This one was a big cluster f#$@*. I spent hours building and maintaining an article site and I only made $5 from adsense. I can laugh now, but trust me this was not a fun experience. It put me off trying to make money online for about a year – not joking.
I bought into the whole adsense hype. I bought into the dream of creating a keyword rich article site that millions of online eyeballs would flock to and click on every ad that was put infront of their opportunistic eyeballs. Wow was I wrong! My site even got up to a PR3 in Google yet still no revenue!
The biggest mistake I made was not focusing on building a customer email list. That way I would have a list of web-savvy entrepreneurs that I could market to. Instead I was totally focused on trying to build adword revenue. Damn you Google! I also had banner advertising as well that brought in about half as much as the adwords revenue! I think I’m getting tears in my eyes again…
The one thing I did do that was positive was that I had the foresight to buy an expired domain of an article site (now I know why the previous owner left it to expire! LOL). That gave me instant traffic – traffic that didn’t earn me a friggin dollar mind you! I’m not bitter, really. Incredibly I still get about 1000 uniques a month to the site – all from backlinks that are still out there even though the site is no longer up.
What They Don’t Tell You
So if you’re going to build an article site beware! What they don’t tell you is that you will be spending hours upon hours manually approving articles for inclusion into your directory. They tell you it will be automatic – and some of it is from article submission software, but you’ll have to still manually approve articles. If you don’t and leave it as automatic approval (for manual submissions), you’ll end up with articles about cures for erectile difficulties in the poetry category. All for $5 in adsense revenue. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.
Geoff
