Adsense: 6 months to $100 per month
 

FYI: According to a forum I was reading, the consensus says that it takes 6 months of quality posts to generate an income of $100 per month using Google's Adsense.

Ref: MBN Forums :: View topic - How quickly did you make $100/month?

-h

It took me about a year to come close :)

Interesting... In month 5 (Feb 2005), I earned $53.02 from Adsense, and in month 6 (Mar 2005), I earned $114.63 from Adsense.

I have heard this as well. Probably the exception to this as far as it happening faster is you are a blogging maniac like Darrin Rowe from problogger.

I only do a very very small amount of blogging as it is not my focus....I'm up to a whopping $.73 after 1 month. LOL

Thad

:) I haven't been earning like Darren Rowse, but I've learned that for a blog to earn more from Adsense, posting frequently is not just the only way. Blog promotion (forum participation,word of mouth,e-mail lists) can help, too.

It took me 5 months to get my first $100 adsense payment, and only 1 month after that to get another $100. I think that's a good sign. :)

I put AdSense on my blog just to see how it works and actually it's just small block of few links. I didn't generate much, but it rises every day and I am happy to see that.
Steve's $9000 per month is unbelivable :) but it is great inspiration.

Steve, check the hyperlink in your sig - it's down.

I would like to say that Steves $9000 per month is very attainable. Through hardwork & dedication. This is a goal that one should be looking to attain. The drive itself is great motivation.

I've been blogging for over six months and have a total of $34.27, but the first months were really focused on my personal development and primarily shared with my friends. Only in the past couple months have I been aiming for a more global audience, and spreading notifications on social bookmarking sites, and though I'm still not making much, the rate of earnings has improved slightly.

$100 AdSense in one month
 

I was fortunate to earn $100 in my first month through multiple posts being referred to by lifehacker.com. I've been able to maintain about that level, although October wasn't a great month for me. Overall since mid August (2 1/2 months) I've made just over $200.

My biggest question now is how to opptimize my site for adsense, search engine optimization (SEO), and other advertising.

I would love to hear from Steve (or anyone) more detail on the following:

1. What the percentage break downs are from different revenue sources (I know he's shared some rough figures).
2. The break-down of where his traffic comes from (Delicious/Social Bookmarking vs. Organic search vs. Returning readers vs. posts from other blogs).
3. What 80/20 activities will optimize Search Engine results the most.
4. How did revenue sources change on Steve's site over time as the blog grew.

I'm at over 10,000 hits a month and have been wondering if I should try to do some direct sponsorship deals or look into affiliate programs rather than relying solely on adsense.

I would love to hear any advice on these questions.

You should definitely opt to use other streams of income apart from Adsense. The reason for this is Adsense can be "insecure", and if you put all your eggs in one basket, then all your income could vanish overnight. Very often, people would get their Adsense account terminated mysteriously for no reason, and as everyone knows, it's almost very difficult to get one's account reinstated, unless you have strong evidence and supporting data to show the big G that you are at no fault.

There are many other ways to make money apart from Adsense. For instance you can create your own e-product (i.e: softwares, ebooks), and promote the website through organic traffic and of course the so called PPC.
You can also use what's called the "Google Cash" model to make money. It's becoming increasingly harder to profit this way, but it's still very possible to make handsome income (i.e: 4 to even 5 figures per day) if you know what you're doing.

Don't know how to create softwares? Then you could get one developed at outsourcing sites such as rentacoder.com, elance.com. Don't know or like writing? You can buy PLR articles and turn them into an ebook and sell it through, say, Clickbank. You can also preload these articles into an autoresponder sequence, and have these sent to your list as, say an online course spreaded over a course of 7 days, 14 days, etc, and promote your affiliate link this way......

Build your list: create a squeeze page, diligently post in marketing forums, create contests, use PPC......

Another income stream idea would be to create a membership site. It's a smart way to make money, I think, and if you do it right you can make handsome income. Pick a niche you like, do some market research on it, and just proceed with creating a high value membership site, which hopefully you can sustain for a long period of time.

