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Yesterday I announced my intention to make a commitment to grow the income I make from this blog long term. The first thing I wanted to figure out once and for all is whether or not AdSense is still alive today as a viable income source for today’s blogger. Less than 24 hours later, after implementing just some of Joel Comm’s advice from his book “Google AdSense Secrets 4.0” I am convinced that AdSense is still alive and kicking today as it ever was.

Before I go into more details why, I’d like to share my crappy AdSense earnings for the last 6 months or so, since I launched this blog at the beginning of October last year. Keep in mind that basically all I did was to just slap an AdSense ad on my posts and that’s it. No tweaking, no real understanding of AdSense beyond the very basics of just putting the ads up on the site and waiting to see if any money comes in.

Here are the results I got from doing that:

• Oct 2007 - $3.33 - Average Per Day = $0.11
• Nov 2007 - $7.57- Average Per Day = $0.25
• Dec 2007 - $5.66 - Average Per Day = $0.18
• Jan 2008 - $7.83 - Average Per Day = $0.26
• Feb 2008 - $5.98- Average Per Day = $0.20
• Mar 2008 - $6.66 - Average Per Day = $0.21

Six Month Average Per Day = $0.20

As you can see, these are hardly huge numbers to get excited about. However, I wasn’t really focusing my efforts on getting AdSense up. That just wasn’t my goal. I have been focusing a lot of my time spent on this project on helping other people, building up my RSS feed subscribers past the 50 point so that I could put my Feedburner chiclet up, and getting more clear on what kind of content I want to write about here.

Now, having read Joel’s book yesterday and having implemented some of the advice he teaches in there I began to see immediate results in my numbers pretty much immediately. Maybe it’s beginners luck, or fluke, or whatever you want to call it but I was pretty shocked when I logged into my account today and saw that I made $5.38 today alone! That is a 2590% improvement on my 6 month average!

I know that isn’t a huge number compared to people like John Chow or Steve Pavlina and I know it’s just one days worth of earnings, but for me that’s the most I’ve ever made from AdSense in one day, so I’m really happy with that. My site doesn’t get a lot of traffic yet, as I’ve only written 58 articles so far but I’m looking at this as a long term thing since this is only something I do part time outside of my regular full time projects.

It Gets Better

Things get even better. When I bought the book for the insanely inexpensive price of $9.95 and read through half of it and discovered the amount of value it delivers, I knew I had to let other people know about it so I decided to sign up for the affiliate program as well because I knew that there might be some people who decide to get the book too so why not see if I could make even more income for my blog from that source too.

Well guess what? I checked my affiliate account and I found out that I already made $49.75 in affiliate fees from people who also ran out and bought the book! That’s a total of $55.13 in earnings from my blog for today. Not a bad start, considering my 6 month average has been twenty cents!

Anyway, I don’t want to make this post sound like I’m over selling this thing or something because that is not my intention. I just wanted to report my results for you guys so that you know how things went.

AdSense is Alive, But There’s a Catch

One other thing that I am fairly convinced of which may be one of the reasons why a lot of people dumped AdSense a while back is that to make money with AdSense I believe you have to actually have a good quality website with good quality articles that bring value to your readers. I think all those people that were using auto-generators to slap together useless websites that don’t do anything except act as AdSense cash cows are long gone and I really don’t think those days are ever going to be back so if you’re the type of person who’s looking for a get-rich-quick type of thing then AdSense is probably not going to work for you.

However, if you are the type of person who wants to write good quality content, and has the discipline to do it consistently long term for a period of time and to deliver the kind of value that people actually want to read, then I think you will build up enough traffic to your blog to be able to make some decent pocket-cash with AdSense and possibly even a good full time income from it if that’s your goal.

If Joel’s book interests you, you can purchase a copy today by following this link:

AdSense Secrets 4 - What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense