Adsense Diary may be back

It's been a while. Quite a while I would say. I really lost interest in posting here when it seemed that I achieved the intermediate goal. Boy how wrong I was assuming I made it!

Well, I did achieve it, for a short while. And since then it was down and down and down. The last drop was the fall of the average click cost from 10c to 2c, that practically eliminated my income altogether, and forced me to face a hard reality - we are in a depression baby, and nowadays you have to work 10 times more to earn ten times less!

So I am back to drawing board, starting several projects at once and trying to resurrect what is left from the old ones. Good thing is that today I finally crossed again the $100 mark with Adsense - I did not see such kind of earnings since May! In fact at the end of January my usual numbers were between $10 and 20 :(

Actually the purpose of this post was to keep a record that yesterday I changed urls of two of my forums posts from ftopict-160 and ftopict-179 to main-keyword-1 and main-keyword-2. The idea was to make them rank better, since I noticed that almost all first page listings but mine had the keyword in the url or domain. I can't slip it into domain name, yet url is doable with 301 redirect, at least theoretically.

So I did not dare to try it on a main money-making page just yet. According to publications and rumors, it takes BigG about 6-8 weeks to sort out redirect 301, so I want to have other means of income for those two months! First I am going to figure out is it really 6-8 weeks, hence this experiment on a couple of much less profitable pages.

Victory?

I don't know. There was a moment already when I declared victory on this blog, and it was kinda premature... After several days I was dropped from the first page of SERPS, traffic went, and so were earnings. I had several spikes of traffic since then, but neither stayed more than a handfull of days.

My earnings were more or less stable in the are of $30 a day, and climbed steadily - but slowly... Finally late February I got a kind of jump, and it stays in the area of $150 a day - which was the intermidiate goal. To be precise, those earning are combined Adsense and Widget Bucks, and Widget Bucks gives about 1/3...

Yahoo traffic goes down, Google picks up. Difference between Google and Yahoo. Latest Adsense layout is the best for ddir so far.

Well, yahoo doesn't like me anymore. My position keeps fluctuating between 4th to 9th, and yahoo traffic dropped significantly. The good thing is that google finally picked on my link building efforts, and yesterday I finally got to the third place. I doubt I can get any higher, cause first two places are occupied by natural keyword holder, and the number of links they have are no match to my subtle effort. Traffic from google did increase, but it did not stabilize yet, so it's too early to post any numbers.

I did notice though, that quality of google and yahoo traffic is different. Quality in terms how many people click and how expensive they click. Google seems to be much better. However, the difference could be due to fact that keywords are different, and yahoo top one is slightly awkward. I personally cannot picture the person who might type those four words into the search engine. I rank first on google for that yahoo keyword, and it does not bring any traffic. When I was second for it on yahoo, it brought 600-700 daily…

Today is the last day for the last adsense layout test, and the latest configuration seems to be the best one. I don't know however if difference in traffic has anything to do with it. Anyway, CPM is 20-30% better than any other layout, so I stay with it for now. I think I will come back to revise this later, when traffic gets stabilized a bit.

Serious drop in traffic. Malware. Click price differs during the day.

I thought I finally made it to the club. Well, not yet. My amazing traffic of the last several days dried out more than in half. Reason - Yahoo moved me from the second place. Last night I watched my site dropped to the ninth position, in the morning it was seventh, then it became fourth, and now it dropped a bit again to fifth. No idea what prompted them, but it resulted in me doing less than $5 today after yesterday's record $18.

When I was exploring search results that came above mine, I got infected by WinAntiVirus. If you don't know (lucky you), it's a nasty malware. Neither McAfee, nor Spybot S&D, nor Adaware are able to remove that piece of sh*t. I spent half a day on searching for the solution, and I just gave up. This is not my computer that got infected, I have this notebook temporarily for consultant job, and it will get re-imaged when I return it in a week. Just isn't worth my time…

Interesting observation - my clicks are more expensive in the middle of the day, and cheaper in the morning or evening. I have no clue why, but that's a fact. Almost every day I watch the major gains in the afternoon, with night clicks being mostly a penny

Setting another daily record. Adsense layout and different quality of traffic. Jetsubmitter.

Well, I suspected it is going to be a roller coaster. I saw it being a roller coaster recently. But what I see today does not really fit into most wild expectations. Yesterday was a really dull day, and I finally managed to close just a tad more than six bucks. I was pretty close to the bottom in terms of CPM.

Today I'm setting another record. As of this writing (about 9pm EST) I have more than $15 on the book. Isn't this amazing? Two and a half times difference (I really expect it to be close to three times by the end of the day) between today and yesterday! If I wasn't trained by stock market, I would probably go bonkers already - such jumps are a huge emotional drain.

The bad thing about comparing different adsense layouts is the difference in traffic. May be more established sites have more stable traffic, but mine keeps fluctuating in quantity and I suspect in quality. I mean that people that click on the second listing on the page are generally different from people clicking on the sixth listing. Who of them is more likely to click on ads and on what ads (more or less expensive) leaves me wondering. In other words, I'm not sure that fluctuations of adsense CPM are due to the layout and not due to the different people group. So far I have no idea how to deal with that issue. I guess I just have to watch and think, and at some point light will come.

Jetsubmitter "kind of " works. I still did not receive any response, and I just suspect Todd is out on vacation, but I figured the way to move the backlog. When I pause the submission and then restart it, it moves forward a few lines in the list. Yep, this is weird, but at least it works, and it is much easier job than submitting articles manually.