The blog post experiment had a very interesting week… I had some commitments that really got in the way of writing posts. I was able to write some but wasn’t able to do nearly as many as I needed to. I’m WAY behind and am at about the half way point as far as the writing goes. However, the experiment still did great this week. The new posts were able to produce $780.40:

So far the posts I’ve written have made $1831 in three weeks.

I noticed some interesting things this week:

• People are linking to my posts. I’m not asking, it’s just happening. That’s what can happen if you really get into the mind of the searcher and deliver the information they’re looking for. This is obviously helping and is most likely responsible for a lot of the earnings increase this week.
• The earnings from posts varies wildly. One post will do really well one day and then won’t produce much for a few days. Sometimes I won’t be able to find the post at all for a few days. It will then come back and do really well again. A lot of people in the comments here as well as in the forums see this happen and freak out. They think that something it wrong. This always happens when you’re dealing with new posts – it doesn’t mean that something is wrong.

I have to laugh because I know that I’m going to get a new slug of comments asking how many ‘readers’ I had on the site before the experiment. It seems like the common explanation is that this money is being made because of existing traffic. This is frakkin hilarious because it shows me how little some people actually know about making money with Adsense. Guys, regular visitors do not click ads and never will. If you think I’m doing this because my ‘readers’ are clicking ads, you obviously don’t understand the game. Searchers are the ones who will click ads and if you want to get ad clicks, you have to draw the searchers.

As a side note, the site I’m working with had less than 10 readers before I started the experiment.

There are no tricks in how I’m reporting this stuff. I know how to find the right keywords and I understand how to write about them. If you’re wondering if I’m somehow leveraging my existing traffic to make this money let me put your mind at ease – I’m not. The traffic on this site is WAY up right now because of the addition of these new posts and it happens to be search traffic – the kind of traffic that clicks ads.

I’m a little surprised by how well this is going and at the same time I’m not. I’ve never added this much content based around solid keywords to a site before. Now that I’ve done this, I can’t figure out why this is the first time I’ve tried it. To me it’s pretty obvious that it would help any site but for some reason I hadn’t connected how much benefit I could get from this.

I think that some of you probably have the knowledge to pull something like this off and others need to learn more about keywords – how to find the right ones and how to target them well. There’s no way I could get these results without knowing what I know about keywords.