Oct
Where have all my earnings gone?
If I did this for a living, I would be seriously upset with the performance of my online earnings the latter half of October. On September 25th, I earned $19.50 from Adsense, on October 25th I earned $4.93. On September 25th, Fight Song Lyrics had 353 impressions and earned $3.26 and on October 25th, Fight Song Lyrics had 508 adsense impressions and only earned $1.88.
The trend is similar for all my sites. Increased traffic and impressions, but decreases in earnings. I have switched most of my earning sites to Yahoo Publisher Network last night, to see if there is a similar trend in that. I have already reached nearly $300 in Adsense for the month of October, so I can go a few days of testing and still get paid next month. If the trend continues, my November earnings will suck and I will hardly earn a check. I thought this time of the year was supposed to be big earnings because its getting close to the holiday shopping season.
Every now and then I get so bummed out when trying to make money. Like I really feel all the work isn’t worth it. Spending hours and hours a day to build up sites and hoping to make a couple dollars from Adsense. That’s not how we’re supposed to live.
I have still yet to come up with an awesome website/business that draws insane traffic. I’ve never had a site get more than 2,000 uniques/day. All my sites combined don’t even touch that. Reading forums like Digitalpoint and Sitepoint, people make it sound so easy to make money online. They slap something up and thousands of people go to it. Maybe they resort to spam?
I guess I’m just pissed and crying over the fact that I was pushing $20/day last month, and now I can hardly get to $5/day. And having a full-time job is not leaving me enough time to do anything about it. I wonder if there ever comes a time when you just pack up and quit the online biz. Maybe try my luck in something else? I’m not going to make that call anytime soon though. I’ve been trying to earn money online for about a year now. A whole YEAR!! And I’m still making peanuts. If I give another year of my life to web publishing, and still can’t come up with at least $50/day I think it’s a sign that this isn’t my calling. Some people have it and some people don’t. This career might not be made for me, no matter how much I like it.


Everyone gets down at one point or another. Glad you’re not packing it up just yet though. If your clicks are still high or higher, the problem might be with smart-pricing. Google could have dropped your revenue because your traffic wasn’t converting. It effects your whole account, and not individual ad units/sites. That’s just my initial thought though.
David, even if you are not making $50 a day by next year, don’t quit! I still haven’t made it big yet, but this is my full time job now. It took several years to get to this point. You are off to a much faster start than I was. Just keep it up, but take time out every now and then to walk away so you can recharge. By the way, your experience with Adsense earnings drop is pretty typical. You may also want to try this out.
http://www.adsblacklist.com/beta/
The other thing is, I think you need to focus more on user-generated content. It is the easiest way to produce lots of quality content at low expense. Essentially, build a site that allows your users to produce lots of hi-quality stuff. It’s not always easy to come up with something, but once you do, you can work on promotion instead of content creation. Lighten your load, automatee and offload as much work as you can, without paying of course.
Hey, don’t stop with the online business.. your doing good and i have been watching this blog for a time now.. i like it..
i started also with developing.. and not making $ 1 a day at the moment.. but im going to try and learn from everything to..
regards,
Nomar
Thanks for the replies and kind words. I know everyone goes through rough times in the beginning. I just want so badly to have my freedom (read: not not working the man anymore). It’s just going to take a lot longer than I thought.
I only have 1 site that is user generated content, and that is Historum.com, my history forum. Even running that is hard at times because it’s still in its developing phases.
this has happened to me before. I think you might have been smart priced.
I think the whole higher impressions but lower earnings could be down to the source of traffic.
Some incoming traffic from particular external links may not convert very well at all compared to search engine traffic or better quality links.
Keep up the good work.
http://www.cheese-burger.net
You surely have one of the most interesting sites in net. I believe in your way of doing, so go on this way. It surely the right way.