Stall The Ball

I was going to post a comment here about some issues Tom Raftery has raised including money generated from free ring tone sites, privacy, and training courses on blogging. But to be honest your better of taking a wander over there and just reading them.

The monetising your site thread on Blacknights/ Michele’s forum is interesting. Until now I had always assumed that people making serious money on adsense were of two types.

The web spammer type, you know the ones, Google search links to the site and when you get there it’s just a bunch of links to other sites. The serious full time multiple sites guy who did this as a full time job.

Follow up:

But from reading through that thread and a bit of research there seems to be a lot of people making some nice money on the side by either doodling, getting lucky with picking a niche topic or some combination of the above with a little elbow grease.

By nice money I’m not talking about retiring from your day job or anything but if you were earning 20 Euro a day from a site that’s 600 per month. That’s a bit more than beer money, indeed you could use it to finance a nice holiday twice a year, trade in your car every year etc.

And apparently 20 Euro a day isn’t beyond the realms of most ordinary people. From a little bit of research/guessing/estimation it appears that 20 Euro a day requires between 500 and 2000 visitors a day. That might seem a lot but it’s not exactly unimaginable. I even go so far as to say it’s a pretty good target to aim for.

The key seems to be

Beyond these basic steps there is a world of optimising tips, articles and snake oil merchants. My gut feeling is that once you advance to the stage of carefully crafting each and every page to be exactly right for Google and searches you are rapidly entering the arena of diminishing returns and might somewhere along the line forget who the site is designed for, humans.