An Accidental Discovery

I sold that lawn mower from the local newspaper ad very quickly. But I left the pictures of it on the blog that I listed in the ad, with a new post stating that it had been sold. Naturally, all the traffic stopped when the newspaper ad ended, and in turn, so did the Adsense clicks & earnings. This local paper also includes a listing of ads purchased in their seperate weekly paper, which is really just advertisements and is given away for free. So this ad just came out in the little weekly paper around the end of last week, so I started getting calls on the lawn mower again.

But here's the interesting part...I also started getting quite a few hits to the blog site again - and even several Adsense ad clicks! And once again, considering the number of visitors that statcounter.com reported - more than half of the visitors clicked on Adsense ads before they left!

So I seem to have accidentally stumbled on a partially devious way to make some money here. The ad continued to run, and even be run again in a separate publication, even though I really had no more product to sell. Yet, the traffic the ad brought in was so well targeted to the Adsense ads that appeared, the click-through rate was fantastic! So while they didn't find what they really wanted, which was the actual lawn mower I had already sold - many were more than willing to click on the ads for the information they provided.

This isn't to say that I plan on running a whole series of "for sale" ads for items I don't actually have for sale, but it appears if one was willing to do this they could probably earn quite a few dollars just on the ad clicks the want-to-be buyers would generate. Personally, this seems just a little too dishonest for my conscience, so I wouldn't actually run ads for things I don't have to sell. I'm not even very high on the idea of doing that with the plan of using a 3rd party dropshipping company to do the shipping of the items you advertise. That's considered a legitimate way to make money, and the hardest part of that is finding a dropshipping company that's worthwhile to use. But I do certainly see the benefit of using the blog to assist in selling items that I really do have for sale, so I will continue to do that whenever I have something to sell.

I must say, this makes it clear how easy it could be to create a substantial income from those targeted ads if you simply generate well targeted traffic. It doesn't even have to be a great amount of traffic, as long as it's very well targeted. So that's what I need to focus on is ways to do just that. But in the meantime, this was a pretty interesting little accidental discovery!

Another Successful Blog Experiment

I'm pretty satisfied with myself right now, even if I do say so myself. It's not much, really...(doesn't take much to impress me!)...but I think it's a good sign. That new blog I started really scored some pretty good AdSense ad clicks today.

Here's what I really did. I had a spare lawn mower that I had decided to sell by advertising it in my local newspaper. This paper offers free ads for inexpensive items, and they run for 3 days. Well, I thought I could set up a little blog just for this too, and post a few pictures of the mower on it, etc. And if I used my domain name, it would fit in the short classified ad they give you for free. (Only 4 lines.) I figured, who knows, put some AdSense ads on there too and see what happens - maybe I'll even get a few clicks.

The mower sold on the very first day, but I left the ad in the paper since it was free anyway. Boy am I glad I did! I got more paid clicks today than any single day back in December with my fairly popular baby-alive blog that month. And the clickthrough rate was way way better too - almost a click for every 2 visitors the page had today!

Turns out that this was a pretty good idea! Most of the readers who came online to see pictures of the lawnmower I advertised were finding all the lawnmower related AdSense ads hard to resist clicking on!

I'd like to think this confirms that I'm starting to figure this out, starting to know what I'm doing with this Google AdSense publishing. I can do this whenever I sell things in the newspaper and make a few more dollars on the AdSense clicks, while showing pictures of the items that wouldn't normally get to be seen in the newspaper classifieds. And it's all absolutely COST FREE, which is my favorite price in the world!

This also marks another ever so small milestine, but a milestone for me nontheless. I'm now more than 25% of the way toward that elusive First Ever Check from Google AdSense, which needs to be at least $100. (I'm over $26 now!) I know, it doesn't sound very impressive to most people I'm sure, but that will be a real cause for celebration the day I finally receive that first check from Google. I've already warned my wife to expect some celebration when that finally happens in the (hopefully!) near future! It will be nice to be able to show her an actual check, rather than those tiny little numbers on the earnings screen...and most importantly, it will mean that all this stuff I'm learning to do is actually starting to work.

Domain Forwarding Problem Solved!

Well, I should have called GoDaddy as soon as I started having that problem. Solving it turned out to be as simple as a 10 minute call to their toll free customer service line! Now I feel pretty FOOLISH (notice today's date?) for not having done so a week ago!

I guess I'm just bull-headed enough to insist on trying to solve "simple" problems like that myself, just by searching around the internet forums, etc. That USUALLY works for getting the information you need, but in this case, for whatever reason I couldn't find much help. In fact, I saw some posts by people saying that GoDaddy's customer service wasn't of any help, so I hesitated to give them a chance because of that. Now I'm sorry I did - it turned out to be a fairly simple matter.

For everyone else's benefit, here's what solved my problem: My domain wasn't forwarding because it (for whatever reason) was missing the proper forwarding IP address. So the GoDaddy rep. had me enter their correct forwarding IP address, which is: 64.202.189.170. I was told that no matter what anything else was set as, there would be no forwarding done without this. Another 10 minutes later that domain was instantly forwarding to my blog!

Needless to say, I have no complaints about GoDaddy's service, although I do think their help screens should explain this fairly simple detail. I was told they do, but as much as I looked for it I didn't see it explained anywhere.

Just goes to show you...sometimes you just have to talk to the right person to steer you back in the right direction.