I started blogging almost three years ago with an aim of sharing my thoughts on technology and its use in the fight against poverty. Since then, I have written 209 posts (including this one) on this blog and 10 posts on my new blog, where I write about my experiences in Japan and Afro-Japanese issues. During this time, my friends have introduced me to blog monetization. With time, I have actually discovered that there is a growing number of people e.g. Mart Erkal, Etienne Teo, John Chow, Javo etc. whose blogs are solely aimed at making money online.
While the aim of my blog is different, it does not prevent me from monetizing it with Google Adsense. Actually it works better that way. I signed up for Adsense way back in 2006. Since then, I have been displaying Adsense ads on my blog. Because my blog is not money making oriented, I don’t do any kind of Adsense optimization. As a result, my monthly income from Adsense is very small (US$7.00 on average) but now it is increasing rapidly especially with my increased PageRank. I recall that one day, Cryton and other friends on the Blogcatalog forum were talking about their meagre returns from Adsense. Cryton has actually removed Adsense ads from his blog. Initially, I also thought of doing the same because I felt that it was just one of Google’s ways of using poor bloggers in order to continue enriching themselves. But after second thoughts, I decided to continue displaying Adsense ads on my blog. After all, I do not do any special work in order to make money through them. I get whatever they bring to me. I do not even care how much it gets to. Last month, my Adsense revenue crossed the payment threshold for the first time. As I write, Google has transfered some US$109 into my bank account. This is a small amount and maybe negligible to some of you but you must understand that I got it without breaking sweat.
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71 users commented in " Do not be deceived, Google Adsense really pays! "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackIf it is a bonus for doing nothing extra and pays for some of the expenses, why not indeed. They are nitwits to pay for something without getting something in return. In your site, they get a focused audience.
Nicole Price´s last blog post..Home Accents: Ideas and Deals
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Good for you mate! Some people may not see it as much but it is something. And as you said, it was money you got without breaking a sweat. I hope it only gets better for you.
Gerri´s last blog post..Buy and Sell on Twitter With Tweba
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Clement Nyirenda says:
February 1st, 2009 at 12:31 am
@Gerri:Good to see you here again. Blogging is becoming more and more exciting. Wow!
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Yes it does pay. The higher the page rank the more you get. I have paid for at least all my hosting and blogging expenses through google adsense.
Keep up the good work.
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Clement Nyirenda says:
February 1st, 2009 at 12:31 am
@editor: I am seeing exactly the same pattern here. From now onwards, my blog will be paying for itself and even make some more money for me.
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Good for you mate! Some people may not see it as much but it is something. And as you said, it was money you got without breaking a sweat. I hope it only gets better for you.
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I guess the reason for making easy Adsense money may be because of your blog is not a money making oriented blog.:)
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ive beeen trying to break my back on this adsense thing, what iam noting is that its not even about the traffic butthe pagerank thing! which i find particurlarly disturbing!
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Clement Nyirenda says:
February 1st, 2009 at 12:30 am
@Nairobian: From what I see, if you have a high PageRank, your posts will rank higher in SERPs. As a result, you will get a good amount of organic traffic. It is this kind of traffic which will increase the clicks on your adsense ads while traffic from sites like Digg, Stumbleupon etc does not increase adsense click rate.
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Hello,
It does pay between 59-65%
but I cant think as I have seen some keywords prize around $10 and when someone clicks on the same keyword targeting ads it pays $1 or less…
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Clement Nyirenda says:
February 1st, 2009 at 12:27 am
@MarbleHost: Do you mean to say that Google gets 35%-41% and the other part goes to the blogger/site owner? On my blog, as I have already said I do not do any keyword targetting. I wish I had time for that.
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Revenue for adsense is not as much as people expect.Getting adverts from affiliate networks is actually better.How long on average does it take to earn us$100.Very few bloggers get us$100 per year.
It is good for you if you are satisfied.
