Not many changes... Kind of lost interest

There are not many changes with my Adsense for the last month - since I last posted here. I did not perform to expectations, and Adsense revenue for October was even lower than in September. Still, it was more than $1000, which gives me a hope I can finally make it in the nearest future.

For some reason I lost interest to posting my "adventures" here, so this blog will just hang around until I want to post again - or forever. Good luck to everybody :D

Things are getting better. Internal vs external links.

Things are gradually getting better. After quite some time down the page I'm back to the third place with my former main search term, and I'm slowly creeping up with my now main and second search terms. Currently I'm holding 16th and fifth places respectively. After serious dip well below 1000 traffic is back to around 2000 level, and adsense shows some more or less respectable figures. Nothing close to $150 just yet, but yesterday I managed to close $44, which is way better than last week standard $15-20.

Looks like my aggressive link building campaign and risky internal linking experiments are starting to generate some value. Not sure what is more effective, but I suspect internal linking. And looks like it has even more potential, cause I just fixed titles, and the new structure definitely is not reflected in the SERP yet. This is not to say link building campaign does not work. Just on the current stage internal links re-structuring seems to bring in more bang for the buck.

But I can do only so much with internal links. As soon as they are optimized, I can't improve any further. On the other hand, external links can be built infinitely. So, until I have more ideas on internal links optimization, I need to continue with link building campaign...

Update on traffic building

Here is an update on my risky traffic building experiement. Currently Halfdeck's tool found about 340,000 pages and crawled 91,000 of them. Search engines found some, too, but the results are mixed so far. I definitely got a serious boost on MSN across the board. And I got a serious slap on Yahoo across the board, too. Google seems to be indifferent so far, with just a few noticeable changes both up and down.

Yesterday I realized that all of my Amazon pages have identical title. I had to spend some time on coding trying to figure out the solution, and now they are getting unique titles with the product name and my site name. I hope this will push things in the direction I want. Will keep you updated :)

Adsense results and plans

OK, here we go again - one month is over and another month begins. Time to access how plans were fulfilled, and to make new plans. September was really controversial. I did manage to close $1119 in Adsense total - noticeably higher than the maximum planned. At the same time, it did not leave the feeling of satisfaction. There were three teaser days with revenues well above $100 each that showed what income could be achieved, and then things just slid back to the mediocre levels.

However, I dare using those teaser record Adsense days in my plans for October. I use the same algorithm as before, and base it not on the mediocre end of the month days (not all of them even crossing $20 mark), but on those three great days. So, $150 x 31 = 4650. Reckless? Unrealistic? IDK. I had such days, I know it is doable. If I don't try, I don't get there for sure.

Maximum Adsense goal? Well, same calculations as before: $4650 x 2.5 = $11625. Doable? IDK. But I was able to beat all my previous maximums. Wish me luck this time, too :)

Adsense and traffic stay down. Back to risky traffic building exercises.

There was no progress in traffic and Adsense since my last post. Worse, my SERP for the current main keyword went down even more, and currently I'm on the seventh place. Fifth place for the second one does not bring much traffic, too. All this coupled with the usual Sunday drop in traffic translated into the lowest traffic figures I've seen since the mid September. Here is the chart from Google Analytics:



Adsense followed the suit and showed me the figures between $40 and $50, today being the record low of $23. Well, I already felt the taste of $150 per day, and I want those and more back. I'm running a pretty aggressive link building campaign of course, and I also want to leverage every possible advantage I may have. After some hard thinking I decided to try a 900-pound gorilla that I have on stock. The problem is - I can't really tell if that thing kicks me up or down.

Let me tell you the story in more detail. On my main site in addition to Adsense I run several affiliate programs, including Amazon. I have a decent Amazon affiliate module that generates a page for every item in Amazon inventory, plus quite a few overhead pages like categories and searches. I can't tell you how many pages exactly, but we are talking HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS here. Halfdeck's tool is crawling my site for the second full day in a raw, and so far it found 150159 pages.

I used to have many of them indexed way back. They brought me some weird traffic, but unlike Adsense the only person who ever bought anything through my Amazon affiliate id was my wife. I decided I did not like that and spent quite some time figuring out how to get those pages de-indexed. With the help of robots.txt I succeeded, and I managed to bring number of indexed pages down to around 300 meaningful ones.

Now, after musing some time over Dan Thies's teachings, I realized I may possess some nuclear weapon. The idea is that your internal links do matter for your pages ranking, as well as external ones - as long as those links are on pages that are indexed. Granted, internal ones are not as valuable as external, but they still can pass some link love in the needed direction. So, you want as many pages as possible to be indexed.

