My Adsense Story

Part 1: Go Baguio!

I discovered adsense.

And it gave me a whole new perspective on website design, website content and website marketing.

You see, I’ve had this little website called Go Baguio! Your Guide to Baguio City, Philippines since mid-2003. It used to be a traditional website, valiantly ’selling’ my hometown to the world and hoping that advertisers selling something related to Baguio City would advertise on my site to support the costs of web hosting and long internet hours. Despite cheap advertising rates, it was hard to get the folks in Baguio to even go online, much less sell their items over the internet.

And much as I wanted to recommend hotels and restaurants for the benefit of my readers, I felt it was not fair to my few advertisers to recommend those who did not advertise. So, information that my readers craved for had to be withheld at times.

In July 2006, I signed up with the Google advertising program called Adsense. In essence, I agreed to give their advertisers some space on my website. I would get paid whenever my site visitors would click on the ads. That simple. Not much, but it was exciting to see how the income was growing. Since the ads to be shown were related to the topic (contextual), Google figured site visitors would be interested in them, too.

A few months later, I met up with my law school girlfriends and boasted that I had earned $xx.xx from Adsense. Of course the amount was not very large but I was boasting that the website actually earned “unexpected” dollars.You see, for the first 3 months, I was not taking Adsense seriously at all. I put a few ads on my homepage and forgot about it altogether.

Then my friend, let’s call her Bella (short for her dream name “Isabella”), exclaimed, “But I earn $x,xxx.xx from Adsense every month!” And my mouth just fell.

Bella gave up being a lawyer a long time ago to be a full-time mom to her 2 beautiful daughters — something that was, to me, so admirable yet so frightening. She discovered, though, how to make money without leaving home.

The web detective in me deduced the following:

1. I knew she was a columnist for a Philippine daily, so she must have maintained a blog for that.
2. Then it seems she started creating other blogs and, one by one, they each became very popular.
3. All her blogs are simply beautiful and beautifully simple.
4. She talks about things she knows: the law, cooking, flowers, being a mom, travelling.
5. She keeps her posts short so that her site visitors do not get bored.
6. Her ads are subtle so you won’t even notice they’re there.
7. She teamed up with another person to experiment on Filipino blogs and hosting and they jointly promote each other’s work.

Bella commented…
Ah, I had been a blogger for about 2 years before I became a columnist. The column was a consequence of one of the blogs.

I replied…
Imagine that! A blog as an unintended audition, an unwitting job interview. That’s so great, Bella. Can’t wait for that documentary that will feature you and other bloggers. Good job, blog goddess!

Part 3: Blogs

Now it turns out that when Bella, the girls and I met up, I thought I had earned only $xx.xx dollars in 3 months. When I got home from our dinner, I logged on to my Adsense account and found that I had in fact earned $xxx.xx in 3 months!

So flushed with excitement, I researched all I could on Adsense “optimization” and on blogging (remember that all I had was a “traditional” website, not a blog).

I signed up for Blogger a year ago. I knew it was a journal (”blog” is slang for web log) and since I never had a diary, I was not about to reveal myself to the world via a blog. My blog had 1 post in 12 months.

Then I discovered that blogs were not just diaries. A person could post ANYTHING in a blog. And my sister, Karin, told me that you could maintain multiple blogs with just one Blogger account and link them up to each other. In a blog, you could link up the blogs of others, too. Plus folks could comment on your posts, which they like to do.

Then I discovered Blogger Beta. This new system allows web dolts like me (those who do not care to learn HTML programming) to drag and drop items onto my blog.

Next, I found out that since Google also owns Blogger, you could put Adsense in your blog! This means you can earn dollars (you can opt to get paid in Philippine Pesos, too) by just writing about something you know, something helpful, something interesting.

Google makes it easy.