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Clement Nyirenda says:
February 1st, 2009 at 12:23 am
@JOHNK: I agree with you totally. I am now going to launch some adverts from affiliate networks. Looks like this blog has a huge potential.
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Adsense is a great program, whether your site is for making money, or if its just a small hobby. It can still bring in a few extra bucks no matter what. And since it’s great at targeting ads, it’s pretty easy to get a quick buck from it.
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Yeah….it pays…….but the main difficulties arrive when Google mail you as a regular mail….I have followed in many cases the PIN arrived just 2-3 days before deadline….so don’t be afraid if you haven’t received your mail yet….it will come just 2/3 days before…..the same thing happened to me too…..but now I am earning well with AdSense.
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Google Adsense certainly does pay and allows one to focus on blogging and other aspects just like you have done.
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I have used bidvertiser in the past although I have been told that Google Adsense was just as good if not better. Thanks for the info. I will be visiting a lot more in the future.
Grog´s last blog post..Global Population Growth
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Adsense is a great program and from what I’ve read around the forums, it’s how you use it that either succeeds or fails.
As far as PR goes, I always thought that it was the click $ amount that the advertiser was paying that determined the amount we get from a visitor who clicks on our ads.
Perhaps someone can chime in with more info on this, is it really PR?
Tony
Tony Lee´s last blog post..1911 INDIAN HEAD GOLD EAGLE COINS
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Clement Nyirenda says:
February 6th, 2009 at 3:14 am
@Tony:My observation is that as your PR goes up, your site begins to receive more organic traffic from Google. This kind of traffic naturally leads to more clicks on your Adsense ads and even purchases or sign ups for some of the services being advertised.
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Of coz they do pay! Its google you know..
Ben Pei´s last blog post..Top 10 Facebook Games Of The Year
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MAn I was kicked out of adsense . I can really feel the pain cz I am a newbie
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Clement Nyirenda says:
February 6th, 2009 at 4:23 am
@Viraj Sawant: What offence did you commit? Were you clicking ads on your own site?
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Hello Clement,
Thanks for the quick reply.
In addition to PR qualities and adsense results, let me share an experiment I did with adsense over a 2 month period. I’ll try to keep it brief:
The goal here was to determine how much value google gave my pages that contained my adsense ads based on webmaster tools stats and monitoring page stats with:
site:mydomain.com
and
site:mydomain.com/* <- Displays pages NOT sandboxed
Here is a short list of what I found:
-Use only ONE ad per page. (Once I added two or more ads, I noticed a decline in $ per click and an overall decrease in adsense income.)
-Ensure your content is unique content, and a minimum of 250 words that cover ONLY that subject matter that the page or post is about. I purposely created 3 different types to test this out, using the same subject on each page. Unique, scraped (with some revisions) and a poorly written page. Obviously, the unique page outperformed the others, but the real kicker was that the bad pages dropped from search results, and reappeared when I removed the ads!
-Blend (color) your ad into your page and bury them deep within the text. Again, my pages with this configuration stayed in search results.
The bottom line is, google seems to de-value a page that it feels unworthy of its ad, so be careful when laying out your page.
Perhaps Clement, this would be an indicator or proof that PR has a connection here.
Anyone else have any “experiment” stories they would like to share? I’d love to hear them!
Tony
Tony Lee´s last blog post..1911 INDIAN HEAD GOLD EAGLE COINS
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Clement Nyirenda says:
February 7th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
@Tony:Wow!This is news to me. I have never ever thought of Adsense, PR and SERPs being connected in this way. But I am sure Google can do such things. Is there anyone else with similar “experiment” stories.
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Congratulations! It’s good when such transfers could pay the bills for hosting and so on…
Webkinz´s last blog post..Webkinz Jr. Releases by Ganz
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Adsense is really a great source of income. 90% of income of my blogs are from adsense.
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Hello Clement,
This is something that each webmaster using adsense should be aware of, at least from what I can see.
