The Adsense Roller Coaster
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
It’s been a while since I made a blog post, and I apologize for that! The fact is, I got a little lazy with my adsense empire this month (and my profits plunged – more on that in a minute!). But from now on I plan on posting every day, or as near to daily as I can manage.
It’s the end of September, and I’ll be posting the month’s numbers tomorrow after they finalize. The numbers were WAY up, and WAY down this month. Let me explain.
I didn’t add any sites to my empire this month, I’m still at 300 sites. But the very first 100 sites that I built (.com sites) all completely nose-dived this month. Combined they pulled in an average of about $20 per day…but that’s deceptive…they started out pulling about $40 per day and slowly dropped, each day, till the end of the month when they were bringing in about $2-5 per day.
YIKES!
I knew this would happen, because when you build a website, it tends to get a bump at Google, followed by a couple months of fluctuations, before finally either settling into the sandbox, or dropping towards the bottom end of the index. So for the first 2-3 months you’re golden…then often fall into Google purgatory. And those initial 100 sites were built around 2-3 months ago, so….this was bound to happen.
But it still hurts!
The solution to this is simple. You have to constantly build new sites…like clockwork…every day. That way you always have sites in that 2-3 month GOLDEN period and you aren’t hurt as badly by the inevitable downturns.
But it wasn’t all doom and gloom…well not completely…
My 200 .info sites started out strong and got stronger and stronger during the month….until 2 days ago. Those sites started the month pulling in about $60 a day, then crept up to $100/day a week later, then up to $130/day a week later, then down to $120/day a week later, then disaster struck out of nowhere…
2 days ago, for no identifiable reason, they plummeted to around $30/day and have been sitting there for the last 2-3 days. DISASTER!!
What happened??
Not only did traffic shrink across the board, but cost per click dropped from around .50 cents per click to around .25 cents per click!
You sort of expect cost per clicks to drop at the end of the month because many businesses budget their advertising on a monthly basis…towards the end of the month, many companies have used up their ad budget for that month…and prices drop. But they don’t usually drop by HALF!
So something happened here….it’s also the end of the quarter. And Google always seems to screw around at the end of quarters. I have theories about this, but none I will share in polite company. After all, you don’t want to bite the hand that feeds you…in public at least.
So…am I worried?
Not at all. Why not? For two reasons…
First, when you add up the totals, I actually made more money this month than last month, even with the drop at the end of the month. Second, because this is simply the nature of the beast. Fluctuations are the norm. It’s part of the game.
These sites may never recover and I don’t care…why? Because I’ve already made close to $12,000 on these 300 sites in the last few months. And they cost me less than $1,000 to build. That’s an INCREDIBLE return on investment.
And some of these sites (heck, MANY of these sites) will probably come back and earn more in the future once they stop dancing around in the Google index.
So I’ll keep smiling, and keep building more sites.
I’ll admit, I took it easy this month. I didn’t build a single website…and THAT will come back to bite me in the ass more than anything.
I visited some friends down state, traveled to an old college friends wedding, and enjoyed the last bit of summer when I should have been working…but sometimes you just need to do that.
And that’s why this lifestyle is so amazing, because it gives you the freedom to choose how much or how little you want to work. And even though I didn’t do much real work this month, I still made more money than the previous 3 months. You can’t complain about that!
But as October begins, I plan on building out 400-800 of those new domains I bought over labor day. It’s time to get back to work!
I’m building a bot that will build those sites automatically for me….but more on that later!
Keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
Edit Update: It’s been confirmed that Google rolled out the newest update to their algorithm, Panda 2.5, at exactly the same time that my traffic plummeted at the end of September. So it looks like this wasn’t a normal sandbox dance, but my sites all being penalized by the new algorithm. More on this soon….
