The Serge Is Working

I didn’t expect there to be any traffic on day one other than myself checking to see how the site looks, changing a few things here and there. I went to check to see if adsense was recording at least the ad impressions, I noticed that I had made 63 cents.

I immediately checked analytics to see what was going on. I looked at the traffic sources and noticed I had 11 visitors that day who came from a referring site. How is that possible? No one knows about the site yet, how did someone have the time to pick it up and link to it already. I used the referring url from analytics to go to the site in question and there I found my answer. Side note: this is exactly why I recommend installing some method of analysing your web traffic. Without it I would not have come to the answer (at least without spending hours looking over apache logs).

Wordpress has this very nice feature called pingback. Basically, when you link to another wordpress blog, a message is sent to that blog’s server and set up as a comment to the blog post. You can see an example of this on my post about Wordpress sidebar being pushed to the bottom. A fellow blogger George Coghill had a similar issue and posted about it on his blog. He was gracious enough to link to my original article on his new blog post which brought up the “pingback” comment in the comments section of my blog post.

Pingbacks are a great tool to promote your blog. First you get to link out to the target blog and that blog also links to you, so both blogs get a boost in google’s tracking of backlinks. You also now get people clicking through and finding your blog which in turn may net you some ad clicks, like it did with my single ad click and generating me 63 cents on day one of the operation.

I will be looking more closely into this feature to see if I can grow my user base and keep this going.

The Experiment:
The concept of the experiment is very simple and almost everyone out there is trying to do this:

Try and make as much money as possible online putting in as little work/time as possible

Sounds simple enough but goes with the old underpants gnomes model of making money:
1. Start a Blog.
2. ?????
3. Profit

Rules:
The rules are pretty simple.

• No porn
• No shady deals
• No questionable products like diet pills
• No sleazy SEO techniques like placing a keyword hundreds of times on a page in white font so spiders can see them but users can’t
• No breaking the rules that are set in adsense like getting a click farm hitting your site and using fraudulent clicks to pump up your numbers

The blog needs to have real content to drive good ROI to the advertisers on the site. It needs to have good keywords mapped in search engines to drive high organic traffic. I’m not going to put effort into SEM at first but I might consider it later on just to learn more about SEM and see how effective it is to drive higher revenue.

Objectives:
Short answer would be to create a blog that can generate the quite popular number of $10,000/month from adsense revenues.

Long answer is to use the years of knowledge from working on online applications, SEO, SEM and other projects to create a revenue generating site.

Worst case scenario is I fail to reach any significant revenue but I get to learn a lot about the latest blogging technologies out there, new SEO techniques (figure out what search engine spiders like and what they dispise) and finally how NOT to make a site which I will use in my future endeavors or apply to help my clients avoid the pitfalls I make.

I see this as a win-win experiment that shouldn’t take too much of my time. Maybe I can get a book deal out of it at the end! now I’m getting way ahead of myself. Time to start the experiment.

I looked at my adsense report today and was surprised to see that I had only made $13 over the course of one full year. That’s with 18k pageviews and only 40 clicks. I followed the commonly accepted rules:
1. Start a blog based on a subject that interests you.
2. Write as often as you can.
3. Write about recent buzzwords and include them in your posts.
4. Place adsense ads.
5. Profit?

OK, so I followed all the rules initially but eventually I slipped on #2 because my day job was taking up most of my time. Even with few updates and posts, my blog still averaged a decent 1200 uniques (unique visitors) a month. The blog was a tech blog mostly about problems I faced day to day and how I fixed them.

So what was the problem?
The blog was extremely useful and efficient but completely devoid of entertainment.
It was extremely useful because even I would search for posts on my blog when I came across the same problem I’ve already fixed and discussed. Another indication of how useful it is comes from analyzing the incoming organic traffic which were usually people searching on google for “how do I fix..” or “using … on …” or jus the error message itself.
It was very efficient because my blog would usually show up in the top three results on the google searches those users made and most of them landed on the page that is an exact match to their query and their answer is right there on the landing page.
It was devoid of any entertainment value because once the users found their answers, most never came back.

Being useful and efficient is not always good. People found what they were looking for and disappeared. Many didn’t stay on the blog for more than the time it took them to read the blog post. This class of user is on a mission to fix a problem. They are not there to browse and click on links. They are not there to make a purchase so even if they click on an advertiser, the ROI is probably horrible (not that you can really base any sort of long term ROI on 40 clicks and $13).

Thinking about all this over lunch made me think of a cool adsense experiment. I will explain the rules, objectives and progression of the experiment in future posts. This will hopefully teach my readers something about how to make money using adsense (or how not to make money, what to avoid when starting an online site). I’m hoping to also learn much more aobut SEO, SEM and new blogging trends.