Remember, although Google is a search engine, their main push is to advertise and make money with ads. Since they also serve as a search engine, they also (I believe) set page rank to website pages that display their ads, hence the poorly written pages vs. quality pages that dropped in and out of my search results.
In a sense, “G” scrutinizes a page more that display their ads, than they would a page that doesn’t. If they feel a certain page lacks quality, content and relevance, they either sandbox it or give less authority in the rankings. We all know that the googlebot is NOT the bot that scans your sight searching for this info, rather it is the adbot. Whether they work together or solo, I’m not sure, but the appearance of the adbot was one more item
that I observed during these two months.
One more short note:
As I mentioned before, the site:mydomain.com verses the site:mydomain.com/* syntax.
If you recall a few years back “G” had a “tag” that they would display when a site owner
typed in the syntax: site:mydomain.com. The word “supplemental” would appear on page listings that “G” felt were not worthy of their main index library. (Today we call that “sandboxed”) Then suddenly, without notice they dropped the tag. Now webmasters had no way of knowing what were their “actual” indexed pages or sandboxed pages.
In comes a guy (or guys) much smarter than I, to create a syntax to release not only indexed pages, but supplemental as well. Many variations were invented, but lasted only a few days or weeks. The tag /* at the end still works today.
Those of you wanting to create your own experiment with your ads can use that as a guide to track your pages in “G’s” inventory.
Hope that helps,
Tony
Tony Lee´s last blog post..GARMIN ZUMO 550 MOTORCYCLE GPS RECEIVER
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Er, meant to say “scans your site” not “scans your sight”.
Darn MS word spell checker! LOL
Tony
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Hey man, it is great to listen that you have earned some amount of money without going after it. But I think you should use some basic search engine optimization techniques and join some affiliate programs to earn something more. you posted 209 articles, that means your blog is content rich. So, you are definitely going to earn far more than you earned till now.
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I still trying to get revenue from adsense
Rozi´s last blog post..Teknik Rahsia tambah traffic – “Gunakan Smiley sebagai link”
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Well, I’m not so lucky with adsense. 3 years ago I was making a living with adsense but these days… I had to remove adsense from all my sites because my earnings went down down down. I make money with my websites selling my own banner spots
Jimmy´s last blog post..Save Money With Discount Codes
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hi, ive just discovered PayingPost blog network
Nairobian Perspective´s last blog post..Direct TV Satellite Packages
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Clement Nyirenda says:
February 19th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
@Nairobian: I will test it in the coming days.
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Good for you! Free money is always good. Sometimes there is such a thing as a free lunch…
pete´s last blog post..How to find and delete duplicate files
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Adsense is a great method to start making money online, but it does take diligence and continually getting new content out there.
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I agree Josh,
Most folks new to website building assume that just launching a site will bring results. Very few succeed without doing any research on what works and what doesn’t. I’ve gotten many tips and learned much just visiting forums, affiliate sites and internet marketing advice websites.
As far as adsense goes, I’ve found that experimenting with different styles and layouts will result in better adsense income. The individual website owner must find the best style that works best for him or her.
Tony Lee´s last blog post..Ben Hogan Headcovers
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Clement Nyirenda says:
February 19th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
@Tony and @Josh: Many people who launch new sites think that they will start making huge monies instantly. When that does not happen, they shut down their sites prematurely. But as you point out, there is a lot to learn online before you can start to make huge monies. As the saying goes, Rome was not built in one day.
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It pays and it pays a lot, but you have to optimize your blog to have decent income. It’s more than likely that you’re smart-priced.
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Hi Clement,
Yes Sir, effort=success.
As a starter and for those who are using adsense for the first time, I recommend visiting other sites to gather ideas regarding placement and layout schemes.
Some things to look for are layouts that catch your eye. Check to see if their ad placement complements the site and ask your self, “do their ads entice me to click on them?” How does their formating effect my chance of clicking on the ad?
