Adsense Income Case Study

On Tuesday’s training webinar I talked about Adsense Income and mentioned a couple of sites that have produced monthly income even though they’ve long been neglected.

Way back in the day (2004-2005) – after I had my affiliate income running on autopilot – I got on the Adsense bandwagon (thanks to Internet marketing conferences) and “wasted” 18 months building garbage sites that ranged from Traffic Equalizer generated to low-quality outsourced writing to experimenting with the first article spinner (Article Bot by Don Harrold).

These sites created little value for anyone but I was too caught up in the glee of making money from doing next to nothing to really notice I was on a bad path.  I really got into the game late – as an affiliate already accustomed to building lists I just didn’t get why anyone would trade that for nickels and dimes.  At least not until I realized how easily really low quality content could rank.

When I saw the bubble beginning to burst – and like other users got really tired of wasting my time looking for important information I needed – I washed my hands of the whole deal and regretted the time I wasted.

So X, why the change in heart?  Changing the business model to focus on generating Adsense Income?

Not exactly amigos.

But, at the same time if something can make money and it can be easily built then why not?  I want to revisit the whole process only this time with the idea being to produce top quality content that’s going to maintain value for a long time.

It’s hard to look at a poorly done site that’s made over $2600 to date and think “that wasn’t worth the $35 I originally invested in it – and the 2 hours it took to put it all together”.

I felt the need to back up those claims with some screen shots . . . and that lead me to tweak one of the sites when I realized how poorly it was performing.

I decided to go ahead and document those changes here just to see what happens.

Above are the lifetime stats of the site that caused me to revisit my Adsense sites.  Please note there is nothing spectacular here, really, except that this site has sat untouched since I launched it and promotion has been next to nothing.  It currently ranks #2 in Yahoo for the primary keyword phrase.

This site focuses on a seasonal item and therefore peaks in the cold months and declines in the warm months.

Next is my case study site.  First, notice the click-through rates that I had once upon a time.

SIDE NOTE: I don’t know if anything approaching these CTRs is remotely possible in 2011.  And no, there was no click fraud involved (not on my end, or to my knowing).  Simply proof of “the secret of the one thing”.  Only give people the one choice you want them make.

Back when I was a rumor chaser and still learning to think for myself (and everyone was becoming paranoid as it seemed Google was de-indexing MFA sites) I made a couple of significant changes to the site (adding a low-quality banner, an optin form and an affiliate banner ad) which killed that click through rate.

Since I’d moved on to bigger and better things I never came back to fix the site.  If you’re a math junkie you can probably guestimate how much money I haven’t earned because of the resulting lousy click through rate.

Tonight, in less time than it’s taken me to write this up, I gave the site a makeover

• I changed the header graphic with special care to position the image directly above my ad block drawing the eye to it.
• I moved the ad block from above the article to the top right corner of the page (under the header that is)
• I removed the optin form and the affiliate offer (which, in 5/6 years has never resulted in a penny of earnings – banners, waste of space if you’re an affiliate)

My expectation, and we’ll watch this, is that the CTR on ads will approach 10% or better.

Traffic

This site has also (obviously) been unloved and untouched (and un-promoted), yet it still generates an average of 64 visits per day.  No, I have no idea where that traffic comes from at the moment!

What I do know, because I wanted to check it out, is that it ranks number #59 on Google for “outdoor fireplace”.  In other words, the traffic isn’t coming from Google – at least not for that search phrase.

So, I’m going to do a little traffic generation test – or rather a ranking improvement test.

For starters I made a simple edit to the site title.

And since it’s gotten late (and won’t make an immediate impact anyway) I’m going to put off buying some backlinks until tomorrow.

Plus, I’m just really, really curious to see what my site design modifications result in.