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I haven’t written for a while because I’ve been dividing my time between a number of “money making” blogs which, annoyingly, really weren’t making all that much money. Like a rat chasing that ever elusive moving piece of cheese in the maze, I was starting up new blogs based on whatever the hell caught my fancy at the time. I’d buy three or four domain names, pick one I liked, design some graphics, install Wordpress, write a few posts, slap some Google Adsense ads on them and wait for the truck load of money to pull up to my house.
My Retirement Plan…sucks.
Except it didn’t really work that way.
I simply ended up with a bunch of blogs and not enough time to write or promote any of them properly. For a few of the sites (like this one) I would have a lot of people visit the site but almost no one have any interest in the ads. With no one clicking on ads I ended being branded with a “low click through rate” which sounds like some sort of medical condition a robot might have when it needs Viagra.
When you suffer from a low click through rate Google ends up giving all your websites crappy paying ads and you end up with… yes… just about nothing in revenue. Google calls it “smart pricing” but I call it “smack pricing” because it’s pretty much a slap to your adsense account for a while. Google figures your content is crap, so your ads should be, too. In reality it’s a pretty effective way to stop spammers from putting up crappy sites just for making a quick buck. It doesn’t stop them, but it’s a good start. In addition to my low click through rate Google also went ahead and slammed a few of my blogs for not having regular posts or links and ended up squelching the Pagerank on a few of them. Low Pagerank generally means less traffic and, you guessed it, less money from ads.
So I wasn’t really creating spammy blogs, I was just lazy and unfocused, which is pretty much the story of my life.
To remedy that I’m going to start taking Speed.
Kidding!
I would never take Speed. I’m much more of a crack cocaine kind of guy. At any rate I’ve made the decision to shut down a couple of my wackier blogs and concentrate on the few that are more fun to write for and even have a chance of making me some cash at some point.
Yes, I’m keeping this one up for the moment because it is, believe it or not, one of my less wacky blogs. I’ll even, you know… write some more. Maybe. I’ve taken down most of the ads that I know exist and I even upgraded Wordpress (which I had avoided doing for about… oh… a year). I’ve also been futzing around with the theme and generally trying to get back into the “fun” part of blogging instead of just the cold, heartless money-making side of it. I ask for your patience while I play around and continue to find things that work and don’t work. I noticed the Blogroll is totally toasted and this theme still has some odd issues with the sidebars that I’ve never been able to figure out.
Now that I have the new version of Wordpress I can actually use some of the neat features like tag clouds and other plugins that I couldn’t use before. Of course, to use a tag cloud means that I’d have to go back and tag all 100+ previous entries.
And you know I’m too lazy to do that.
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5 Responses to “Google Smackdown”
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Caveman says:
I’m glad you’ll be sticking around for a while. Wouldn’t be the same without ya.
I also removed all the ads. “Ad cents” was crap on my blog too. I’ve tried various affiliate networks and I’ve come to the conclusion that my blog is not fit for any advertising at the moment.
To be honest, not worrying about ads anymore has made me a more happier guy.
I wonder if removing adsense caused my pagerank to drop to zero too. Bastards.
-Caveman
January 23rd, 2008 at 11:39 am -
Tom Coffee says:
Thanks… Did you ever use any pay-per-post ads? Googles hates those, too, because it’s essentially selling links to increase PageRank…
Fun!
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Greg says:
Once I hit the four figures by blogging, I swear, Tom, I’ll leave my job! But, realistically, does it really happen, I mean, do bloggers really earn that much to not wait for that retirement age?
Indeed, like a rat chasing that elusive cheese…hey, glad you’re there, you make it more fun.
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Robin says:
I love reading your stories, I didn’t think other parents noticed the same things or thought about them in the same manner. Barney the Dinosaur was my horror story. I wouldn’t have minded him so much if he could have had his lyricist also figure out different tunes. He always ripped off old nursery rhymes! Please don’t give it up you always bring a smile to my face. Thanks magic bean man your my hero.
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Lionel says:
Hi Tom, I hear you on the AdSense blues. You have a quality blog though, it’ll just be a matter of time. I’ll put a post on a forum signature to get you some traffic too.
I’m looking at this post and all I see for revenue is the search bar down below? If you had something good that matched the colors of your page for ads, and it was high up on the page, out of habit I’m pretty sure I’d get distracted from one of your posts sometime and check out a deal.
SellingPPP.com has 5-second ads for commercials and you get paid per page serve, so you don’t have to make amazing posts and then just sit and suffer as traffic washes over and past you.
Would you consider smacking people around with some 336×280 ads? Or link units?
John Chow has a lot of Google alternatives too in one post called “How I make money”.
I’m not trying to spam with these guys, I just feel awful because you’ve got some quality posts and shouldn’t be in the same boat as me. Problogger.net has a book out too for $24.99 or so but I bet you could get it off Amazon for a lot less. I read it, took extensive notes, and I’m putting my blogs together for an overhaul.
Also are you on Facebook? Compared to FB MySpace is a lobotomy experiment. The apps are what counts for getting the word out and it’s nice to finally have a social networking platform that works with Twitter, eBay, link posting. At first I thought “this is worse than MySpace”. Then I added a few apps and I had a blast.
(If you agree FB helps you, I’d accept a spot in my mob on Mob Wars as thanks…
)Anyway best wishes and good luck.
Lionel Houde