Finally made the $100 mark in my Google AdSense account!

[Frenchiexno1]

Big news for me today, after getting in to domaineering in November last year I have finally hit the $100 mark in my google adsense account and am now awaiting the first cheque through the post!

Must say it has been a lot harder than I though, but seems like the hard work has started to pay off and this month I hit nearly $40.....

Anyway other than showing off I wanted to see if anyone here can remembr hitting the $100 mark themselves - its so nice to be getting something back, and whether it gets any easier after the first milestone......

Frenchie

 

[Rob J]

Congrats. It can take a lot of patience to build natural traffic and monetize web sites. It seems like it takes eons to get a new site indexed and get quality backlinks and steady traffic, but the nice part is after the initial work of development and promotion, you can sit back and collect the checks for years to come, and those checks will keep getting bigger as your sites age and collect more backlinks.

If you want to jump start your sites, take the Adsense money you make every day and put it all back into Adwords for a few months.

 

[irishmat]

If you want to jump start your sites, take the Adsense money you make every day and put it all back into Adwords for a few months.

that is insustainable at best, reinvest in other long term strategies such as link building, learning seo, content etc

 

[Rob J]

that is insustainable at best, reinvest in other long term strategies such as link building, learning seo, content etc

It's not meant to be sustainable, it's meant to get bookmarks & backlinks.

 

[Frenchiexno1]

Ok so explain to me what the benefit of adwords would be? I get bookmarks and backlinks?

I have used Adwords before and I thought that I would pay for my adverts on search and people would come to my sites and that would be it. Some may then further click on some of my links and I could recoup some money, however as irishmat says this is unsustainable. What benefit would I get???

Really interested to here Scabies....

 

[Rob J]

I guess it depends on the type of site. I'll give you an example, I have a site that has discographies, lyrics, album art, photos etc for metal bands. I could wait years for links and pagerank to develop naturally, but I pumped some $$$ into adwords to speed up the process. The result was I got several hundred backlinks, I got people hotlinking photos and album art with my url watermarked on them, and certainly some bookmarks. So no, the site didn't make me any money during this period it lost money, it wasn't supposed to be profitable or a sustainable strategy it's intended to get links out there.

Maybe that type of strategy won't work for some types of sites, but i've recently been focusing on celebrity and music type sites and it's working well, there are alot of people who want to hotlink Britney Spears pics on their myspace page, so Adwords just gets them to my sites.

 

[Varon]

Really awesome! As far as using adwords to drive traffic to your adsense sites... it might not be a great idea. Google will soon start smart pricing you and leave you with very less options. Building strong related backlinks...is a better investment. Its a long term sensible investment. But the best investment would be to spend some time each day writing some new articles and adding fresh content to your site. Once you write an article, you should also submit it to the various article directories and your backlinks will come in automatically. Plus, your original content will get you higher SERP's and a likely good page rank.

Adwords cannot provide you backlinks as these are advertisements and not permanent links. Visitors brought to your site using adwords may bookmark you. But for them to do that, you need to have unique content on your site which is updated frequently to make them want to come back again.

Write a keyword rich article each week and submit it to article directories. Once you have around 75-100 pages of original article content on your site, you should see a steady flow of visitors from various SE's. Also make sure to submit your site to as many SE's as possible. Once you see your site surge in popularity try to add additional streams of revenue like;
1. Selling backlinks to other related websites (once your site has a page rank)
2. Selling adspace to your site related KW advertisers ( for example, you can see a top banner ad here on the forum for hosting solutions)
3. Using affiliate sales in conjunction with adsense

These should help you get better, sustainable, long term revenue numbers. Also, all along, try to build a brand name...a good example would be esurance.com. Once you build popularity, you should also focus on brandability. Having a great domain name is a must! This helps in case of a future sale of your website. I mean you don't want to create a popular site thats called best-vacations-in-vegas.com. This site might get visitors et all, but will fail to build an easily identifiable brand name. YOu would rather have a website name that reads 100Miles.com...a nice brandable name.

 

[irishmat]

gaining backlinks from from spending on adwords is just an indirect benefit and not guarantee in any way

surely you would be far better to spend the money (as adwords can be very expensive) on a bit of directories submission, social bookmarking, links from related sites

this will do more for your backlinks count and the traffic from it will gain the indirect backlinks that you are talking about like from hotlinking images

imo adwords works best when selling a product otherwise there are better ways of doing things

 

[Traveler]

Congrats on making the $100 mark!!! That is the first big step

 

[johname]

Getting in domains in November and getting to the $100 mark in April is a very good acomlishment. The big goal now is to get the check every month. Goodluck Frenchie

 

[nu-money]

Well done Frenchie :tu:

 

[mrizos]

Read all Varons posts and take his advice. I did 1 year ago this week and now my blog is pulling in 200+ a month...not a ton, but helps with gas these days :hehe:

 

[ameRie]

Big news for me today, after getting in to domaineering in November last year I have finally hit the $100 mark in my google adsense account and am now awaiting the first cheque through the post!

