Quite some time ago, I’d added Adsense to this blog as an experiment, to see how well Adsense worked on an Internet Marketing type blog. I’d intended the experiment to run for just a few months, but then one thing led to another, and it’s been over a year.
I’m now officially ending the Adsense experiment, and will report the results. I’m limited in what I can report by the Adsense TOC, but here are some general results.
Click Through Rate
The Internet Marketing crowd is very ad resistant, at least when it comes to Adsense ads. Click through rate (CTR) was very poor, well under what I’d consider to be worthwhile. As a comparison, my best performing Neglected Niche Site (instructions for creating those will be in my upcoming free ebook) had a CTR 10 times that of this blog.
Earnings
The earnings per ad for Internet Marketing related ads isn’t bad, but the poor CTR makes it not really worth the real estate on the blog to show the ads. Total earnings over the same time frame put this blog at about half of what my best performing Neglected Niche Site earned.
Total earnings certainly more than paid for the effort of adding Adsense to the blog, but wasn’t really enough to justify keeping it, in my opinion.
Other Options
Better options for advertising on an IM related blog would be specific IM products. For me, though, I would only do that for products I’ve tried and could honestly recommend…and frankly, there really aren’t all that many of them that I consider to be worthwhile.
So, if you’re looking to create a blog to make money, I’ll repeat my usual advice: don’t create a blog about making money. Create a blog on another topic you enjoy, and you’ll see much better CTR on your ads, and probably better affiliate sales, too.
Adsense is nowhere near what you can make compared to offering your own product. On our first website our product ended up being 16 times more profitable than the ads. It’s allot more overall though.
[quote comment=””]Adsense is nowhere near what you can make compared to offering your own product. On our first website our product ended up being 16 times more profitable than the ads. It’s allot more overall though.[/quote]
There is a lot more to Adsense than just placing an ad on the blog.You need to choose the right ad block size, the right colors, and know exactly where to out the ad.A lot of testing is required.Here is more information:
http://ask.joelcomm.com/selecting_the_right_adsense_bl.shtml
I agree that it’s much more important to focus on your own products than on ads. For me it’s much more profitable.
I agree that it’s much more important to focus on your own products than on ads. For me it’s much more profitable.