Google AdSense

Dec 9, 2005

I've written before about my ongoing experiments with my site - first a redesign, then various ways to monetize it, with Google ads and Amazon buy links. A recent news story claimed that one in six Americans is selling something online, so I'm hardly unique.

Google AdSense revenues were growing steadily, but very slowly - I wasn't making enough money to get excited about, let alone quit my day job. About two months ago I tried applying some of Google's advice about optimizing ad placement and using colors that blend the ads into my pages. Revenues jumped by almost 50% in a month. However, I can't be sure that this alone accounted for the increase, because at the same time I was doing other things likely to bring in more traffic and hence more ad clicks: publishing new material practically every day, and letting people know about it via my RSS feed. More recently, I submitted my "video podcast" to a number of podcast directories, which may be helping.

Google keeps adding new ways for me to make money. They now have a referrals program whereby, if you go through a link on my site to join the AdSense program, I get a commission.

They also have a referral service to encourage people to use the Firefox browser with Google toolbar. I wrote about Firefox long ago (have been using it happily since it came out in mid-2004), and suspect many of you are already using it, but, if you want to get it (and want to pay me for that), there's a referral link at the bottom of this page.

After several attempts, I finally got my "video podcast" accepted to Apple's iTunes music store, so now I publish an iPod version of each new video. You don't have to own the video iPod, or any iPod at all, to view videos this way: you can download them through iTunes and view them on your computer. Whether or not my video is being viewed on video iPods, I certainly get viewers through iTunes - 10 to 15 a day each from the Windows and Mac versions - but I have no way of knowing whether any of those people then visit my website (though a new blurb at the end of every video encourages them to do so).

Amazon revenues have always been disappointing. I suppose I have been too conscientious about only providing links to things (books and movies, mostly) that I actually like, so the chance that someone will click through and buy something is small. Amazon's got a new kind of link now that supposedly will increase click-throughs, so I've added lots of new Amazon links (including a few for items which, strictly speaking, I have not tried myself, I admit).

I also joined an iTunes affiliate program (through Linkshare.com) and put a few links to specific songs that are mentioned on my site, but I've never earned anything from that (not surprisingly) and their site is such a pain to use that I don't think I'll bother with it any longer.

I am doing a couple of things online that are not directly related to my site. I volunteered/was invited to beta test at Squidoo.com, something new from Seth Godin (a well-known marketing guru). Squidoo's tagline is: "Everyone's an expert on something." The idea is to make it easy for you to share that expertise by giving you tools to create a web page (they call it a "lens") of information and links related to a specific topic. (The site should earn money through its own Google ads, Amazon links, etc., with proceeds being partly given to the "lensmasters" and partly to charity.)

The easiest way to understand this is to look at a lens. I've created three so far:

Videoblogging Resources
Living in Italy
Woodstock School

(Most of the material on the latter two will look familiar if you look at those sections of my website.)

Making the lenses was fun, and I'll particularly keep up the videoblogging one as that field changes constantly, and a good source of information on this topic could be useful to many new videobloggers.