Since the Adsense Tips from an Expert post, I’ve been paying attention to how much money Adsense is bringing in. Over the past couple of months, I’ve also been learning more about accounting. The combination of these two events is leading to new sources of profit for me and the inspiration behind many of the recent changes on this site.

I’ve been learning more about the Adsense program and how it works, experimenting with different methods of tracking and devising ways to project future earnings. Through this process I’ve stumbled quite a bit and discovered the numbers weren’t adding up… in other words the actual events didn’t match what my brain thought should be happening.

It looks like I’ve finally discovered a working system for tracking and projecting financial growth through Adsense. These are my tips from my limited experience, but I thought you may be interested in the things I look at and how I come to my conclusions.

Adsense is an earner but it is not a “get rich quick” scheme

I make a little money on Adsense each month. I have for years but it hasn’t been until recently that the income was worth looking at. I’m not ready to retire but steady growth and an understanding of what’s going on has encouraged me.

The growth is the key. By tracking everything at first and figuring out how all the bits of information relate to each other I have figured out how to encourage even more growth.

Unfortunately, the answer is to keep working at it! Continue How to set goals and make projections with Adsense earnings »

What’s more fun than launching one website? How about launching five websites?

I mentioned before that I really enjoy writing about industry news, ideas that I have about web design and SEO and other online business concerns. The content of 14th Colony followed my passion. But I do still have a website design and SEO business to run.

With that comes the Sacramento Edition of 14th Colony. The Sacramento Edition is a bit stripped down and will focus on generating client work and giving back to my local community. It will also be more fun and personal for me.

I grew up in Sacramento and the culture here is really magnificent. The “high art” scene has been booming, real skyscrapers are emerging and there is a feeling of impending greatness. As the Capital of California we have a lot to live up to.

Plus, we have the Kings.

…even if they do suck most of the time!

While the Sacramento edition resides on a subdomain and looks similar it really is a separate site with it’s own features. There are small differences in the layout but I expect that to change over time as that site develops it’s own personality.

One of the features the Sacramento edition will have is a blogroll, so if you want to exchange links, hit me up.

PS. Yes, I said 5 websites and all over the course of 2 weeks. Take a moment to check out the new Fabrication Unlimited website where they Steel Your Ideas! The other two sites are confidential but I’m sure I’ll find a way to mention them here eventually…

I have been running Google referral ads on a few pages of my web site. Google Referral ads for those who don’t know are very similar to regular content ads except you pick the advertiser and it is NOT pay per click. To receive payment from a Google Referral ad the person clicking through must complete a predetermined action like filling out a form or actually completing a final purchase. As you may expect the pay-out is much higher than that of a content ad click through. As it states in the referral ad set up, “Choose up to 15 products or specific ads to rotate in the referral unit. You can also choose categories and keywords to ensure you get newer ads as they become available.” There are numerous categories to choose from and overall a large number of advertisers/products available.

My site was accepted to run referral ads a few months ago. I Have enjoyed 4 conversions so far, less than one a month, after numerous impressions and very few clicks - my site averages 40,000 unique visitors a month. Like any publisher I want to increase the click thru rate (CTR), I try to place ads that are relevant to the page but don’t think I’m doing a very good job, content ads are getting 100 times the click rate on the same pages - I have swapped ad locations with similar results. Could be a few reasons for the very low CTR, one being that “Referral ads by Google” is bigger and draws more attention than “Ads by Google”, my ad picking (this is most likely) and the heading tag used by the advertiser - referral advertisers are not taking the same time in referral ad creation as with content ads. I think Google should remove “referral” from the ad and have it display as the other types of ads do.

Good luck using the advanced reports to recall referral data - I think the old TI-99 4A I owned back in the early 80’s could process the information faster. It appears the problem is the impressions, has to be as the other data you could count on your fingers. The impressions are not from each time an ad unit is displayed but from each ad that is displayed within the unit (skewing the crap out of real results, well at least what we publishers are used to), have a 3 ad unit display once it counts as 3 impressions.

As I discussed the pay out for a conversion can be much higher than a content click through. From the advertisers prospective it is a great thing - basically 100% profit without any risk. Also, I looked and cannot find the answer to this question - if I have an affiliate ad on my site and a person clicks through I will get credit for a purchase even if a person makes that purchase much later, could be months later. Both the advertiser and the publisher are aware of how much time the referred shopper has to buy. Does the person clicking through a Google referral ad have to complete the action required for publisher pay out during the first visit? Until I hear different I will think this is the case.

Google Referral ads could be a win-win-win but I am afraid it is just a win for the advertiser and Google. It goes a long way in making the advertisers happy and is a little payback I guess for all the fraudulent click throughs in the past (I mean when it was really bad). Lose for the publisher - until an advertised time span is placed on the conversion beyond initial shopper visit and advertisers get serious about writing ads which will draw more clicks (my click through to conversion rate is actually pretty good) and most important we publishers get smarter about picking the ads, don’t let the payout be your only determining factor as tempting as that is.

Even after saying all this, I will continue to run referral ads on my site because of what can happen - it really is a beautiful thing when a conversion happens on a high paying referral ad, damn near better than sex…damn near.

Get noticed on 14th Colony with your own advertisement. Site-wide ads on the right are going cheap starting at just $10 per month. There is a 3 month minimum (pre-paid) but members get a 4th month free.

I’m also open to custom ad programs like single page insertions or ads in other areas. If you are interested, shoot me an email.

Enough complaining about what didn’t work, here’s the process I went through to relaunch 14th Colony into the cleaner, more professional (and already looking more profitable) website you see before you.

First, some background…

When 14thC was first launched I was putting out a new layout every 3 months or so. This was reactive to the growth and new directions for the site. When 14thC.com was first launched it was as a notebook for my own research and ideas about search engine optimization. The initial site was made of static HTML pages. As the amount of content grew this became insane to keep updated so I changed things to PHP to use includes for the basic site structure and then hacked the .htaccess to keep the page URLs the same (with .html at the end instead of .php) for the search engines.

This was ok for a while but then I added the blog. The blog was in a separate directory. I was never really satisfied with this as I didn’t really have a home page for the site, instead just pulling the RSS feed and stuffing some content around it.

By the time I added some new pages like Services and the Interviews things were getting a bit cluttered. Microsoft launched a new version of Internet Explorer that inexplicably broke the header design for just the blog… even though the code was the same as the rest of the site.

“I’ll fix that soon,” I told myself, busy with client work.

Finally the day came where I was meeting with a client and explaining what a blog is and how it works. I brought up my own site to show him the Dashboard and how the content displayed. Looking at the site with a client embarrassed me. Here was hundreds of pages about how a website should work but the usability was poor. I had learned a lot about SEO - and posted about it - that was not in practice on my own site. Continue The 14th Colony Transfer Project »