I first started playing with AdSense and affiliate marketing after reading about the financial success that probloggers like Darren Rowse and Jason Calcanis were achieving. Like many other followers at the time, I figured that, if they could do it, so could I. So, I started up a few (spam) blogs, posted (crappy) stories, and pasted AdSense code everywhere I could. Yes, I did a little SEO as well as a bit of little link-building, but I probably spent more time logging into the Google AdSense website to check out my puny earnings than I spent creating quality content. And, as you can probably guess, I faired pretty poorly financially.
In hindsight, I admit that I was attempting to spend pennies to make millions. I was hoping to get lucky, score a high Google SERP, get tonnes of instant traffic, and convert that into paying clicks. How naive.
Years later, and with a much clearer head, I know that it’ll be impossible to achieve my goal of covering my monthly mortgage without putting in a lot of hard work. Such a simple realization, but it’s only now that I’m finally accepting the idea.
And you know what? It’s already paying off. In a previous post, I calculated that I had earned $335.79 last month. At a glance, it looks like my October earnings will be a significant percentage higher, and I attribute that to this matured mindset.
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chovy says:
so was that the difference, spending time on one quality site vs. littering the web with MFA?
Rory says:
Well, I don’t think you need to spend time on only one quality site, but yes, quality works much better than litter.
I wrote a few quick .exe’s that would scrape from various content sites and paste the content into new blog posts. These exe’s would run every day, doing the same thing over and over again, with the content varying only slightly. The result: Datasource schemas changed, the exe’s eventually broke. And when I compared the two sites afterwards, not only had my AdSense earnings gone down, but so had my Page Rank. (Not delisted by Google, but obviously they sensed what I was doing.)
Anyway, consistently good content is hard.
What I think had greater bang for the buck (and what is going to be the main cause in my October earnings increase) is more effective and more aggressive focus on affiliate marketing.
So: more PPC, more landing pages, more concentration on sales pitch, etc.