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In the post-Sanjaya Malakar world, my Shyamali Malakar search traffic has dried up and my page views have dropped to half of what they were a month ago. As a result, my Google Adsense revenue now approximates to zero every day.
I have said before that it doesn’t make sense to use Adsense if your blog gets less than a thousand pageviews per day. I have also said before that most non-tech bloggers should focus on making money because of their blog rather than from it.
I have decided to take my own advice now and remove all advertising from my blog until I find a way to increase my pageviews to more than thousand per day.
This is also a cautionary tale for bloggers who want to make quick money off blogging. My blog is ranked within the top 17,000 on Technorati (in terms of linkbacks in the last 6 months) and about 3,00,000 on Alexa (in terms of average pageviews in the last 3 months), and still I’m not making enough money to make it worthwhile for me to use Adsense. It’s not likely to be any easier for you either.
So, my advice to novice bloggers is: blog for a reason that is bigger than making money, invest time and money into your blog for the long term, and be patient if you are not rewarded immediately.
Comments (14)
The post-Sanjaya traffic drop has been noticeable at UberDesi also. On a different note, I don’t miss all those people visiting UberDesi purely to get Shyamali’s picture in a Hooters uniform.
Wise decision. No use diminishing the readers experience if it is not generating enough income. I yanked off Kontera after their support staff failed to reduce the no.of links to 5. Doing that got their attention and my problem was resolved almost overnight.
I too went through the high traffic thanks to Malakars and the World Cup and subsequent drop in earnings but then it isn’t that bad yet to remove Adsense completely.
You don’t want to jump on all the desi hotness-de-jour scandals and post, say, about Shilpa and Shamila? ^__^
A well-timed (and well-written, and most importantly well-imaged) post about the “flashing incident” could easily bump up those hits.
Though it would probably make you feel tawdry, and then what’s the point?
Yeah, the same case with me. Normally I average around 650-850 Page views a day, resulting in note more than $2-4 a day. For that kind of money, it’s not worth to spoil the readers experience.
If you get around 1000 page views per day, you can easily earn $10 per day. It depends on the niche and adsense optimisation. You should optimise your blog for search engines.
I’m going to disagree with this move. For one, even if you make 2-4 bucks a day, or even 1, you still got in 30 bucks a month on the minimum which is enough to pay for your hosting and more.
Secondly, if you do make a post that suddenly pulls in visitors you will lose out the revenue that you could have gotten when your ads are there.
As for visitor experience, how many of the big blogs are devoid of ads? Don’t people still go to them?
And, regular readers would always prefer feeds, won’t they?
After reading your posts on blog user experience and marketing I thought you might be interested in a startup I am with called Bravisa.
Bravisa is a new online tool for anyone (webmasters, bloggers, entrepreneurs, early stage startups, etc.) to make retailer-size earnings from their blogs. Simply pick products, set retail prices, and place widgets in your blogs. Bravisa takes care of everything else(orders, payments, service etc.). You make retailer-size earnings (20%-50%) from every sale without touching the products or spending anything.
We are fully operational in terms of orders and fulfillment, though still in beta as far as the full offering is concerned. Dekho and let me know your comments.
I agree with you and also disagree.
I agree that ads should not spoil the reading pleasure of the visitors thus I strongly dislike ads that are displayed in the middle of the post or something like that.
I disagree because although you make littel money, there is no harm in keeping adsense on sidebar and bottom. Although very less, you make some money which is always rewarding.
I think it really depends on the blog. If it’s in a lucrative niche, slap the ads up. But if not, wait to put up ads or never put up ads.
side effect of a blog may be revenue but many blogs has cropped up just to make quick and easy money through plagiarism, morphed content or sheer non-sense - cluttering the net and making a focused surfing experience less rewarding.
As far as making it less obtrusive for user, its no doubt a good step but intelligent choice of layout, colors etc with some text ads (provided layout is controlled by blogger) should be OK.
I like your metric for linking adsense when clicks > 1000. Though above two paragraph contraditory, but when this metric is the law, they are no more
Bogat Gadgotra
put little bit of adsense is ok foe novice.. but don’t expect to get much out of it… and when you put it when you start blogging, reader will get use to it
I am getting close to 1000 page views/month after one month of regular blogging. Should I go in for adsense and other forms of advertising or just wait for traffic to go higher?
Sachin
http://sagecapital.wordpress.com
Wondering if any of you have tried store widgets on your blogs in addition to AdSense. I am with Bravisa, we provide free online stores where you get the retail markup (often 100%) from wholesale & have the order processing taken care of by us. Please take a look at it and let me know what you think - http://www.bravisa.com
I am not a prolific blogger so I don’t get much out of adsense but I use adsense and my online store, and post things to ebay through my online store too.
No harm in having adsense while you build up traffic. I started from zero on one of my blogs only six months ago and now I am rather happy that I did it. It is a prepatual process. No?
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