I have been working hard on building up an extensive portfolio of websites that have begun earning me a regular, although far from lucrative, income. I’ve been making money via a number of methods but the income stream that hasn’t missed a day in many months has been Adsense. The earnings have been nothing to write home about, but they are increasing every month as my sites have been aging and their rankings have been improving. Basically I was starting to make money with adSense on a regular basis.

Sometimes you become so involved in what you’re doing that you fail to notice things that are painfully obvious once you take the time to analyze them. In this case, there was a definite pattern forming with one of my sites, in fact, my most successful in terms of how much Adsense income it was generating.

This particular website started out as a kind of special interest project for me. The subject was topical and there were many news stories available to draw content from every day. I went to work building the site and found that I could easily add a post every day. Some days I added more. The nature of the topic meant that there was always something else to post about. In short it was high maintenance requiring dedication.

I thought I had made a terrible mistake starting the site because it was chewing up all of my time. The thing was, it didn’t take long for the traffic to start arriving in droves and close behind came the Adsense clicks . What was happening while I wasn’t paying attention was that all of my dedicated posting was bringing the Google bot visiting with great regularity.

Suddenly I was ranking quickly and well for all kinds of long tails. Singly, these long tails weren’t bringing in huge traffic, but combined with hundreds of other long tails I was getting more traffic with this site than with any other site in which I was practicing solid SEO tactics.

Did I learn from this lesson? No, not really. I have been focusing more on building backlinks from intermediate sites and backlinks to intermediate sites. I’ve been writing articles and posting them to article directories and focusing on this keyword and that keyword. This particular method has been extremely slow going. It works, mind you, but it works after putting in a helluva lot of hours.

So I was looking at a couple of websites of mine that I started with the idea of dragging in a steady income using Adsense. Neither of them have set the world on fire. Here are the figures to give you an idea of just how mediocre their performance has been:

Since 1 January 2009
Site A – 80 unique visitors per month for total earnings of $5.00
Site B – 90 unique visitors per month for total earnings of $7.40

** Site B has only had Adsense on it for the last month and a half.

Admittedly, the traffic has been pitiful, but my posting has been almost non-existent for site A and not much better for site B.

I can actually track back and match up the spikes of visitor traffic for site A with the times that I rolled up my sleeves and put together a few days of posting for the site.

So I am setting myself a challenge by way of an experiment with these two sites. I am going to increase the rate in which I will be posting to both sites and confirm the rate of increase in visitor activity that it generates. I will be posting the progress here at Blogaration to keep “score” on the two sites.

The success of this little experiment will be measured on two fronts: unique visitors and Adsense revenue.

Site A is over a year old, so it has age on its side. It is in a competitive niche, but the niche is also one that gets a lot of traffic on a daily basis. I expect to pick up traffic through the long tails. I plan to organize a series of posts for the site using recent news reports as the inspiration for the content. I will build up the articles but will hold back posting until there are around 60 posts. Over a 20 – 24 day period I will then post the stored articles at the rate of around 3 per day.

Site B is only a few months old and so it hasn’t got the benefit of site age behind it. It is in a niche that is responsible for high paying clicks but I expect the number of visitors to be fewer overall. For this site I plan to post at least 1 article of 300 words or more to the site per day until I have reached 50 posts. After 50 posts I’ll stop and reassess the effect that the regular posting has had on the traffic for the site.

Related Content

Subscribe to the post comments feeds or Leave a trackback