$500 Per Year from Adsense

A VC has decided to go public with how much he’s made with the Google Adsense program in a post titled $500 Per Year. I guess the title answers the question of ‘how much’. $500 a year isn’t really a lot when you break it down, less than $2 a day. My guess is that this is perhaps an average sort of level of earnings for a blog using adsense – in fact its probably a bit above average.

Of course I wouldn’t recommend you do what Fred did in revealing his Adsense stats – its probably the fastest way to get banned from the program. I know of many bloggers who have suffered from doing this – especially in the details that Fred has done.

Anyway – his post got me wondering – how could he increase his earnings (which he generously donates to charity)? I took a quick look at his blog and I think I could double his income, if not triple or quadruple it with just a few simple tweaks and changes to his blog.

I’m not writing this because I don’t like what he does – but rather saw it as a little bit of a challenge – and plus I’d love to see his charity benefit a bit more. So here is how I think he could write a $1000 or more cheque to his charity in his second year (if Google doesn’t ban him):

– more than one ad per page – at current Fred has only the one skyscraper ad on each of his pages. At present virtually every page on his blog serves the full four ads in that banner – there seems to be plenty of ads out there so I’d add a second one.

– in content ads – I would leave his current ads in the side bar where they are (or possibly raise them to the top of the column) and put the second ad per page within the content on his individual archives. Ideally I’d put this ad at the top of the post (perhaps one of the square formats (perhaps the 250 x 250 pixel size) similarly to the ones on Digital Photography Blog’s individual pages. If these ads dominated the page too much I’d probably put a 468×60 sized ad at the bottom of each individual post (not on the main page but only on archive pages) between the end of the post and the comments section (as I do at the end of my posts).

– I’d change the name of the blog from A VC to something with the words Venture Capital (which I suspect is what VC stands for). At the moment Fred’s blog mainly is getting ads for blogs and RSS. This is one of the biggest problems that many bloggers face – they don’t actually get ads for what they write about. Here’s the thing – ads for blogs pay peanuts. Ads for Venture Capital would pay considerably more. I’d also include the word Venture Capital a few more times on each page (it could be through a few mentions on the sidebars) and remove the word ‘blog’ as much as possible. The word blog (even once or twice) seems to bring out blog ads so much.

These are just part of how I’d tackle increasing A VC’s earning capacity – of course you’d also work on increasing traffic levels, probably tweaking the blog’s design and some SEO techniques – but I suspect that if he just did what I’ve suggested above and he kept writing content daily that he’d double his money.

Again – no criticism to Fred and his blogging – looks like he has a great blog and he’s got a very respectable readership level – but thats what I’d start off with if he was serious about getting some more money for his charity through his blog.