I Hate Being Called A Liar

If there’s one thing I really hate, it’s being called a liar. Particularly by someone who doesn’t know me.

There’s a shameless linkbait post that calls into question whether the online earnings of bloggers that report their earnings, including myself, are genuine. I responded to the post straight away vouching for my own earnings, which I hoped would be the end of it. But, the site author then responded with the following comment:

Everton: After looking at your site you have very limited amount of placement to be earning a great deal of ad revenue, for example Google Adsense. And after looking at your alexa ranking you cant be getting to much traffic to your site and on a 1% click thru ratio i cant see how this is all possible, unless you are clicking on Google Ads yourself.

I don’t know why, but that comment really bugged me and I feel I need to respond as somehow I feel my online reputation is at stake, even though I doubt the site is well-trafficked. I also think my response might be interesting to readers, as it will provide more insight into how a blog can make money.

Limited Ad Placement

Yes, looking at the site currently there is limited direct-ad placement. That is why my direct ad earnings fell over $4k in November. However, just in case Steven you are suffering from ad blindness, there are still other ad schemes running on the page:

1. two Adsense units on every page
2. two Tribal fusion units on every page
3. up to five intellitxt links on every page
4. ten text-link ads permanently sold on blog, plus others on forum and directory
5. Occassional Feedburner ads

When you have over 500k page impressions a month these schemes can bring in a decent amount of money each month….

Low Alexa Rank

It is a well known fact that Alexa Rank is a poor measure of traffic. Alexa Rank only captures the usage of people who have the toolbar installed, which tends to be bloggers and webmasters. Sites like mine that get traffic from ‘normal’ people i.e. via search engines have tend to have lower Alexa Ranks than sites that have higher ranks because they get a lot of bloggers reading their site, but actually have less traffic. John Chow is a good example where his rank is sub 5k and mine is 18k, despite having 60% more traffic than him.

Even still, I think 17-18k is a pretty ‘good’ ranking, especially when you consider it is higher than sites like www.whatcar.co.uk and www.scoot.co.uk who anyone in the UK can tell you are massive sites.

Low Adsense CTR

I really wish that people would stop saying that a Adsense CTR of 1% is achieved on blogs. My CTR is a lot higher than 1%. I can’t say exactly what it is as I’m not allowed to, but I have posted below proof of my Adsense earnings, which you will see tally up with MyBlogEarnings reports (may be a few cents out due to Google adjustments after month end):

Your CTR is a factor of the type of readers your site receives i.e. via search engines or fellow bloggers, ad placement, the type of content you write about etc. Most blogs don’t make money from adsense because they are blogging about blogging, or what they ate last night, or what they watched on TV etc etc. Google can’t place high earning or interesting ads against these types of posts so hence the CTR and eCPM will always be low.

I did a quick search for ‘Adsense‘ in my search engine and it turned up these old posts which might be interesting to readers:

• 10 Tips To Improve Adsense Earnings
• Improve Adsense CTR – Remove Blog Ads
• 10 Ways To Improve CTRs and CPMs
• Guide To Google Adsense Smart Pricing

Hopefully that finally answers Steven’s questions!

Read Related Posts

1. Alexa Introduces Localised Traffic Rankings – I’m Massive in India!
2. Do You Declare Your Blog Income And Pay Taxes?
3. Install the New Alexa Firefox Toolbar To Improve Alexa Rank
4. Alexa Rank Experiment Update – Something Is Working
5. Adding A Robots.txt File Has Increased My Google Traffic By 16% In 4 Days

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