Don't Back Down

One year ago today (technically, one year ago tomorrow, but it's close enough), I added the first advertising to Don't Back Down. I probably should have done so earlier, as at the very worst, it brings in a trickle of money, which can pay for hosting and the like. I'm not making John Chow money or anywhere near it, that's for sure. But it can certainly help pay the bills, which is nice.

Had I done so two years earlier, when I started the blog, it may have grown a bit faster. Had I done so even a couple months faster, when there was a bunch of traffic for the Treasure Hunters, then I may have been able to make some really fun money. But that's okay. It's been an interesting learning experience, to say the least.

One very important tool that you'll want to familiarize yourself with is JavaScript. Don't worry - you don't have to do anything fancy - just some simple lines of code that will help you to maximize the ability to test out which ads work the best on your site. Google provides a page where they show you how to perform A/B testing on your site.

But wait, you say - Google tells me not to mess with the AdSense code at all. And so they do. But they have also put their blessing on this particular usage, saying that it's okay to generate two snippets of code, and use this sort of mechanism to determine the best placement on your site.

What I found was ideal is to come up with two formats - generally the same layout, just varying colors for instance - and assign them two different channels, and put one of them in the upper block, and another in the lower block. When visitors to your site get the page, some will get the upper section, some the lower section. You can then log into your account and see which channel performed better.

Of course, there are alternatives to AdSense. Unfortunately, not all of them work well for everyone, and very few of them are as easy to implement as AdSense. I've found that Text Link Ads is a nice alternative to AdSense, but it doesn't always sell as often, so the money may or may not be as good. Kontera can do okay as well, but I've found their reporting to be lacking. That's not entirely bad - as long as the money comes in, it's okay - but you can't do as much optimization with their tools. Changing the colors of the links is about all you get.

Still, it's definitely a good idea to use all the tools at your disposal. In the beginning - which is to say last August - I had only AdSense (and an occasional post that had a link to Amazon). During the month, 99.61% of the income came from Google. To put that in perspective, if I made $100, $99.61 would come from Google (the other $0.31 would have come from Amazon that month). Over the course of the last year, I've tried to diversify the income stream a bit, and so far, I've got to say that AdSense is still my best performer, but I'm at least getting some income from other sources.

This is nice, because on days where AdSense is down, perhaps those other players can pick up some of the slack. My ultimate goal is to try and get some direct advertisers (for anyone interested, take a look at the Advertising page), as I think that leads to the best results. But for now, diversity seems to be the best approach.

After 12 months of advertising, however, I can say that while I'm still no John Chow, my earnings are up - roughly 51% this month (July) over last August, when it all started (the advertising, not the blog). That 99.61% dependency on Google has dropped, but not by as much as I'd like. It's down to 79.91% this month, while ContentLink (Kontera) was 9.79%, Amazon was 8.26% and Text Link Ads contributed 2.04%. I like to see the wealth being spread, I just don't like the numbers to be so concentrated.

I'm not unhappy with the results, but I think I can do better in the upcoming year, with a new design, and new advertising plans, that will hopefully and some direct sales that will result in some more distributed results. What do you think? Anything else that you'd like to know about the past year?