Web Blog of Greg Mathews

I have had adsense on many of my sites for a couple of years now, never making much more than $50/month in total and never really taking adsense seriously as a genuine source of income until I started a new site in Setember 2006.

As I am a perl developer the site was more a project, a client had asked me to mock something up for them but when I had completed it they changed their mind saying they are not going to go into that area now, so rather than scrap it I kept the site going, added adsense and modified it as and when.

In September it earned me $90, this was twice what all my other sites had ever earned me from Adsense.

By December I hit $4000 for the month. Wow this is a great source of income, more then I get from selling my scripts, so rather than do more perl work I sat back thinking well at this rate I don’t need to do much, $4k/month for doing very little apart from updating the site now and again is a decent wage.

In Early January 2007 I had a big shock, the site disappeared from Googles index, my traffic dropped and so did my adsense earnings. Back down to about $30/day. OK for adsense that isn’t bad, in fact its more than any one of my sites has ever earned from adsense in a whole month, but it was a 75% drop in adsense income.

I thought all kinds of things, has the site been banned for some reason, have all my inbound links disappeared? so I spent some time reworking the site. I liked the idea of $4k+/month for doing little.

It turns out that I was not the only one to disappear from the google index and it had little to do with my site, after a few days my site started to reappear and after about 2 weeks the site was fully indexed and at the end of the month I had earned $3k.

Last Friday adsense peaked at $330 for the day. This was no surprise as each day since the January traffic/earnings increased. Then I had a ‘Google Crash’ again - Although Google shows xx000 pages from my site are indexed, when using the ’site:’ command it only shows about 50 in the results.

This in turn has killed my traffic, I dropped from 80,000 page impressions on Friday, 80% of which where from Google to 8,000 impressions yesturday, 4% of which came from Google. Adsense fell to less than $30 yesturday

I do not know if this is a similar situation as it was in January or if this time I have upset Google some how, I don’t think that is the case as I would expect them to ask me to remove adsense from the site if it is not suitable. I do know though that I didn’t learn anything in January but I have learnt it now. Don’t put all your eggs in one Basket

Rather than ignoring other projects, I should have, and will be doing now, worked on other projects so if this site fails for whatever reason I have something else to fall back on. I have to work on this fast as a drop from $3k-$4k/month to $1k/month is a big drop for me and most people and not one that we can afford.

So my advise to anyone reading this, if you hope to earn online, spread your eggs about, do not rely one one single source of income when working online, it is a volatile business and a good earner could become a no earner over night with no warning.

Greg