Thursday February 28, 2008

Google Adsense - first month report, and thanks for the clicks

First of all, thanks to you, the reader, for your support of lowem.log, for your visits, and clickthroughs, and your comments. It has been just over a month since I have put up ads via Google Adsense on this blog. The preliminary report from the first month or so of operations : USD $44.32 in earnings, at an average of 5 clicks at $1.23 per day, which works out to about 24.6 cents per click. Google ads are counted on a CPC (cost per click) basis instead of CPM (cost per thousand impressions) so it's the actual clicks that count, not the number of page impressions or page views.

It started off, as with quite a few initiatives I have been taking recently, as part of my personal war against inflation. I wanted to say "fight", or maybe "struggle", but I decided that these were not strong enough words. So yes, I am declaring war on inflation. Here's my story.

In the middle of January 2008, my Java hosting provider, eatj.com, sent me an email telling me that they are merging with another Java hosting provider. As part of the transition, my existing hosting subscription plan of USD $9.85 would be invalidated and I would have to re-sign up at a revised rate of $12.85 per month. Okay, you might say, so it's just $3 but from a percentage point of view, that's a whopping 30.46% rate of inflation !! Did you get a 30% pay increase any time in the past year? I sure didn't.

It also helped that my friend and fellow fund manager, Hoo Shao Pin aka shooperman was talking to me at the time about "multiple sources or streams of income" and how he was going to set up a few blogs and write up stuff and bring in some money. So, in a fit of pique, I signed up for Adsense, went through all the hoops of registration, setting up the code templates, verification, and then turned to look into SEO ("search-engine optimization") techniques. No black hat stuff for me - I wanted to do this the legitimate way. So I tweaked my Roller template, fixed a bug in the <title> tag, added meta-keywords, and off I went.

So what have I gained so far? 3 months' worth of hosting fees in 1 month ain't bad. I've also learnt a few things about trying to run a blog in a rather more "professional" manner. If you're into the white-hat, legitimate side of the business, there's only one thing to know : content is king. And if content is "king", timing is "queen". People look for compelling *and* timely content, and Google's search algorithms appear to reward those who have the stuff, and, it seems, just as importantly, those who have the stuff out *quickly*.

Case in point : I am the #1 search result for "singapore airshow 2008 photos" - which brings you to my blog entry here. I got a trade day ticket for the airshow on the first day, I took the photos, the moment I came back, I uploaded the photos, added captions, and wrote the blog. So I had the content, and I put it up quickly. So if you want to get a high Google ranking, do the same : have good content, and put it up quickly. That's the trick, which isn't much of a trick, actually. It's just common sense.

Anyway. Thanks for reading this far, and thanks for the clicks. The Adsense terms and conditions stipulate that I'm not allowed to *ask* you to click on the ads, but if you like to do so, you are more than welcome to :)

(2008-02-28 12:55:15 SGT) [Musings] Permalink Comments [1]

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