Targetting AdSense

Hope you all had a good Christmas!

Just before Christmas, I was at a festive podcast do, and people were surprised to hear that we can earn as much $200 a month, and sometimes more, from our Google AdSense clicks on the Storynory website. It’s funny, we thought it wasn’t that much. However, I can’t say that we have done as well as we hoped in December. Despite getting as many as 60 clicks a day, we are currently on $163 for this month, which is not so great at all, considering this is the top time of the year for kids.

What annoyed us was that Google didn’t send us any Christmas gift related ads. We just got a lot of unseasonal low-paying stuff. This contrasted to October when we had all the Halloween ads and good rates per click.

In a huff, I fired off an email to Google AdSense and to my surprise received a very full and personally tailored response. It turns out that you can wrap code around part of your text on your page to tell AdSense which are the key-words you want to use to attract ads. This should help send relevant and seasonal ads - but that you should be aware that it can take 2 weeks for Google to recheck your site. There’s more info here. I’m impressed by their customer service and now have warm Christmassy feelings about Google.

Another thing that amazed people is that you can earn as much as $60 by referring a webhosting contract. I don’t think webhosting that relevant to Storynory’s core audience of 3-11 year olds, but we’ve had a few sales, and it is nice to get that cheque. Most of the webhosting companies, including Dreamhost, Bluehost and Go Daddy have generous affiliate programmes.

This entry was posted on December 26th, 2006 and is filed under Blog Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.