Relevancy is key. Placing your ad inside or around text with keywords that “spark” your ad will increase that greatly.
Here is a cool tool that has many uses:
http://www.colorsontheweb.com/thecolorwizard.asp.
(Note the adsense ad the webmaster use just above the color wheel.) This is handy to use when your color matching or blending anything on your site.
Many others ideas will come to adsense users as they practice and learn, I guess you might say, the “Art” of adsense!
Tony Lee´s last blog post..How to Spot a Fake Coach Handbag
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$109 isn’t that much for a month income. I think that proper optimizing would increase that amount significantly. You have quite nice traffic according to alexa so your income should be about 300-400 dollars a month.
Maybe it’s not much in Japan but in my country it’s quite a lot.
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Anything you make is more then if you didn’t monetize your site.
The Blogger Source´s last blog post..What Time Should You Post?
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109 dollars is not much. At least not if you look on the work involved for managing a blog. But still it is bettern then nothing.
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adsense on my blog also covers my site expenses and for that I am happy and all I have is a badly placed 468×60 banner
Jamaipanese´s last blog post..Chicken Foot Soup
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I think it is great that Google have made this opportunity to to make a small profit when we spend hours and hoiurs writing free articles for our readers. My experience is just like yours: it actually pays
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From what I know , people aiming at making money from adsense are actually doing great. I’ve seen people making 10-12 sites using the same adsense code and actually prosper.Once I even saw a 101 sites using the same adsense code $$$
I’ve read somewhere that if you work hard enough, you might get to around $100k a year from adsense alone.By the way the Click rate for google ads is 4% only so you need lots of traffic to make enough.
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The right placement of the ads is very important, and that can be done without so much effort. I find that a placement on top, center, just over the main content, is the best position.
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Yes adsense does pays.
It took me 8 months to reach my threshold and my first cheque is on the way .
I love adsense !
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Clement Nyirenda says:
February 28th, 2009 at 9:31 am
@Steve: Congratulations!
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I have made about US $ 5 after about 5000 pageviews. Is that low, high or normal. I don’t really run after keywords but how do I find the higher priced ones?
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Clement Nyirenda says:
March 7th, 2009 at 10:54 am
@Jhangora: I make far more than that for the same page views without running after any keywords.
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and u wrote in ur blogpost that u don’t optimize adsense for ur blog either. Initially I thought it won’t be a good idea to put ads and even now I havn’t put adsense in prominent places. I’ve heard afilliate ads help u earn more.
Well right now I just want to better my google page rank, technorati blog rank and alexa traffic rank. Monetization will follow.
Jhangora´s last blog post..Tata Nano To Launch On 23rd March 2009
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There are lots of monetization methods for blogs, adsense is just one of them, you can also sell banner advertising spots, affiliate links, sell ebooks, etc
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Oops sorry , Not read your comment policy .So posting my comment again :-
Congrats for your adsense payment But I am sure that you have heard of adbrite . I used it on one of my blogs and it earns more than google with minimum payout of $5 .feel free to check it
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I just received my first adsense cheque worth 104 $ today !
roughs0ul´s last blog post..Square Halo Engagement Ring
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Hi,
I agree completely about adsense working better when you DON’T try to make money from it. I know a few marketers who’ve trid adsense to make money, and the only ones who succeed are those doing what YOU’RE doing – writing a blog which you hope people will READ, not just click thru.
I think Google should DOUBLE your adsense earnings because you write a blog on an ethical subject
)
Zander
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thats good earnings and you can increase it by using affiliate programs which make you earn more and more .
Mohammed´s last blog post..know what is blackhat SEO ( black hat SEO ) so your website don’t get banned from search engines
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Keep up the good work. I only use Adsense as ‘extra income’ but people who really make a lot of money usually have to blog for a year or two and build up a lot of readers. Keep at it!
Altesino´s last blog post..DoFollow Search Engine Reviews
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If it brings an extra 109 in a month, why not have it?
