Traffic and revenues take time to build and don’t forget you are building from nothing… 10 visitors a day from nothing in your first few weeks is a huge increase. If you keep at it then after a few months that 10 a day number could grow to 100 or more… the longer you keep plugging away, adding content, marketing your site and improving your technique the more those numbers will rise.

Give up because you don’t immediately succeed and you’ll never see those numbers grow.

I’m going to keep plugging away… my US$12.00 in adsense revenue this month will be more next month and more the next…

The Idiot

Read the Post by Seth Here

The idea is for them (and anyone else that wants to give it a go) to take a brand new wordpress blog with a brand new domain name and make $100 or more using Adsense in the month of December 2008.

It sounds like a great idea to me, so I’m going to be following their progress. I considered taking part myself, but we are nearly a 1/3 of the way through the month and I’m too busy with other project.

Good luck guys,

The Idiot

I think the trick is to start small, if you are going to try your hand at building sites don’t try building 10 sites in a week or worry about getting tons of traffic (and revenue) right away, that won’t happen despite what you have read in all those sales letters. Instead aim to get one simple site online, then work on getting it indexed and try to get some visitors. Don’t even worry about getting sales from it right away, that will come later… what it takes is patience, consistent effort and more patience. Eventually you’ll find that you can create 10 sites (or more) a week and you’ll have figured out how to get traffic and once that happens you’ll start to see some sales. There are no overnight riches when you start out trying to make money online.

Slow steady growth will get you there if you put in the commitment to your online business.

I have been making money online since early 2000, and for the first couple of years I made quite good money. Good enough for me to get lazy and spend too long sitting around on my butt thinking I’d finally cracked it, until I realised that 2 years had gone by and I was barely able to pay my bills. That was when I discovered Adsense and joined the program in April 2006. In May 2006 I made a staggering US$4.56 from Adsense, not a lot but I could see there was amazing potential. Since then I’ve had good months (over $100) and bad (less than $5), the important thing to note however is all this time my earning came from the absolute minimum of work… why exactly didn’t I put in any effort? Well mainly because although I was confident I could make a nice income and my dream was to do exactly that so I could escape the daily grind of a 9-5 job, I still found myself tied to the job by the demands of bills which just keep on coming. I was in effect stuck between a rock and a hard place, or at least I thought I was. The reality was I *could* have found time to work on my internet business, but after a day in the office all I really wanted to do was hit the local bar, chat to my friends there and get drunk. As far as I was concerned that was better than sitting home alone in the evening working on the computer.

So anyway fast forward to four months ago. I was offered a job in Bangkok, Thailand (I manage large scale web development projects) and so I packed up my life in Hong Kong and moved to Thailand. Everything seemed to be great, at least for the first month… then month two and we were informed by my new boss that the company I’d joined had run out of money and he wouldn’t be able to pay all our salaries !!

Bearing in mind I had moved country, quit a pretty good job in Hong Kong, put myself into a bit of debt just moving myself and my stuff and getting set up with a nice apartment here in Bangkok.

That was a month ago and I now find myself living in Bangkok, with almost no money and no job (we are all waiting to hear if the boss has been able to secure new investors).

So I’ve now got the time and the incentive to start really working on making an income online. It isn’t going to be easy but if I don’t do *something* I really have no idea what the future will hold.

I hope you’ll come back to read about my plans, my progress, my failures and my successes.

I discovered this theme called ‘The Morning After’ (more info here http://code.google.com/p/the-morning-after/ ) which not only looks nice (IMHO) but also comes with a whole heap of nicely written instructions to help with any customization you might want to do. That in itself makes this theme better than most.

I’ve only just installed it so I’ve not tweaked it much, but I will be going through the documentation and seeing what can be done.

On another note, this site very nearly disappeared as my credit card had expired; and for reasons that I will perhaps explain in another post I don’t have a replacement card. Fortunately I discovered I had enough in my PayPal account and was able to renew theadsenseidiot.com this morning… talk about a close shave.

screen grab of the Rebel Magazine Theme for Wordpress

I’ve spent a little time today searching for the perfect theme, one that looks good and is relatively easy to tweak and after trying about 5 different ones I think this one is the best.  Its called Rebel Magazine Theme and aside from being nice to look at, its free which was another consideration.

So that’s another step towards getting my site back from the dead

Next task is to figure out what plugins I should use, I’ll document that next time perhaps.

After the disaster of having this site trashed by malicious hackers, I am slowly putting the pieces back together.  I now need to find and configure a good theme, preferably one that isn’t too complex but one that will allow me some flexibility.

I took a look at the theme my friend Martin over at Wealthy Dragon uses, its really nice but I don’t want to be using the same theme as him. You can check it out by clicking here.

Hopefully by the end of the day I’ll have found something suitable and be able to make this site look better.

Thanks for dropping by.