Saturday, January 03, 2009

Blogging for Greenbacks (Part 2): My own experience with Google Adsense

The lure of blogging for green backs, as I have said, proved to be irresistible for me.

The barriers to entering this endeavor were basically nil. You could set up a blog for free (the most popular being Blogger and Wordpress), register it with Google Adsense for free, and find loads of free, helpful advise on how to maximize your Google Adsense earnings.

Also, I believed that I had more than the necessary level of expertise. One blog hype that I read said that if you could write a letter, you could write an interesting blog.

By the time that I had discovered Google Adsense, I had already been making a living as a writer for television and print for about ten years. I was confident that given the breadth and depth of my stock knowledge, I could churn up pages and pages of addictive content.

This got me to imagine my blog attracting thousands of visitors who would all click on my Google Ads.

So, like most brave idiots who spot a rainbow, I set off to find my pot of gold.

I started this Blogger blog in April or May 2005 with the unfounded and totally ridiculous assumption that people will care more for my opinions than their own.

Of course, I wasn’t completely foolish and I spent some time thinking of a pretty good way to build in attributes that give my blog a pretty good chance of getting attention.

First, I thought that it should appeal to people who have more or less a natural affinity to me and the things I care to write about. So, I thought of using the word ‘Pinoy’ as part of my blog’s title.

The second idea I had was that of people combing the internet for information, a significantly large number of them would most probably be looking for a way to ways to earn money.

Hence, Pinoy Biz and this is why my URL is http://www.pinoybiz.blogspot.comJustify Full
It was originally titled as Pinoy Business and Leisure Stories. I think it was in one of my first posts that I promised my readers that I would clue them in on various ways of earning money over the internet. I made a couple entries about Adsense, Feed Burner, and other stuff. Then I made a foray into topics like credit repair, multi-level marketing, Filipino inventions, and a host of other topics.

My readership, for the first couple of months, stayed below a hundred a month. Google Adsense revenues didn’t reach beyond a few cents a month.

I visited almost every website there was in an attempt to figure out what I was not doing and what I was doing wrong. What I discovered basically boiled down to two things:

1. Creating traffic or getting people to visit my blog.

2. Getting people to click the Google Ads on my blog.

I chose to tackle the first of two problems.

As with most things in the internet and in life, there is a high road (high tech) way of getting traffic and there is a low road (low tech way) of getting traffic.

Before taking you on the low road, let me point at what I think is the high road because that is all I can do being a low road traveler.

(Up Next: Search Engine Optimization and other ways to generate web traffic)

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