While they launched AdSense in June of 2003, I first began to experiment with it on 7th October that year.
I had been blogging for around 11 months by that point and had begun to experiment with the Amazon Associates Program as a way to help me cover my costs of hosting, domains and design.
So I signed up as an AdSense publisher and set up my first ad to put on my blog.
I had no idea what I was doing and so put the ads at the top of my right hand sidebar to see how they would perform.
At that time the only way you’d earn anything from AdSense was if someone clicked the ads so I made them bright pink and green to stand out. Boy, were they ugly!
The next morning, I woke up to discover that I’d earned my first $7 USD from AdSense. I was pretty amazed by this as it was significantly more than I was able to make from Amazon. Over the coming days, I watched in amazement as I continued to earn a few dollars here and there.
It turned out that that first days earnings were artificially high as some of my loyal readers thought it was a good idea to click the ads repeatedly to make me money. Things quickly settled down and by the end of the month I’d earned $42 USD.
By no means was it spectacular money but it was enough to give me a little hope.
I began to experiment with placing a few more ads on the page and tweaking the design and colours I used. I discovered that blending ads into the design of the blog was better than making them stand right out. I also discovered that putting ads into the middle of blog posts worked well.
The results of my experiments were that I quickly saw my income from AdSense rising. The next month I made around $90 from AdSense, the following month – December – around $170 USD.
I began to experiment with a new blog in the months that followed – a camera review blog. This really helped things to grow a lot faster and blogging was fast becoming something I saw as a part time job.
- May 2004 saw me hit over $1000 in a month for the first time.
- 7th June saw earnings go over $100 in a single day for the first time.
- By November 2004 AdSense had allowed me to go full time as a blogger with earnings of close to $10,000 for that month alone.
While there were ups and downs in my earnings over the coming months (in January it all took a big dive due to me falling out of Google Search results for 6 weeks) since then I’ve continued to earn a monthly income from AdSense.
The combined total of what AdSense has earned is well in excess of a million dollars! Yes – I’m glad I started using AdSense back in 2003!
In 2005, I posted here that Blogging had bought my family a house, something that a year before was not even in our wildest dreams. The bulk of that came from AdSense.
These days I don’t put as much focus on advertising revenue (Advertising revenue makes up about 25% of my business revenue these days) but the bulk of that revenue still comes from AdSense.
While I know AdSense is at times looked down on by some bloggers and online entrepreneurs – I for one am grateful for it.
Happy birthday AdSense!