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I completely agree with you that you are not running your blog just to make money like others, the blog is 100% free for people, adsense payment is also very less and you are doing your hard work by writing use full posts.
The money you have got from Google Adsense takes it as your hosting cost of blog and the fee you have paid for you domain. I am running my other web site that provides completely free training for Microsoft Excel, I have implemented adsense on it and trust me I have got my first hundred dollars after eight months but that was more then enough to cover the one year hosting cost and domain renewal fee.
Although I am providing a free training to individuals but why should I bear these costs out of my pocket when I have Adsense to pay these on my behalf.
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Google adsense does quite well if you have a decent trafficked site, with quality content. And of COURSE it pays, advertisers pay YOU to place their ads on your site because it helps the advertisers expand their advertising space. Adsense ads display based on the theme of the webpage, so this increases the relevancy of the advertisers ad, and in return, they pay you for their exposure. This is is a model that has worked for both Google and advertisers alike since inception.
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I think people can make more using other systems but Adsense is easy to add to a site and can be the nice ‘bonus’ income. I sprinkle it in my sites and usually get a $100 check every 3 months.
Tim´s last blog post..Is Mortgage Refinancing for You?
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Very nice! $109 is a lot to me. I think it’s really cool that you don’t even care about making money off adsense. I would like to make some money off my ads if I could, because I need the money.
I think it’s great that your site is increasing in popularity. If any site deserves it, it’s this one.
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If you want to make more I’d suggest using a larger block ad in your posts. The one you currently use doesn’t do as well in CTR.
Altesino´s last blog post..Commenthunt review
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That’s great man, I hope it will continue to improve. Party time I believe!
Thanks for sharing. Hope the best for you.
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Congratulations on your first bank transfer. Adsense is a nice way to get repaid for your efforts. It won’t change your life, but at least you can get a free movie or a nice dinner in return.
- Glenn
.-= Glenn Torres´s last blog ..Mortgage – Definition =-.
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Clement Nyirenda says:
July 1st, 2009 at 1:00 pm
@Glenn: I am loving it. The next payment is due not long from now. Looks like as my blog gets older, my monthly adsense income increases correspondingly.
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Clement I’m glad to hear to your earnings are starting to increase. But the main reasons your income is low is that this isn’t a money making blog. Posts have to be keyword targeted to make any real money with Adsense.
Also you need mostly search engine traffic. Most social traffic, like other bloggers for example, don’t click adds so even a million hits won’t help if your goal is to make money.
You should really check out how to make money online for beginners if you want to really learn how to make money online.
Don’t be thrown off by his ugly blog, the guy actually knows what he’s talking about and makes a killing from adsense. I think he mentioned that at one point that blog made over $100 a day in just Adsense. He’s went with affiliate products now though and I assume that’s making him even more. Digging through Grizz’s (that’s what he goes by) posts can be a little rough since they aren’t really organized.
Another guy that really knows his stuff is Court at the keyword academy He has a whole set of videos that walk you through how to optimize your blog for search engines and adsense.
Just reading those two guys has helped me personally a ton. I just started actively trying to make money online two months ago and I’ve already qualified for Adsense payments twice.
.-= Matt Balthis´s last blog ..Infobarrel – Why You Should Be Using It =-.
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Google adsense is still the best. Although my income doesn’t come only from GA. But I like it. Congratulation. It won’t make you rich, but can give you satisfaction as a blogger.
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One of the biggest mistakes that people make is to rely solely on Google Adsense.
Google adsense pays and it can be used to monetize people who are leaving the site anyway.
So the bottomline is to use Google adsense as an additional income stream, not the primary one.
Jake
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I think if you play around with the placements and colors you can make even more. You can also try private ad sales.
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Thanks for this heartening post. I’ll also wait for my first cheque from Google. I recently read that adsense can pay as high as $50 per click for some keywords. What’s the highest cpc you’ve received?
.-= Gouri´s last blog ..Proverbs =-.
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