I did internal link structure optimization already for all of my meaningfull pages, and this gave me some nice results. Now I want to bring this further, and use hundreds of thousands of pages instead of just three hundreds. Even when the amount of link love from the single page is marginal, multiplied by thousands and thousands it creates some serious force. If I manage to get just 1% of those pages indexed, we are still talking about more than 1500 pages here. This should propel me to the top SERPs in no time. At least this is the plan :).

Now, there is a possible flip side to it, at least I can think about one possibility, and it worries me a lot. What if most of my content pages just get lost among the heaps of Amazon inventory? While I really doubt that my money making pages can disappear in such a manner, other pages (especially the ones without external link love) easily can. Well, I guess I have to watch this closely.

I removed the corresponding disallow line from robots.txt a couple of days ago. Google reports it did crawl my site since, but no changes to the index so far. I'm waiting and watching...

SERPs down, traffic down, Adsense down.

Oh, well, it's not always that rosy, you know... Yesterday I went down to the fourth place with my now main keyword for ddir, and today I'm even more down, currently on the sixth place. Accordingly, my traffic dried out (relatively), and my Adsense earnings took a nosedive, too.

While three days of the third place on SERPs turned over $151, $137, and $157, yesterday I was not able to hit even $100 and closed at $93.62. Today's forecast is even grimmer, and I frankly do not expect much more than $50, if at all. Currently (10am) I have 8.37 on the Adsense counter.

While just a week ago $50 on Adsense would have made me happy, today it's no longer the truth. However, there is not really much I can do. I'm already spending all that I can in terms of time and money on the marketing campaign. I should have several articles spun by the end of this week, and I'll start submitting them immediately. All the spare time I devote to stumbling, bookmarking, and otherwise promoting sites that link to ddir.

The good news though is that I'm back to the third place on Google with my former main keyword. Now it is forth in my priorities, and I did not pay much attention to it, but it manages to creep back. And, It got to the first page of Yahoo, too. Ninth position so far, but I did not finish my campaign yet. I just need to keep doing what I do, and eventually things should take care of themselves :).

Adsense miracle lasts longer than one day. Traffic assessment and plans.

I thought it might be a one-day miracle but it is not. As I write this, I'm still on the third place for that keyword, I'm still getting tons of traffic albeit slightly less than yesterday, and my Adsense is still showing me daily numbers well in excess of $100.

Well, I now believe it is sustainable, and I plan on increasing this level of earnings at least two times. I'm having two good rankings now, and I can improve the second one. It will not double the overall traffic, but it will increase it probably 20%.

Now, I have three more related keywords I'm running marketing campaigns on currently. Two of them are approaching first page rankings, and one of these keywords is way better than all of them taken together in terms of traffic.

My raw estimate would be I can get a total of three times the current traffic = three times the current Adsense. Two times to be conservative. All on that one page :D. And I have more than one page on this site, way more. Granted, 99% of those pages cannot be ranked for such an amazing set of keywords, but one percent that left is more than enough to make a good living.

I just went back several pages and looked up what I planned to achieve for September. The plan was minimum of $450 and maximum of $1000. With monthly counter showing $650, minimum is already out of the question. Now I'm eager to see if I can break the maximum :).

Finally making a living with Adsense; a bit earlier than expected.

The day before I was hoping to get to the immediate monetary goal in a couple of months. You know what? I'm there. Tonight. As I write this, my adsense counter for today is showing a number just a tad below $150. I did not make a typo. Not $50 (which was an uncharted territory for me just before yesterday), but $150. Now, let's do a little math: $150 x 365 days a year = $54,750 yearly. While one can't have caviar for breakfast with that kind of money, bread and a fair slice of butter are more than affordable.

How did I get there? This same keyword I was mentioning several times in this blog already. I'm now on the third position in Google for that keyword. When I turned on my computer in the morning and checked my adsense stats, I immediately knew something happened - it was showing $30 and change. During last week I saw such a number close to the end of the day, and before that I did not even know such numbers exist :). Traffic shoot through the roof - here is the chart:



All that means today is the day to remember and celebrate in the years to come as the day when I proved I can make a living working for myself, not for my boss. I'm sure I'll have enough difficulties ahead, but now I know this is doable. I don't have to second-guess myself anymore whether I'm doing the right thing. It is possible to make a living with Adsense, and I'm doing it!

