I’d just thought I’d share with you a little case study about my failed blog project. About 2 months ago I decided to give Adsense a try and creating a blog seemed to be most practical as I had setup a blog before and the learning curve would have been bearable as compared to full on SEO. I knew that all I needed to profit from Adsense was TRAFFIC. And lots of it! I didn’t want to pay for traffic so the logical choice would have to be SEO.
Based on the my prior experience with blogs I knew that as long as I had constantly updated content I’d get at least some traffic from the search engines. I wasn’t looking to make it profit big time but more to test out the idea and decide if it was a stream I wanted to pursue. I registered a domain name and installed Word Press on my server. I then plugged in content from various ezine directories and submitted the blog URL to various web directories. I worked on this at a constant pace and posted at least 2x articles a day. Within a month my site was indexed in the search engines and I was getting up to 700 visitors a day with about half of that being unique visitors. I had Adsense ads planted through out the blog and was making a good $3/day. Not bad for a months work..
After about a month or two I noticed a huge decline in visitors. I was still continuing to upload content but my visitors dropped from 700 a day to 20. I then realized that it was because I was no longer ranking as well for some of the main keywords. I continued to upload content in the hope that the traffic would pick up. Its been another month and traffic is still at a standstill. I don’t know what happened or whether it was because my entire blog was built on duplicate content from ezine directories.
I’ve decided this is not something I’d like to pursue. Reason being :- after months of effort everything just went down the drain overnight. SEO just seems too volatile and unpredictable. Also there’s blog maintenance and the traffic to profit ratio where in order to make your Adsense profit worthwhile you need huge amounts of traffic. There are a lot of people out there making money with Adsense and blogs and perhaps I gave up too soon but….for now I guess I’ll look into other areas. I still want to grow my PPC income stream to include other affiliate networks such as CJ and LinkShare so for now thats number #1 on my list.
November 1st, 2007 at 6:01 am
The reason it failed is simple.
You were writing the blog for money.
The whole reason the blog existed was for the ads.
That can’t be the case.
The reason for a blog should be for the content. That’s what will drive readers to your blog.
If you have good content (and I’m not saying you didn’t), visitors will come.
If the whole reason you have the blog is for content, then even more visitors will come.
Money from ads will follow the visitors - not the other way around.
November 1st, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Just wanted to make some notes from my perspective:
At 2 posts per day for 2 months you had approximately 60 posts. I would consider myself lucky if I got $3 a day from 60 posts in 2 months!!. The fact is there are many many many factors taken into place in order for your content/site to be on the search engine favourably for a particular keyword. and one the of the main reason being that you get backlinks from other blogs/websites who are more popular (read pagerank) than your site. And it takes some time for search engine to pick that back link up and help your site to be on the search engine favourably for that keyword. This takes time and lots of backlinks and more more contents. 2 months is not enough for that, not even close.
There are other ways to get traffic other than search engine, stumbleupon/digg/forums to name a few.
Also original and interesting contents help not just copy and paste things from others. If you post original contents people who subscribe to your blog through feeds will come back to read them and recommend other people to read your blog.
Thats just one of the few ways to get traffic and earn money from it.
Whatever you do 2 months is just not enough. I have been associated with few popular blogs and would like to stay anonymous. but my most popular blog fetch about 80,000 hits per day and only 60% of it comes from search engine.
Good luck with your project.
November 11th, 2007 at 12:29 am
Hi,
You should use unique content instead of other people’s contain.
And there’s more.
Try Googlesnatch.com. It is only $67.
November 15th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
do you think having new content will increase the google rankings?
November 16th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
hope you don’t give up too easily…try to make your content personal and unique just like this one to sustain it, the you can bulid readers easily..
all the best.
November 16th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
thks for sharing your failed project. its very information.
December 24th, 2007 at 11:24 pm
I’m glad to see someone finally being honest about Adsense. There are a lot of people that seem to swear by Adsense and usually there’s a sales pitch at the end for some ebook or program they’re selling. Others seem to just repeat whatever they’ve heard others say.
Thanks,
Brian