Trying to earn money from people clicking on ads has been a long process. It started as a neat little thing that made me a few pennies, then it turned into hours of spinning articles and posting 1,000 pictures to Pinterest.
I used Google Adsense to host/supply the ads which were shown and for several months it was going great. I went from making nothing to averaging $1 per day. Then right after i got my first check from Google for $125 i got banned for " link schemes." Actually the email said lots of things like "check our terms of service" and i really wasn't sure what i had gotten in trouble for. Luckily in the email they said i was only temporarily banned from Adsense and if i fixed the problem i could have my account re-enabled. Had i been clicking on my own ads it would have been an immediate and permanent ban.
Also in the email it said i could write an appeal, so i did. It was denied. So i wrote 5 more over the next 5 months. Each letter i wrote in a different tone. The first time i wrote about i am clueless i was and didn't know how this happened. Another time i tried admitting to everything, even stuff i didn't do. Each response i got was the same, a cut-and-paste paragraph saying to look at their terms of service. But always at the end of the letter it said i could continue to appeal if i felt that i had fixed the problem. Although the more i read about trying to get Google to reverse their account ban, the more unlikely it seemed.
So i decided to try a few "Adsense alternatives." I though "forget them, Google Adsense isn't the only player in the game" So i tried Chitika, Clicksor, Bidvertise and a few more. Some sites like AdBrite only worked with a private domain, which meant that i could not put their ads on Blogger. I do have notitlerequired.com but davewirth.blogspot.com is where i have all the traffic and earnings.
What i learned after trying all of those different companies is that they can't match Adsense, at least in my situation. Chitika and Clicksor payed me at most 15¢ per day. Sometimes i would get 4 or 5 clicks on an ad and still i would only get a few cents. So after trying all the other ad providers i decided to give up. I'd rather have no ads on the site, then obnoxious ones that only give me pennies per day.
but then....
A few weeks ago i looked into Google Webmaster Tools and checked my backlinks. The whole time i knew about the "suspicious backlinks" that Google was talking about. I just assumed there was no way of removing them. Somehow i had over 15,000 backlinks from one site and 3,000 from another. There were some others but those were the two oddballs. So i emailed the people running those sites and asked them to try and remove any links pointing to my page. Amazingly a couple of days later the 15,000 links pointing to my site disappeared.
I decided that i might as well write another email to Google, saying that i got rid of some of the "bad links" and that's the best i could do. Two days later i got a response saying that Adsense has been re-enabled for my site. I was really surprise and quite happy.
It's funny how in the past 5 months my emotions had changed about the whole situation. First i was a little mad at myself for getting banned, then i was determined to get Adsense reactivated, then i was mad at Google for blocking me, then i was inspired to try a different company, then bummed out when noting worked. By the time they finally reinstated my Adsense account i had sort of forgotten about it. The big let-down when i got banned, was that i was always hoping that Adsense would be something where i could just sit back, do nothing, and make $1 a day. Luckily that hope has returned.
So this time i'm going to keep things real simple. And one big advantage i have now that i didn't have a year ago is Data. I can learn from from my past attempt.
Using a combination of Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Google Adsense i can look at past information and see what worked, what didn't, why something worked and where did the money actual come from. First i looked at my past earnings. This chart shows how i went from nothing to averaging around $1 per day, then back to nothing. The small spikes after October are from my videos on Youtube. I have Adsense linked to those 100 videos, thought it gives me practically nothing, maybe $3 a month. But my hope is that the daily earnings jumps back to what it was before being banned.
Next i looked at the different type of ads i used before. At the top you can see the 7 rectangles, i only have two active in this picture, Earnings and Clicks. I also looked closely at CPC (Cost Per Click) but for clarity i have it turned it off.
For the new ad layout decided to put just 2 ads on the blog, 300x250 which goes in the top right corner and 728x90 at the top middle. Both of them i set to ONLY show images/video/rich media, not text. From looking at the past data i see that text does result in higher clicks but lower CPC, which means that even though more people click on the text ads i'm not making as much per click. So forcing Adsense to just show images it will hopefully mean that i will be getting clicks equal to $1 instead of 2¢.
Looking at the chart above you might also be thinking, what about the 200x90 button, why don't you use that instead of the 728x90. The reason that ad worked so well was because i imbedded it into the body of the blog post. I'm not sure if it's technically allowed, so to be on the safe side i'm leaving it off.
Here's my earnings broken up by country. It makes sense that the United States is at the top, then the UK and Canada. They are all english speaking countries and probably relate most to the things i write about.
This is an image that looks familiar to ones i've posted in the past. It show what people are typing into Google Search that leads them to my blog. You do have to remember that this is a combination of Google Search, Google Image Search, etc. and i get lots of page views through Google Images. This is really important information to understand about your site's traffic.
Looking at this data you can see that i get 1,000 clicks per month from people typing in "project free tv" and "free tv links". Actually 6 out of the top 7 all go to just one of my blog pages. You can test this out by going to Google and typing in "free tv links" and see what pages come up, hopefully mine is 5th from the top. Or try typing in "skype vs tango" my link should be the first one. You'll also notice that i have my Google+ profile picture linked, which i do think draws people's attention to my links as well.
It's no coincidence that the page with the top 6 searched for keywords is also the page which i earn the most from Adsense.
I definitely wrote the blog post, Watch Free TV Online, with popularity and keywords in mind. The other great thing about that page is that it works perfectly with Adsense. It usually puts a Netflix ad at the top and a Hulu ad in the corner. Both ads are totally relevant to the page and that's why lots of people click on them.
For now i'm just going to put the ads back to how they were before and hope for the best. Maybe i'll check the data here and there but i really like the idea of making money by doing absolutely nothing.
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