Setting a new Adsense Record.

I love it. Seriously. For the last several days Adsense shows me at least $30 a day, most of them around $35. Right now at 11pm I have $38.74 on the counter, and a good possibility to tap $40 for the first time in my life tonight. :D This is nothing to talk about for some people like Joel, but for me this is a personal record. I checked this blog - just a bit more than a month ago my normal Adsense revenue was $3. I increased it tenfold. In less than a month and a half. If I manage to keep this improvement pace at least for a couple of months more, my immediate monetary goal is reached.

Internal links do wonders. Hold on Adsense tests.

Looks like my internal link reorganization really helped. I see a definite increase in rankings for most of the search terms related to the pages I aimed link love at. Google loves me, and I'm enjoying the fourth day of fifth place for the very active keyword. Traffic jumped about 50% and now hovers around 1500-1600. I like it!

Can't really tell if current adsense layout is better or worse than the previous one. Traffic nature did change significantly during the test. My usual problem. I can't figure out the solution so far, so I stop experimenting with Adsense layout until I reach my traffic goals I think. Or until I figure out the solution.

I wanted to find the post about forum topics not getting targeted Adsense, and just could not do this. Well, I decided it's time to go ahead and categorize this blog. It took me probably a half an hour, but now I can find needed posts much easier. Did slight re-arrangement of other blocks to accommodate the change.

Talking about forums Adsense, I went back and compared stats from before and after. Well, it definitely helped. I'm now receiving 40% better CTR, and 25% better CPM. Since traffic on my forums are extremely low, it does not translate into big figures yet. But it definitely shows there was a problem that is fixed now. When I get enough traffic to my forums, I enjoy the difference.

BlogRush works. Record Adsense CTR, CPM, and earnings. New keywords.

You probably noticed I joined BlogRush (this fancy box at the bottom of the right column). It's a completely free brand new service (still beta) from John Reese, and it seems to work nicely for me. It's here for a couple of days, and it brings me several unique visitors every day. Considering I give it just a very few impressions, it's really good. Give it a try, it probably will work for you, too. There are no catches, and it looks like a no-brainer for me.

I showed record earning of a tad more than $30 yesterday. Today follows the suit with $28 currently. Adsense CTR is shooting thorugh the roof, as well as traffic and CPM. Most of it is due to the new keyword that I even did not consider before. Accidentally I got to the first page of Google for it (number eight currently), but now I want to keep it there. It became the key keyword for ddir page for now.

I even went back to keyword research, and did a very broad scope of related search terms. Now I have four key terms to target for this Adsense page. Two of them were in my list before, and two much more powerful I just added. Since they all are interconnected, I did target all of them in my campaigns, but I did not track results for those two that are new. I just did not realize I have two more way better search terms there. Why I did not pay attention to this is a mystery to me.

Transferring all available link love to Adsense pages.

After some serious consideration decided to cut off all the internal links to the homepage using nofollow. It's kinda scary, but I figured out I should survive :). The reasoning under this decision is pretty simple. After internal links reorganizing I have three pages receiving almost all link love from the whole site: homepage and two money-making Adsense pages. If I cut off the homepage, these two pages should receive one and a half times more link juice.

Will it improve Adsense pages rankings? This is the goal. Will it hurt homepage ranking? I bet it will. How much? I have no idea. Since 95% of money are currently made on one Adsense page, and I'm currently promoting the second one that should become better money-maker, I guess homepage ranking is not that important from the income point of view.

Information sharing is a different story. At the first glance it should suffer if I get less traffic to the homepage. Well, consider this: if I manage to double the traffic on my Adsense pages (what moving from 5th to 3rd place on Google for a couple of key keywords can easily do), how many people will wander to explore the rest of the site? My guesstimate is much more than I lose on homepage. I'm going for it.

Record Adsense CPM again. Peel away ads don't work. First page ranking.

Coming back to Adsense, I had a record CPM yesterday. I want to brag about it so much - but I really can't cause I can't disclose the number according to Google Adsense TOS. Trust me, this is the number everyone in the industry would be happy to have.

Peel away is not that good as expected. 0.26% CTR and zero conversions hardly qualify for shooting through the roof :(. Text ads for the same advertiser on the same page have CTR up to 1.18%, and conversion rate up to 6.25% currently. Since I already bought the stuff, and it uses the place otherwise not used, I leave it there for now. I might play with other advertisers and see if it gets any better. Anyway, my main income on that site comes from Adsense, not affiliates.

