I made a pitiful attempt to monetise Travoholic.com with Amazon way back in 2003-ish and still have yet to sell a single thing through them. I resigned myself to the fact that my site would remain a hobby and any dream of being able to make a dime had been crushed by my lack of book salesmanship.
I didn’t know anything about the world of SEO and didn’t know that webmaster forums even existed so when I was put onto Adsense by the guy that runs 2 Camels, I really didn’t have a clue what to expect. For all I knew, my site only got a few daily visitors so getting them to click on these ads seemed like an impossibility.
Google Earnings History
When I got my first ever click for 0.03 back in November 2004 I was completely amazed. I even thought that 3 cents for a click was a huge amount when compared to the payouts of CPM banner ads that were in rotation at the time of 0.00000000001 per visit or something crazy like that.
More clicks made their way to my wonderful wee Google ads and by the end of November I had earned nearly $20. This was an amazing amount of money to me considering I didn’t believe it was possible to make money from my site at all. In December I made $30 and was dancing in the streets because I had broken the $1 a day mark. In January 2005 I made $70 and I my first Google cheque arrived and things were about to get serious.
February and March saw me earn $175 and another cheque rolled on in. I started hanging out at the Digitalpoint forums, discovered the world of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), made some tweaks and I thought things were about to take off.
Well, things didn’t take off. They tanked. For the rest of 2005 I struggled to make $50 a month. I had started tracking my stats and it turns out that all the wonders of SEO and changes I made caused my site’s traffic to drop off drastically. I never figured out why my changes caused my traffic to plummet but things eventually picked back up and I earned close to $100/month for much of 2006. I’d had added another 5 websites to my repertoire by now so not being able to go past the $100/month mark was frustrating.
In January 2007 the traffic for many of my sites shot up and earnings followed and things have been going well ever since and steadily improving along with the number of page views. For me, as you would expect, my Adsense earnings improve as traffic rises. I don’t spend any time tracking or tweaking individual ads because I’m too busy doing other things but when I get everything set up I’ll start doing this and let you know how it goes.
I had my first $20 day in July so I know it’s possible. I’ll be happy though if I can rake in $15 per day steadily by December. It feels like a long way from $250 to $450 in less that four months but I’m working on overhauling one of my sites at the moment and I think that will make the difference.
So that’s the history of my sometimes dysfunctional relationship with Google Adsense. We’ve had our ups and downs but I’ve bought him flowers and I think we’re on the mend.
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