I was reading an interesting article in last Sundays Life magazine (Sunday Indo) about blogs and AdSense. The general impression is that this is a relatively easy way to earn a significant amount of money from relatively low outlay. I have always been planning on incorporating AdSense into some of my websites and monitoring the earnings (purely for experience at this stage), but I would be interested to know if anyone else read the article? What were your impressions?

The article seems to maintain that personal blogs can earn good money. Surely you'd need huge visitor stats in order to see any decent returns?

EDIT: Sorry I can't link to the article but Unison requires a login...

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Since google adsense is contextual, your revenue will depend on what you blog about as well as how many people view the blog.

In terms of time taken, I imagine blogging is not the easiest way to make money online but the barrier to entry is fantastically low.

Aha but if you use bugmenot you can easily overcome that little niggle.

Going to search out article....

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Ahh, nice tool that bugmenot! I think I'll be returning to that again in the future...

As for Unison, oh my god I've just spent the last 20 mins trying to find that article and I have to say for a National newspaper it's beyond belief that they don't have a search facility for their archives. Googled as well and couldn't find any reference to it. Now I'm starting to think I imagined reading this piece

Anyway, sorry, never found the article in the end!

I havent read the article but I would tend to agree that a blog can be a nice little earner but its all down to the type of blog IMHO.

Lets say you have a blog that is about your daily life rants, your posts are going to be of random topic so the ads being served are not really that well targetted. I noticed if you make a post about apples ads targeting that topic dont show until a day or two later - in some cases your apples post is already buried.

It also comes down to the type of visitor that comes onto your blog. If you visitor is a regular they usualy tend to come onto your blog to hear your latest rants or news and probably move onto read another of blog on their daily reading list. Where as if your visitor come in via the Search Engines there is a higher chance they will click an ad as they are seeking information.

In saying all that its from my own personal experience with a number of blogs that I have so people may have a totally different experience from Adsense on blogs.

What I do is select a topic that I have some knowledge on but that I also know has a high number of people searching on that topic. The second thing I aim for is to bring my visitors in via the Search Engines, they are the info seekers, the happy clickers . If people become regulars via their blog reader or bookmarks etc then its a bonus (even if they dont click).

For one I wouldnt turn down my earnings made from blogs and maybe someday I'll just create one that allows me to retire with a year or two of blogging

If you are considering a blog find a topic that you know about, performs well from searches but also will probably have a high payout via Adsense.

Use least ads as possible, I tend to see that one banner ad and one text links ads work very well. The reason I do this is because I dont want low payout ads being served that a visitor might just happen to click on.

A blog might not see any income for the first couple of months so its a matter of keep plugging at it and get it ranked well in the Search Engines (thats the bread winner).

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Any chance you could post the link for those of us that have a Unison login?

Is the article written by someone who knows what they are talking about or is it yet another dot.bomb riches type story?

Regards...jmcc

I don't make much from adsense on blogs... A bit - yes, but not enough to get excited about.

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It does certainly sound like it alright. From memory, the author lists a few 'big' sites that have made the big time so I'm sure he has been slective in his choices to illustrate his point.

I've tried putting Adsense on my blog once or twice. Not really worth the hassle. That said, mind you, my blog is quite a small and uninteresting one (generally 30-40 subscribers). If you actually have loads of readers you'll probably do better.

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I'm currently seeing less and less across my various sites. I've also noted that the selection of ads is becoming less focused.

To be totally frank, the monetarisation aspect is becoming a time-drain rather than a money-spinner.

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