Answering your question regarding what 80/20 activities will optimize Search Engine results the most, IMHO it would be to get a lot of backlinks and reciprocal links from related sites. Of course you should still do onpage optimisation (pay attention to the tags and obviously internal linking structures of your site), but I think it's the offpage that counts more. Nonetheless the combination of the two certainly forms a powerful combination.
However, don't get stuck solely in SEO-ing your website, because that's not the only way the search engines, especially Google, decide how to rank websites. You should know that Google implements a technology called LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), which basically means that its robot decides the relevancy of a website not only by the frequency of the appearance of certain keywords, but also of those that are semantically related; hence, that's how you should design the contents fo your websites. Overall, write for your visitors and not for the robots. Readers satisfaction very often is followed by handsome ranking.

Well I could go a lot more but let's stop for now and I hope the above has provided some useful insights ;).

What do you people think? Is it better to have one blog/website and put all the energy into that or to have a few different ones. This with the risk of not focusing enough on any of them.

I started a blog on Japan when I move here, but soon realised that the subject was to wide to monetize well with adsense. So now I have created a subblog that I call fightclub with only Martial Arts videos. Very small niche. For general funny stuff I created one I call Nipponsoup.

In terms of trafic I am in the hundreds on these blogs (not fightclub yet), but adsense is not even two figures. I am wondering if it was right to create three separate sites or if I should merge them to one megablog.

Henry, I think that with Digg and Reddit you can do it MUCH FASTER. I've made $100 per month on my second month, but that's when I didn't know about Reddit, Fark, Stumbleupon, Digg and others. One day, when I got to be #1 in Reddit and got into Digg's top, I made over $220 in a single day.

Quality content isn't all it takes. You also need to be a good marketer of yourself and your sites.

Yeah. It's definitely something I'm going to look into as far as marketing. My main goal right now until January is to

a) Evolve my writing so it doesn't suck, and
b) Fill my site with quality content so visitors don't come home to an empty site.

I'm pretty new to all of this still so I really love all the advice I've been receiving.

DmitryDavydov: So which article got dugg? I love digg. I was fortunate to join digg during the earlier stages (like I did with these forums). What does that mean? It means I can have the username "Henry".

I started my blog in July and have earned $15 from it so far.

At risk of stating the obvious, Adsense income is dependent on site topic. For example, martial arts advertisers won't pay much for clicks :(, but digital camera advertisers will.

If you want lots of Adsense income, you need to create a resource that both readers and advertisers value. Creating "quality posts" is not good enough.

Hundreds of uniques per day or per month? I looked at your nipponsoup blog and the adsense ads aren't in good spots. Small traffic websites trying to convert that small traffic into clicks need to have a little...say....spammier (uglier) layout. For a week, try putting two leaderboards on top, then put about 15 br tags below it before the actual content and see how much more clicks you get compared to now. Just experiment to see.

I run several sites now on 5 domains and the leaderboards on top (always one or two) always generate a great amount of clicks, especially for traffic that will otherwise just click the back button.

In my opinion to gain money with ad-sense you need to blog about a topic the pay. I'm blogging about trekking and hiking, very poor! :-(
You need also to have a lot of traffic, but you need also that the visitor don't found all he needs on your blog, otherwise: why to click on another link?
If someone reach your blog with the query "How to crack word password" and with your post he learns how to crack a password, he reach his goal, if on your post there's nothing that really explain how to crack word password, probably he will click on an advertise about " How to crack word password".
I'm sorry for my bad English.

It's eerie how accurate that figure is. March was my 5th month and I made $74.46. If I grow at the same rate, I will be over $100 in my 6th month.

Wow, I really need to find some better topics to blog about then, lol. I've been with Adsense since December (maybe?) but I have yet to even earn a full $1. Then again I haven't put a lot of effort into it since I've been back in school.