SEM/SEO

I remember when I started doing Adsense on my blogs, I was always waiting when I will get my next payout, and just improved on my sites and when it started performing better, not I am waiting when I will break the 3-digit payout and hopefully get 4-digits, and maybe when I get there, I will start thinking how to reach 5-digits. I just received my 3-digit payout in the bank and for the year 2006, January and December have a large difference as I have seen my earnings grow, as well as the traffic and popularity of my blogs and other websites. And the most productive months I had this year in Adsense were:

1. November
2. December
3. May

November and December were the highest earning months I had since I have finished several news sites starting November that became pretty popular with the help of social media optimization. May was high, and after May, the earnings drop as I decided to stop the site that was a high earner in May since I believe it may be considered a site that may be breaking some of the Google guidelines and I might need to modify it and improve it first to avoid from getting banned for invalid clicks.

But this is what I noticed after taking a good look at my channels. Since November and December were my highest paying months I combined them into one report and this is what I saw. Here is a partial view of what it was like:

• Tech Blog: 7,287 impression, 288 clicks with a 3.95% CTR. Page eCPM of $4.73 and I earn $34.47.
• Celebrity Site: 45,512 impressions, 424 clicks with a 0.93% CTR. Page eCPM of $0.66 and I earn $29.83.
• Business Blog: 701 impressions, 23 clicks with a 3.28% CTR. Page eCPM of $15.17 and I earn $10.63.
• Personal Blog: 1,849 impressions, 41 clicks with a 2.22% CTR. Page eCPM of $4.32 and I earn $7.98
• SEO/SEM Blog: 734 impressions, 1 click with a 0.13% CTR. Page eCPM of $0.84 and I earn $0.22

And I am not going to mention the rest of the long list. But what I want to point out here are these:

You can see based on the Page eCPM, the Business Blog seems to be a good paying blog. The CPC advertisers pay of this blog seems to be better. Now is this telling me that I should work harder on making this site more popular that the rest of my other websites?

Comparing the Tech Blog and the Celebrity Site, they have a difference of about $5 bucks. The Tech Blog, I blog often, I think of good topics, I promote the site, and I work on it to make it better. The Celebrity Site, I am basically doing nothing. After I launched the site in the first week of November and fixed a few bugs, that was it and I pretty much do not touch the site that much. I have no latest news to update. It is just there. The Tech Blog also pays better, it took only 288 clicks while the Celebrity site took 424 clicks and is still lower than the Tech Blog’s earnings. Does this mean I need to concentrate more on the Tech Blog?

Take a look at them all, the Celebrity Site was able to make 45,512 impressions which is far from all the other sites I mentioned. But the MFA website, people know it is a useless site already and will simply hit the back button or close the browser. All of us don’t want to be annoyed by useless sites.

And one last thing… take a look at my SEO/SEM blog, only 1 click. Hahaha. Well that do I expect? The visitors obviously know what an ad is, and since most ads are about SEO/SEM also, they are pretty much knowledgeable already about SEO and SEM and does not need to click on whatever is advertised.

Even if the subject of my post is Target Market For Adsense, I want to make it clear, it is not right just to make a website mainly for Adsense targeting a certain market. When you make a site, it’s purpose should be something else. Adsense is just an add-on to whatever extra money you can make on the website. If your main focus is Adsense earnings, you tend to think of ways just to get those clicks in, and often this results to invalid clicks and it becomes bye bye Adsense once Google sends you an email when it’s over. My blog post has this title mainly because I am observing the various target markets I have on my websites, and which has the better click conversions based on the amount of work I put into it.

Now do not ask me what these sites are since I won’t tell you them but I am sure close friends already know what sites they are. And don’t ask me what other sites I have that I did not mention, and if you know these other sites, do not talk about it in the comments, I will not approve it. *LOL* I just want my earnings to be private.

Are you confused when you will get paid by Google Adsense? Let me try to explain it in my best possible way in my own words:

• Minimum payout is $100 (can be adjusted to be higher), if you do not have $100 yet, then you have to wait until you accumulate $100.
• Once you reach $100 or higher for that month, you don’t get paid right away the next month. But your earnings are finalized in the first week of the following month. You have the option to change your payment options up to the 15th. On the last day of the month, the payment details should be posted already.
• 5th day of the second month, you receive they payment by eFT. Secure express delivery checks are sent on the end of the 1st month too, so by this day, you should also have the secured express delivery checks by this time.
• If you chose to receive your checks by standard delivery, expect it by the 25th of the second month.

If you believe everything I have explained was confusing, then just go to the new Google Adsense payment schedule demo. For more questions, don’t ask me. *LOL* Ask Google. If you have no idea what Google Adsense is, then go to the Google Adsense website.

This is not a new topic at all and has been mentioned many times in the past on Digital Point and Webmaster World. But people still do not know about it. Or simply sign up on Google Adsense without reading the TOS well. But one of the policies is you cannot place Google Adsense with another contextual type of ads. Contextual ads are ads that actually read your page, getting an idea of the contents of our website, and delivering relevant ads to you webpage, giving better conversions for the advertisers and better earnings for the publishers.

Although you can use Google with other advertising systems, you cannot use with another contextual type of advertising. Thus YPN cannot be placed together on a single page. And yet some people still sign up and don’t read the rules and just post stuff online making MFAs that do not last long. Here is a website displaying both Google Adsense and YPN ads at the same time. If ever they changed it already, below is a screenshot on their page. The Yahoo ads are on the left, while the Google ads are on the right and within the content as well, this site is clearly against the Google Adsense terms of service.