As some may recall, I am running a case study to see if a personal blog can make money with Google AdSense. Here are the results so far. For the month of September, the blog made $352.94 from Google AdSense ads. However, you have to keep in mind that the ads were not turn on until September 17th, so these results represent only 13 days. That works out to $27.15 per day, which isn’t too bad. It won’t allow you to quit your job but it is a pretty decent part time income. There are a few things to note however.
The first thing is ad placements weren’t fully tweaked last month. I was still fooling around with different ad sizes, positioning, blending, etc. The key to AdSense success is to keep tweaking until you get it right. Sometimes the tweaks can step over the line. This email from Google put the brakes on my super blending AdSense trick. Right now, the current AdSense placement is to have a 468 at the top of the post, another 468 at the bottom of the post, and a 300 box inline with the blog content.
The best performing ad unit is the 300 box, follow by the 468 top then the 468 bottom. Percentage wise, the 300 box gets twice as many clicks as the 468 banners. This is not surprising since it’s the biggest ad and it’s embedded right into the blog post itself. I would like to know how you feel about this. Do you find the ad too intrusive? Does it turn you away from the blog? Feedback on my ad placement would be welcome.
The Digg factor didn’t have that much of an impact on blog revenues at first. However, by the time the 5th and 6th Diggs came along, I had managed to tweak the placements of the ads to the point where it made almost $100 on its biggest traffic day. I am very confident that the blog can make money on a Digg now.
So far, Google is the only monetization method used on the blog. Adding other revenue streams like text link ads, affiliate deals and Vibrant Media can easily double blog income. However, for this month I will just run the Google ads and nothing else.
I have decided to donate the income from the blog to my church and other charities. John Chow dot Com is my personal blog and making a profit from it just seems strange to me. Please note, I am not downing anyone who makes money off his or her personal blog – I think that is great.