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$100/Day Challenge Update
April 11, 2005
Well, here's my challenge update. I have to say that I'm glad that Nadev's rules are so flexible, and I can include any site that isn't currently making any money. That old site of mine is still getting the traffic from Yahoo, and Dogpile likes it too.
So last night, I decided to go in and move the Adsense around, just to see what would happen. I thought it would help, too, in terms of thinking out how I would like the template to be redesigned (Teli's working hard on it for me - she is just amazing to work with, by the way).
And I figured, if I could get Adsense working well on the old site, I won't feel so frantic about moving the site and implementing the redesign ASAP.
Well, after a day of results, all I can say is that everything you might have read about how important positioning is when it comes to Adsense is absolutely true.
Here's what the site had - one of those two-ad horizontal banners running across the top of the page, just beneath my introduction.
Last night, I created a left sidebar and stuck only Adsense on it - one of those skyscrapers - and removed the two-ad horizontal banner. Today, I've been getting clickthroughs like mad. Well, okay, maybe that's a slight exaggeration but the results are just amazing in comparison to what was happening before.
On the down side with this site, though, is the fact that the PR of the main page is grey barred. The home page is still in Google's index, though, as are all the internal pages. So Google must have come by while my server was down. And as I said, I really don't have anything in the way of incoming links. So I'll need to get some fresh ones up and get Google to come by again. I'm just trying to figure whether I should bother doing that now, or wait until I've moved the site.
I've also decided to add another site to my list of challenge sites. About a month ago I created a site for fun, but people have been suggesting I try to monetize it. The site has been doing well in terms of Google - last time I checked, all the pages (59 at the last count) have been indexed. Since I launched it, I have been adding a page a day, and it looks like Google comes by daily.
Anyway, I've decided to try an ezine on my fun site and see how that goes. I put up my Aweber subscribe link today (we use Aweber for our offline business, so that came in pretty handy), and so far I have 9 subscribers.
The "original" challenge sites aren't fairing as well. But I'm hoping to work on one of them tonight - I've got about 16 pages done for that one. The other one is still in the "keyword lists spread all over the dining room table" stage, but I'm starting to see it come together.
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Posted by BJ at 07:31 PM in $100/Day Challenge, Adsense | Permalink
Comments
Thank you BJ, I'm glad that you find me nice to work with :D.
I'm also glad to hear that your challenge is coming along too! It's just about time for me to provide an update as well (I've been procrastinating on the blogging portion)...
Posted by: teli | Apr 11, 2005 10:27:25 PM
its amazing what a tweak of Adsense ads can do for your CTR - strange how different things work on different sites though.
Keep up the great work.
Posted by: Darren Rowse | Apr 12, 2005 6:54:18 AM
Teli, I'm just glad that I'm on your "good client" list :)
Thanks for coming by, Darren. Will we be seeing you in the challenge?
Posted by: BJ | Apr 14, 2005 11:23:32 AM
