Don’t Click This

Ok, I cheated a little bit with my rule about not paying for traffic for my MTB site. I was reading about AdEngage the other day and decided to try it out as I had $8 in a paypal account and it was hardly worth cashing it out. So, I bought 2 text links on two sites, just for a week, for $1 each. And I’m glad I did. By the end of the first day I had already made my back my $2 investment! I’ve recieved nearly 150 clicks from my text links in a couple of days - by the end my weeks advert I’ll have paid less than half a cent for each click if that continues!

Unfortunately though, the money earned will more than likely all be from adsense as I’m running affiliate links for a UK bike shop and as the traffic was from US sites it’s unlikely I’ll make any sales from them. This is actually one of the reasons I started up Text Ads Directory to find UK only websites to advertise on.

Around this time last month, I set up a new mountain biking site and I’d hoped that by now I’d have made some money from it. I’ll admit now, I’ve been really bad about sticking to the targets that I set myself, plus the fact that at one point I didn’t have internet access for almost a week and I sort of got sidetracked by updating my student site.

So from now on I’ve decided if that I’m going to write my goals and targets on this blog so I’ll be more inclined to stick to them. Here are the stats for the first month of from my MTB site:

Visitors: 383

Pageviews: 1779

Earnings: $2.08

Hmmm. Not great is it. Anyway, instead of making lots of excuses I’m just gonna write down my targets for this site for the next month:

- Get at least 10 new inbound links (I know earlier on I said one a day but that just seems impossible!)

- Add a new article to the site every day (I’ve not added any content for about a week and a half)

- Spend an hour a day posting on MTB forums

- Earn at least $50 from the site by this time next month

So there you have it. I know that $50 isn’t that much but bear in mind I’m trying to get all my traffic organically (no paid advertising). Hopefully this time next month my stats will be a bit more impressive!!

I run adsense on most of my sites, which up until Christmas was providing steady revenue, but not really anything to write home about. Then, over the Christmas period I had a strange increase in earnings despite the fact that traffic was down. I didn’t think much of it at the time as I thought traffic and earnings would return to a normal level after the holiday season.

How wrong I was! I’ve just been looking over my stats and traffic has returned to normal levels as I suspected, but adsense earnings per day has actually doubled. I can’t figure it out, I’ve not changed anything, visitors are around the same levels as before the holdiay season so what’s going on?! Not complaining, it’s just strange! This has made me think though, and I’m going to see if I can do some tweaking to the ad units and increase my CTR further.