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!