Google AdSense

Google AdSense
You should have noticed by now that there are ads appearing on the top right of my blog. Yep, I just created an account under Google AdSense and also subscribed to DCRewards.

Having been bumping around recently (or rather, not really been searching for a job yet) puts one to start thinking of various means of getting income. I mentioned in my previous post before that multiple source of income is the way to go. And if a certain hobby/interest activity you love doing actually earns you a little income, that’s like really a bonus. So I woke up this morning and decided to give it a shot.

I started off blogging as a past-time, as a means of journaling down all my life-experiences and sharing things I have learnt. I still enjoy doing so, leisurely.

I have always loved website development and I am always thrilled whenever I came across amazing websites. I used to think that one need to be well-versed in Html coding to create good websites (I've seen terrible ones), until WYSIWYG concept came into the scene. That’s like having a white piece of drawing paper in front of you so you can let your creativity run amok. I think I have an artist-heart lying dormant somewhere inside of me. I never like using standard templates, so whenever I have the time, I will modify my blog appearance bit by bit.

Adding the AdSense thingy and embedding it into my blog took me half a day, especially reading through the Terms & Condition (yes, it took me a while going through all the text + 1 tablet of panadol cuz my head spins when I read too much texts). Then subscribing an account under Dannychoo, and then subscribing to his RSS feeds and such. So it’s something you only want to try when you’ve got too much time during your weekends.

I get an average of around 7 readers (basically my closer friends) daily on my site, and I have told only between 10 – 15 close friends of my blog URL thus far. In addition, I have also checked a box in my blog settings restricting search engines from crawling my page and letting the WWW find this blog. So one might wonder why I bother adding AdSense when my blog-site readership is so low… how much can I earn?

My answer: I just want to give it a try.

Just learnt from Dannychoo’s post “Blog Monetization” that you dun just earn like a miserable 1 cent per click (I though it was like 10 cent initially), instead you get up to USD 1.75 per click. On a good day, he earned about USD 50.00, and it was further mentioned below his post that the most he had ever made through all his affiliated programs (Amazon associates, DTI, Affiliate 2.0, Rakuten Affiliate, etc) is just over USD 1,000.00 per day during Dec 2006. Yes, USD 1,000.00 per day!!! No wonder he earned enough to buy his own house and start his own company in Japan.

But that’s only if one can garner as high a readership as Dannychoo’s “January 2008 Stats” of 1.9 million visitors & 11 million page views in Jan 2008 alone… I didn’t even make it to 1,000 unique visitors having blogging for more than a year! (Then again, I believe that I will never gonna reach there if I didn’t even take the first step out. So why not now?)

So, since I am gonna give AdSense a try, I was thinking of unchecking that box restricting search engines to crawl my blog, thus opening out to the WWW and see how much more unique users will seep in. But I am stopping short of doing this.

My 2 primary concern is of that of privacy (that’s why I always think twice about posting my friend’s pictures on my blog or even mentioning their actual names), and that I wun be able to control what kinda ads Google will place on my blog page (yea, it depends on the kinda topic I post). Google will place public service ads (like donate to the childrensociety, etc) when they can't place any ads relevant to my post.

But once those ads get annoying, I will take down everything.

“If something you love doing actually earns you a little income, that’s like really a bonus..."