First page position for the very competitive keyword I was mentioning before. At that time it showed 90,000,000 competitors, this time it is showing 57,000,000. Still very impressive. Well, since I'm already ranking for it (for some reason I did not include it in my initial keyword strategy), I might as well take several steps to rank better. I'm changing the title to include it, and going to target it in my next article submission. This might or might not knock my current main keyword down.

Killing deal from Jason Potash

Just stumbled upon that thing today, and opened an account as soon as I realized this can be a real cash machine. While not in the Adsense circle, Jason Potash is a no-nonsense name on the Web, and I believe the new project of him will not go underwater.

So, what he is for now? The new deals site. No, not about Adsense. If you are familiar with the woot.com, you know the concept. If not, the concept is really easy to grasp. They strike a deal with different manufactures and retailers, and have a one day sale for just one product. Today they sell golf clubs, tomorrow - radar detectors. Dirt cheap. And limited quantity.

That thing works, I watched it working. I bought from woot.com several times, and I saw how the counter goes down to zero in an hour or so on some things.Jason Potash's site is going to have killing deals on internet marketing stuff, one deal a day every day, 365 days a year.

So, how can you (and I) profit form it? Affiliate program with permanent lifetime two-tier commissions! It does not get any better than that, does it? You get a thick slice every time the person you referred buys anything. And a bit thinner, but still very respectable slice from what the person referred by the person you have referred buys.

In life, you usually find out about something good when it's too late -- like getting the skinny on a huge golf club sale that ended yesterday. Or, being handed a Denny's 50% off coupon when you just ate there like two hours ago. We all know, sometimes life sucks.

Well, this time... YOU will be the one who is laughing, *if* you go check this out before word gets out. Everyone will be talking about this new site next week. You'll see. Right now, this is by invitation-only and closed to the public. There is no cost to join and the profit potential is really big.

And all that is done under Jason Potash name - means the odds of that thing getting really big are very good. And the site is not launched yet! This is a chance to get in early, way before other guys - means others will sign up under your referral! Hurry up, and use my affiliate link to sign up! Yes, sure, I want you to sign up with my affiliate link - it does not cost you a dime neither in real money, nor in opportunity cost. Here it is: killing deals from Jason Potash

P.S. - Whatever you do, do NOT sit on this. The sooner you check this out, the better your potential to make some nice passive income, every month.

First comment. Yesterday's traffic. Back to the third place.

First comment on this blog. Of course from spammer. Sure enough I had to delete it. I wonder how people spam sometimes. What they hope for? This one had about dozen links to the same foreign site, and was written in the language I don't understand. Who in his right mind would keep such a comment on his blog?

Yesterday traffic burst was because Google in one of its re-shuffles put me on the first page for a very competitive keyword. Like 90,000,000 results. It was not long lived, and as I write this, I'm on the fourth page for that keyword. It did not make me awfully big increase in Adsense though - as appeared this keyword traffic tend to have high CTR with very cheap clicks. $12.28, while respectable on my scale, is nowhere close to the record $19.65.

Yet today I'm back to third place with my main keyword, and it feels sooo good! Well above average traffic and CTR, and record CPM as I write this. I'm close to getting the record Adsense number today. A couple of more hours to go, and only one dollar left to beat the record!

Relatively bad CPM for September so far. Adsense CPM and CTR charts.

Traffic is picking up (don't know why btw), CTR is shooting through the roof, but eCPM is hovering way below average. What does this mean? Either people prefer to click on cheaper ads for some mysterious reason, or I'm being served cheaper than usual ads for another mysterious reason. Either way good traffic does not bring in significant Adsense income increase. Sad. I'm still getting around $9 a day for the whole September, forget double-digits I was able to show in August.

Here are the charts of my Adsense CTR and eCPM since the beginning of August (without numbers of course) - did I tell you this is a roller coaster?

Nofollow links. Drop in traffic and other stats in the morning. Peel away ads - nice addition to Adsense.

Keep finding links to nofollow all over the place. I'm catching them one by one in the places I really never thought about. According to the tool my profile got improved dramatically. Don't see any result on SERPs and traffic though yet - and of course on adsense. But this is too early, I think at least a week is needed or may be even more

Today I see a serious drop in traffic with no changes in SERP results. On top of that, both CTR and CPM were extremely low the first half of the day. Somewhat improved by the night, but CPM is still lower than average. May be because of adsense layout changes.