Must say it has been a lot harder than I though, but seems like the hard work has started to pay off and this month I hit nearly $40.....

Anyway other than showing off I wanted to see if anyone here can remembr hitting the $100 mark themselves - its so nice to be getting something back, and whether it gets any easier after the first milestone......

Frenchie

Congratulations! You deserved it after the hard work and all those stuff you have made.

 

[netmeg]

I haven't really put AdSense on any of my parked domains, but when I first put it on my fireworks site, I was amazed that after the first month, I'd made $3. It took me months and months to make that first $100 (but of course, my site is seasonal anyway). Over the next three years, it built up to a really respectable number in peak season. Everybody's got to start somewhere; congratulations to you.

As far as AdWords - it's worked out well for me, driving traffic to my site with AdSense on it. It's very difficult to make it work with parked or thin content sites, but for a developed site, it can be most useful. I keep it going, despite having really good rankings in the organics at the moment; for one thing, the organics could always disappear overnight, and for another, I'm only paying around three cents a click. It really depends on what you're doing - there's no one-size-fits-all solution.

 

[unholy1]

Adwords is a very powerful tool for any site owner. You have the ability to drive a lot of traffic to your sites and if you know how to use it well, you will be able to get low cpc's for good keywords.

I do tend to stay away from the search network though and instead stick to the content network, the cpc's are much lower for the similar keyphrases and the rules are less strict than they are for the search network e.g on keyword to ad relevancy.

Some would disagree on running adwords when they can work on other means to drive traffic to their sites through SEO, such as building backlinks, web 2.0 promotions, etc..., but these do tend to take a longer time. With Adwords I can get instant traffic to my site (in huge volumes), at the same time get exposure and immediately make money.
Eventually as the sites get more backlinks and pull in more organic search traffic, the adwords campaign is reduced and in many cases adwords may eventually be removed, and just re-activated again if there is a need such as to promote something new or just give more exposure.

Oh yeah..congrats to Frenchiexno1 on the first $100...

 

[tonyfloyd]

Netmeg...unholy1....great info!...i agree...

Frenchie - Congrats!

i remember that day too.....then got to $200 consistently...and now up to $350 consistently......all in 1 year's time.......this based on about 5 of my developed sites in google acct.....now i need to work on the rest of them...

 

[DDC_Cyn]

The $100 mark is something to be excited about. No matter how long it took, it proves it can be done and logically if you can make $100, then you can make $200 and so on.

Keep up the good work!

 

[sOliver]

Big news for me today, after getting in to domaineering in November last year I have finally hit the $100 mark in my google adsense account and am now awaiting the first cheque through the post!

Must say it has been a lot harder than I though, but seems like the hard work has started to pay off and this month I hit nearly $40.....

Anyway other than showing off I wanted to see if anyone here can remembr hitting the $100 mark themselves - its so nice to be getting something back, and whether it gets any easier after the first milestone......

Frenchie

Gratz, keep up the good work

Also started domaining back in november and received my first google check not so long ago, was a good feeling. Today I received my second one and this time it went a lot faster and the check was bigger as well, the revenue is increasing slowly the more sites I develop. The only problem is that I have to pay a lot for my vps and that my ROI is still very low but I can only advice you to get one as soon as possible because the skills you earn by doing that are well worth it and you have a lot more room to grow.
I'm also keen on getting my second domain sale done, since my first was worth around 800$ I was pretty pleased with myself but I've learned a lot and I don't regret that I spent a lot of money on bad names because you can only learn by doing mistakes. Sedo is now taking off and I'm finally earning parking revenue there after adsense banned all whypark sites.
In the long term your work will pay out!

 

[Frenchiexno1]

Thanks guys its really good to hear the feedback and ideas....!

I would say only one of my sites is truly developed and thats my BuytheMap site, articles a blog and newly added Forum. But it was a bit of a gimmick site and now acts as a host to all my other domain names.

I have been buying keyword domain names, creating a page on my buythemap site and then redirecting on the register to these newly created pages - for example http://www.MobileSatNav.com as I have been buying more domain names I have been linking them up to one another to aid the page rank. However I am not sure this is the best approcach and am contemplating getting some proper dedicated hosting for some of the sites.....

I have also bought some generic names, and I think I am really going to develop one of these on my domain name plooka.com around skiing, with a Forum etc - but as every domaineer will know time is the biggest barrier!

Anyway thanks again guys and as most at my stage in domaining, I am just experimenting like mad. Just bought 5 .infos!