Ad sense

If anyone has consistently followed my posts (I doubt if there's any besides me!), they might've noticed a point of inflection after this post. In that post, I'd incidentally countered a view expressed in an ezine with significant readership. And that brought me a huge number of visitors, unprecedented for my blog. I started fantasising the possibility of getting dollars by subscribing to Google AdSense. So, I did subscribe.

From then on, I'd started looking at the number of hits to my site and the referrals often. Then, consciously, I began to do some Ad sense optimisations. First was linking my earlier posts however remotely they're related to a phrase used. An example would be this post. ;) I tried to get some page views from sites that sell reciprocal pageviews and reciprocal links under whatever garbs. In the process, besides ending up in their hall of fame, I got some understanding of the dynamics of such sites. More on that later.

The next is audience engagement. I found that two things work. One is manifested in the last sentence of the previous paragraph - give an indication that more will come. I used it in this post and others. Audience engagement also happens when readers start commenting. When they do, they visit repeatedly to check others' responses. So, reader-generated content brings pageviews to me. This is a microlevel instance of the web 2.0 monetisation strategy.

One another thing is increasing the frequency of posting and timing them appropriately so that you get visits due to readers who keep checking for newer posts and visits soon after new posts. Of course, I'm not a blogging machine to be able to stick to this schedule.

Despite all these, I've earned a meagre 17 cents in the two months that Ad Sense ads are shown in my blog. At this rate, it will take years for me to get the first cheque for 2000 American Dollars! Here comes the last of all taboos - sensitising readers to the ads situated at the top and bottom, make them conscious of them, and where applicable make them click the ads. If you're wondering what I did to get there, read this post again. ;)