Tag: Adsense

Where to now for revenue creation?

Making money online is everyones dream isn’t it?  Turning a website in a revenue stream is something I’ve tried and not succeeded at for years!

I’ve raved and ranted enough to friends over the years about how people somehow can create a passive income sufficient to support living in some of the most exotic places in the world.  Jealous?  Certainly, I won’t deny that, but I’m also curious how one steps from obscurity to “success”.

But enough of my green eyed monster, after my debacle with Adsense and discussions with colleagues and friends I’m hitting out on a new path.  It’s almost certainly more interesting talking about the mechanics and how well the idea performs than actually “doing it”.

 

Welcome to TheBookingSpot

Back in October I took a punt and registered a couple of domain names through my usual GoDaddy account and bound them to the basic GoDaddy Hosting.  TheBookingSpot.com and the back-end domain ReservationDestination.com are to be my little foothold into the multi billion dollar business that is Travel, and more specifically Whitelabel and Affiliate based Travel searching.  The potential here is pretty obvious.  I like travel, I like a good deal, and I have some ability to string together lumps of code into websites.

This way to revenue (Where to start)?

The first challenge was to work out a gimmick, an idea that would give me an enthusiasm for the project, and somewhat touch into my personal experiences.

I settled on a combination of trip-planning resources and Motorsport events around the world.  The idea is to utilise the motorsports draw-cards and help fans find flight and accommodation deals to get there by bringing the information they need into one place.  By pre-loading destination information, setting reasonable date ranges prospective travellers are able to quickly work out starting costs and go on from there.

My “experience” as a TripAdvisor user and Senior Contributor has taught me that more often than not people want to have their hands held when planning travel, they need to have dates suggested so they arrive in time, they need to be told where and when to go.  Condescending? Yes.  Fact? Yes.  So I’m trying to combine those elements.  Maybe I should sell reviews?  According to site sites there’s significant revenue opportunities (about USD20-40) per review by a Senior Contributor.  It’s probably a better paying option than this!

Whats it built on?

I’m a fan of WordPress, so I’m using that as the backend and linking together various tweaks and plug-ins to create a more specific experience.  Underpinning the revenue collection aspects will be “Whitelabel” arrangements and regular “Affiliate” programs.  To mop up other potential links etc I’ll continue to use Skimlinks as a catch-all engine to bolster income.

The second phase of the project is build a bit of a Community engine, a reason for people to come and stick to using the tools.  The recurring traffic and word-of-text promotion that will eventually reduce a dependency on paid advertising.

Why don’t you try a search right now 🙂

The Blogger Dream crushed by AdSense

It was in January I decided to share my amazement at how people could travel and live worldwide without a “real job”.

Then in August I shared my successes with the Adsense income I was generating through YouTube and a few other sites. By that point I was hitting around 7 cents a day. Not exactly rolling in the cashola.

So have I made it to the big leagues in the last 5 months?

In short, no, not even close.

Instead I’ve joined what seems like thousands of small volume bloggers and content producers who are dropped from the AdSense program by Google for some non-specified breach on the month a long earned payout threshold is reached.  That was it, I completed the review process trying to eek out a specific reason, but none was forthcoming.  could I have clicked on an Advert while watching on of my YouTube videos?  Maybe I wasn’t supposed to have Skimlinks running at the same time?

I just don’t know.

So guess I will have to move on from the easy wins of a passive advertising income until a viable replacement for AdSense crops up.  There are a few but lets just say I’m fussy and I also like the idea of finding a program with a lower payout threshold to be sure I don’t spend years driving clicks that someone is getting paid for only to never see my share.  You see that’s the real scam here, Google sold ads on my sites to advertisers for years, and do you think in 2014 they’re going to refund the advertisers who paid for displays on ausmicro.com back in the day?  Nope, so they win and I (and every other content producer) get screwed.  Not really impressed.

Screw you Google AdSense

The time has come to move on – it’s likely I won’t ever utilize a Google AdSense program as an advertiser or as a content producer, well definitely not as a content producer, supposedly once the account is locked it can’t be unlocked, but yet because its never deleted its a breach of their T&C to create another.

 

Oh well back to the “Get rich quick drawing board”

Living the Blogger Dream on 7c a day!

Back in January I wrote about how I was so happy to be making 2.4c a day between this blog and Youtube content.

Well a solid 6 months has passed and it’s time to review the situation.  I’ve not pumped this site full of content nor have I piled on the Youtube content so I guess in part it’s been a failure.  As it turns out making interesting content is hard work!

As it turns out making interesting content is hard work!

What I can say is that typically my income is now much higher than 2.4c per day and peaked (after my March-April trip to Malaysia) at a massive 12.8c per day – a 500% increase in income!

So what have I “earned”?

Jul 1, 2014 – Jul 31, 2014 $2.43
Jun 1, 2014 – Jun 30, 2014 $1.73
May 1, 2014 – May 31, 2014 $3.93
Apr 1, 2014 – Apr 30, 2014 $2.75
Mar 1, 2014 – Mar 31, 2014 $1.12
Feb 1, 2014 – Feb 28, 2014 $2.97
Jan 1, 2014 – Jan 31, 2014 $0.88
Total: $15.81
Daily (211 Days) $0.07

 

I think that says it all, AUD0.07 per day on average for the 211 days through until the end of July 2014.

As you can see the income is sporadic and based heavily on how much effort I put into content and also into promotion.  The Renault information certainly boosts the Google rankings and generates traffic but it’s also complex research to generate.  Travel writing doesn’t generate much traffic, but I haven’t written much yet, and honestly really would need to start pushing it harder.

income is sporadic and based heavily on how much effort I put into content and also into promotion

What I do know and understand is that to build revenue I need to start pushing better content related advertisements. Perhaps Google Adsense isn’t the cash vehicle it’s cracked up to be?  I presume using better targeted programs would work, or having a greater level of hits would drive up traffic?  Maybe infusing some Airline ticket search engines would work, they can generate a decent return, assuming someone uses it to buy themselves tickets!

No matter what the outcomes are for me what I can definitely say is that unless a person has a lot of time on their hands and a fairly sizeable chunk of cash to spend on promoting their travel blog they’re not going to be living high on the proceeds of their words!

I’m also very happy to say that the experiment continues with my 7 cents per day almost 300% more than when I started!

Thanks for the Clicks on the ads and thanks for the page views.