Stumbled upon peel away ads - love them. Installed on the site right away, and eagerly waiting for some statistics to see. The package is very primitive though, and does not have any recording, let alone data processing, so I have to rely on advertisers' data. If the idea works, I can add some tracking code of my own to it. It could be really good addition to adsense.

Optimizing internal linking. Tool for this with download link.

Trying to optimize my internal linking to get more juice to adsense pages to rank, I followed Dan Thies's advice and downloaded the great piece of software. I did some analysis on my site. Sure enough it appeared I have a few places I can improve on. I spent the day today figuring out the changes I have to make and applying them, and looks like I'm done with this by now. It is not going to play out today or tomorrow, but over the course of a week or two I expect Google (and other engines, too) to pick up my new internal link structure, and give a due attention to the pages I made accent on.

I love the tool by the way, and I highly recommend you go ahead and download it, too. Of course if you want to control what your pages have higher ranking then others. If you don't, that's you decision :). I'm not aware of any other software doing the similar job showing you how you can accentuate your important (adsense!) pages for search engines. Plus you have really good customer support. No, I'm not affiliated with the author in any sense, I just came there by Dan's recommendation, and I love the tool. It's absolutely free, and here is the link: http://www.seo4fun.com/php/pagerankbot.php

Fourth page of Google for "adsense blog". Dull day. 20,000 visitors monthly. Reverting on-page optimization. New Adsense layout.

This blog is on the fourth page of Google for adsense blog. Considering I did not make any SEO effort whatsoever on this one month old blog, it looks not bad at all. The secret weapon I used while being a marketing tool is not really a SEO practice. Actually, traffic on this blog improved overall. It is not that dramatic as it was the first couple of days after secret weapon launch, but it definitely differs from what was before.



Another dull day on the main site - Sundays seem to be extremely cheap for some reason. And this come on top of low traffic - for real reason people having life instead of starring at computer screen. Yesterday monthly traffic crossed 20,000 mark - another record on my book. Almost all traffic is organic.

Remember I was changing some on-page factors to try to rank better on ddir? I'm reverting most of it. Ranking have been sliding on many keywords ever since. Now I changed the title on ddir. And made some slight text changes on this page to reduce keyword density. I'm no longer targeting that weird long tail on Yahoo. I want to move to the third place on the main one on Google.

At 11:00pm changed adsense layout. Now I have separate blocks for upper left links and menu itself. This was one of configurations I have before, and I like it much better in terms of user experience. I'm giving it a second try to see if it is really worse than combined menu.

Trying to straighten out nofollow.

After reading Dan Thies on nofollow, I decided to take inventory of my internal link structure and try and optimize it. Not that I did not do anything along these lines before, but all the efforts were impulsive and uncoordinated.

For example, I ended up having link to contact and privacy pages only from my homepage. And those links are nofollowed at the same time. Does not really make any sense. You either keep those links only on homepage, or have them on all pages and nofollow. And the second solution is much better than the first one.

Now I'm going to try it more systematically. Using the same example as above, I will return those links to all the pages. This will make user experience better. And I will label them nofollow. This will keep my page rank from leaking to the pages I don't want to rank for.

And my more important pages should receive a bit more PR love. I don't think it alone will boost my rankings, but every bit counts. And better rankings = more traffic = more Adsense.

Four organic search hits on this blog. Traffic improved. Adsense is average.

LOL I got four organic google hits on this blog. Two for "jetsubmitter manually add blog" and two for "traffic + adsense". Well, I definitely was talking about those topics here, I just did not expect to make it to organic results that fast.

Trafic is back after holiday weekend. Sort of. Since SERP did not improve, I can't get back to 1000 + level. However this week showed steady traffic in the range of 700-800. Not that bad for the fifth position on Google - it brings 90 percent of the whole traffic and almost all Adsense income. My Yahoo results are sliding even more, and current position is eight.

Adsense CPM also somewhat improved comparing to the weekend data, but it is still noticeably below the best days. The more I look at it, the more I believe there is a difference between people who click on the third link and on the fifth link. Looks like that "third clickers" are more likely to click on Adsense, at least in my case.

Social bookmarking icons

This post is just going to hold all of my social bookmarking images. This is the way I figured out to upload and keep images on Blogger. This first bunch I found in a Wordpress social bookmarking plugin. This is probably the most comprehensive set of images. Not all of them are here, though, I can think of a couple missing. As soon as I find them, I'll add them. So, there is really nothing to read in this post, it is just a stogare for icons - I just don't know a better way to do this, sorry. I will probably post something readable later today.