AdSense makes cents and sense

Update 1: Bankelele is also in the money. Proving the point that you can make money from your blogger blog! Any other KBW members out there cashing google cheques?

I set up Google AdSense on my blog to see how much money this site could generate. For the first three days or so I would log into my AdSense account to see how my earnings were growing only to find I had earned around 50 cents.

Google does not reveal exactly how they calculate how much money your website generates. Some ads pay 1 cent a click others 2 cents etc. But even if no one clicks on the ads on your site you can still make money as some advertisers may pay you, through google, to have the ads on your site. I soon forgot about it. It sounded impossible to make money from the AdSense programme. Especially as google do not send out AdSense cheques for less than 100 dollars. In fact the main reason I kept AdSense was because AdSense has a twisted sense of humour and I read somewhere having the ads on your site makes the google bots spider your site immediately, which means your posts are indexed by the google search engine immediately. I’m not sure if it is true but hey it wouldn’t hurt to try.

Then I got home one day to an ordinary letter and opened it to see this:

100 dollars sixty eight cents! Brilliant. I pay USD 95.40 a year for this site and now it is paying for itself.

Now for the painful part. When I switched servers and blogging software I forgot to put the AdSense ads up on this my new WordPress blog. In the busiest two weeks for Mentalacrobatics ever, when I was linked by Boing Boing, The Daily Nation and The Financial Times amongst others I had no ads on my blog. I made no money!

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!

As you can see once I saw the cheque I put the ads back up quickly. This however highlights an important point. You do not need your blog linked by big media outlets to make money from AdSense. Joining a community like the Kenyan Blogs Webring of regular blog readers and writers who link each other and highlight each others posts goes a long long way. So here is another reason to join KBW if you still need one, it will help you make money from your blog*! You do not need any complicated blogging software to take advantage of and make money from the scheme. Blogger has a help page with information on how to get AdSense ads on your blogger blog. Put it up and you never know. In a few months time you may get a cheque in the post as well. Your blog content is what will make you money, no matter where it is hosted.

My new aim is to get one of those Google Christmas presents that are out of this world!

*maybe!