with a little discipline.

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