Seriously though, very nice post. You certainly know what you’re talking about. You should be selling this information, not giving it away!

I love looking at it this way because it shows that a number of ways are possible. I have a blog with a small readership that makes excellent money because its a high paying ad value and highly targeted – so you’re right – its not just all about big traffic.

Great post.

You can check out the post I did if you like, it was on November 10 at the site I signed in with. I looked at my Adsense channels and compared the CPM ($ per thousand clicks). My experience with Adsense is almost a year at this point. I have a couple of nonblog “channels” that are performing above $35 CPM, with one at almost $50. My political blog is under $1 and a business related blog that’s been up long enough to get some meaningful numbers is also running under $1 CPM. The business blog has the benefit of upping traffic to the business related site as a whole. The nonblog pages on that site do much better in Adsense revenue and also bring me personal sales business (in real estate), so I look at that revenue as meaning more. On my political/personal blog, I took Adsense down to make room for a picture of Santa Claus and some Christmas lights.

Bottom line. I’d look for these kinds of ads that pay per click to be something that will defray the costs of hosting for standalone blogs. If you can get pay per impression instead of per click (think Tagwords instead of Adsense), you’ll do better. I’d also suggest looking beyond ad sales to how you can integrate a blog presence into a larger web business presence.

Also in reading your post and having a look around your blog and other sites I’d suggest that the reason your blog did not perform very well in comparison with your other sites with Adsense is because your blog is very general in topic.

Your other sites are very focused in content (all on the same topics) and therefor will present people with ads that are highly related to what they come to the site looking for. As a result people are more likely to click through.

I too run adsense on my personal blog and the earnings are very meagre in comparison to my more targetted blogs.

Also you talk about your CPM – I actually don’t find CPM to be a very useful statistic. You see you can have a very high or very low CPM and still make good or no money. It just tells you how much you make per 1000 views – however some sites have 1000 views a lot quicker than others. So one site might have a CPM of $1 but have 100,000 impressions per day (and make $100) whilst another site might have a CPM of $40 but only have 10 impressions per day (and therefore take 100 days to make $40).

So your sites might have healthy CPMs in comparison to your blog, but your blog might actually be a better earner (not that thats what I’m saying is the case for you – just suggesting CPM might not be the best measure to compare blogs with).

Anyway – thanks for your comments – interested in your experience.