Online Advertising Income

2 days ago, I started another experiment on my personal development site – Reason for Success.  I added online advertising with Google AdSense throughout.  Every day, I get around 150-170 page views, mostly going to one blog post.  But still, I have been doing minimal work on the site over the past year so any extra income I earn is bonus.

I decided to go with a low key approach.  This lowers the number of impressions I may get, but better aligns with my design sensibilities.  Take a look at my most popular blog post Hacking OneNote 2013 for Getting Things Done.  As you can see, the ad doesn’t appear until after the first 2 paragraphs.  I choose to avoid ads in the headers because it looked tacky.  I might give up some revenue that way, but I want my visitors to not feel overwhelmed by the advertising.

Results

With two days of advertising, I am already excited.  As you can see below, I’ve earned $5.29.  Not a huge amount by any stretch, but if I continue making $2 a day, the site will more than pay for itself.

What I really like about Google’s metrics, is that I can better establish goals around income.  I see my current Page RPM (revenue per 1000 page views), is $15.13.  That means if/when I reach 1000 page views, I should earn $15.13.  After two days, I already have 351.  By the end of the month, assuming a relatively constant number of page views, I should earn 175*30 =  5,250 page views.  That should be roughly 5.25 * 15.13 = $79.  That’s $79 every month.  Again, not enough to live on, but a nice bonus.  However, if I want to earn $1000/month, I can focus on getting my page views up to 1000/15.13 = 66.  That’s 66,000 page views per month.  That’s obviously significantly more than I’m currently getting, but not unreasonable considering what some bloggers get.

While I’m still a relative novice with using AdSense, this gives me a better sense for what it would take to build a successful e-commerce site around advertising income.  Companies like Mashable and TechCrunch have figured out a formula for making this work.