Joel Comm
07-15-2006, 11:53 AM
When you use AdSense, writing for the Web can be very lucrative.
But money isn’t what usually drives people to put up a website.
Whether they’re launching a blog or building a huge site on some specific topic what usually drives people at the beginning is the desire to share their thoughts. They want other people to know what they think, whether that’s about politics, religion, computer games or whether the latest digital SLR is worth the money.
And if they can earn money while they’re doing it, that’s a bonus.
What tends to happen next is that they see just how much money that fun can bring in. They start optimizing their websites for high AdSense earnings and if they make the right moves, they’ll be well on the way to creating a profitable online publishing business.
And then those first little sites -- the ones that were built to just inform and entertain -- get lost. Why spend time writing a blog that few people read when you could spend those minutes adding new content to a site that gets much more traffic... and many more clicks?
I think that sort of attitude is a mistake. That’s not just because it’s a bad idea to lose track of the fact that online publishing should be fun. (And if you’re not having fun, your readers won’t be having fun either).
It’s also because those small sites can make excellent sandboxes.
My sites are pretty well optimized now and I hate making changes to them. If I try a different ad format next to one of my blog posts, that experiment could cost me hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. That’s a big price to pay for research.
Before I make a big change to one of my high-earning sites then, I first try it out on one of my smaller sites and track the results closely. If I see it increases my revenues, I try it on one or two more sites. Only if I can see that this is a strategy with universal appeal do I expand it across my network. It’s just too expensive a risk otherwise.
If you’ve got small sites that you’ve been ignoring, this could be the time to dust them off and make them work for you!
But money isn’t what usually drives people to put up a website.
Whether they’re launching a blog or building a huge site on some specific topic what usually drives people at the beginning is the desire to share their thoughts. They want other people to know what they think, whether that’s about politics, religion, computer games or whether the latest digital SLR is worth the money.
And if they can earn money while they’re doing it, that’s a bonus.
What tends to happen next is that they see just how much money that fun can bring in. They start optimizing their websites for high AdSense earnings and if they make the right moves, they’ll be well on the way to creating a profitable online publishing business.
And then those first little sites -- the ones that were built to just inform and entertain -- get lost. Why spend time writing a blog that few people read when you could spend those minutes adding new content to a site that gets much more traffic... and many more clicks?
I think that sort of attitude is a mistake. That’s not just because it’s a bad idea to lose track of the fact that online publishing should be fun. (And if you’re not having fun, your readers won’t be having fun either).
It’s also because those small sites can make excellent sandboxes.
My sites are pretty well optimized now and I hate making changes to them. If I try a different ad format next to one of my blog posts, that experiment could cost me hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. That’s a big price to pay for research.
Before I make a big change to one of my high-earning sites then, I first try it out on one of my smaller sites and track the results closely. If I see it increases my revenues, I try it on one or two more sites. Only if I can see that this is a strategy with universal appeal do I expand it across my network. It’s just too expensive a risk otherwise.
If you’ve got small sites that you’ve been ignoring, this could be the time to dust them off and make them work for you!