Earning from Advertising Online

Jun 17, 2007

Bookings.com is getting very few clicks and no earnings beyond the 6 euros the very first day I put it on the site. Which, given the total lack of earnings since then, I am inclined to believe was thrown in as a freebie by the company to encourage me. Theoretically a single hotel booking, if it's at the right hotel and for several days, could be very lucrative for me, so I'll give it some more time, but... anybody wanna book a hotel?

Continuing to follow site-money-making advice from John Chow, around mid-May I removed the right column AdSense ad unit from my pages: according to John, the Google bid gap might mean that I was getting clicks on cheap ads at the expense of lucrative ones. Earnings immediately jumped again, but remain extremely inconsistent, although generally somewhat higher than before. I've just followed another piece of John Chow advice, on using AdSense's competitive filter to increase earnings. It will probably take a couple of weeks before results from that, if any, are visible.

As you can see above, earnings from BlogHerAds are growing rapidly. Adding the ads to the comments section of my site increased views of those ads considerably in March, and earnings shot up to $250. In April I earned about $450 from BlogHer: this is probably because the ad campaigns BlogHer is getting are becoming more lucrative (especially for the parenting blogs, but my site doesn't fit into that category). I finally got the login and password needed to get into the traffic reports at 24/7 RealMedia, but this is not easily correlated with the value of each ad campaign. Sometime when I'm feeling energetic I'll do a spreadsheet to calculate this automatically.

Unfortunately for other would-be web advertising earners, BlogHer is not accepting new blogs into their stable at the moment. If I hear that they are, I'll let you know.

later: They're wide open now, check it out!

A side effect of being part of the BlogHerAds network is that I was automatically signed up for FeedBurner ads (since my RSS feed was already hosted by FeedBurner). The usefulness of this is limited as their ad code is designed to be installed with blogging software, and there's no easy way to install it on a non-blog site like mine; I could only place the code on my comments section, and I wasn't sure I had the code installed correctly as the ads didn't seem to be showing up there. After some frustration with their forum-based support, I finally got what I hope is the definitive answer yesterday: the code is correctly placed, but the ads were only being shown to some specific geographic locations, mostly the US, so I would naturally never see them. And, coincidentally, I saw an ad in there just today (targeted to Italy, I suppose, although it was in English and linked to an English-only site).

These are not earning me much (grand total of about $1 so far!), however, as they seem to get only about 100 views per month. Hmm.

I had noticed that the Google AdSense link units (in the brown bar between the black and beige areas at the top of each page) earn pretty well, but I was only allowed to have one per page. Google has just changed that rule, allowing up to three link units per page, so a few days ago I added another long link unit at the bottom of each page. We'll see how those perform.

useful AdSense optimization video from Google

got any tips to share? I'd love to hear them!