So the Google AdSense thing wasn’t working for me, and I’m not referring to the fact that I only made 60 cents. OK, so maybe it has a little to do with that, but the real reason is that the ads were totally out of context. 99% of the ads that were displayed were about “blog”. The other 1% was about tsunami relief.
Both, I’m sure, are fine topics, but are not relevant to my content like they “were supposed to be”. I e-mailed Google about this a few times to find out what could be done. My third e-mail got no response at all. The two responses before that were (paraphrased):
- I need to wait for indexing by the AdSense crawler.
- I need to use full sentences and paragraphs about specific topics.
OK, the first one I could understand. I didn’t realize at first that AdSense uses a different index than the regular Google index.
The second suggestion, though, was a little frustrating, for a couple reasons. First, I know I’m not a hardcore tech writer, where all I write about is code, but the majority of my posts were, in some way, about technology and development. Second, I’m not writing term papers or essays, and in most cases, long paragraphs don’t “make sense”. Also, as far as I can tell, I nearly always use compelte sentences.
In addition to describing my above reasoning, in each of my three e-mails, I asked (or suggested) if there was a way to “tag” my content. For example, I could surround my content with something like this:
<div rel=”adsensecontent”>…</div>
Well, my third e-mail has been unanswered for 10 days now, so today I decided to ditch Google AdSense. It’s not that I expect them to change their technology based on my suggestion, but I suggested/asked about something like that in each of the three e-mails, and that part was ignored each time. It wasn’t working for me, maybe it will for you. I’m not the only one, though. Julie Lerman blogged about a similar issue.
Anyway, in place of AdSense, I’ve decided to post jobs from karmaONE, a service for referring people to open positions. You can read all about it here on their site. The service is currently in BETA, and, as you can see, most of the jobs are currently located in the San Francisco area. If you are a recruiter in the Wisconsin area, check out karmaONE — you can help to make this list more relevant. I might end up getting some money, but you’ll end up with a good candidate.
In the end, though, as much as I’d like extra money for doing pratcially nothing, I decided that I’d rather my “practically nothing” at least possibly help someone find a job. While making money would be nice, the satisfaction of potentially helping someone land a job outweighs the financial gain for me, even though there are other ways I could make money, like working with the Best Futures Brokers UK.
For those that care, I’m actually using OpenGUI’s Feed2JS service to display these links. What can I say — I’m too lazy to write my own RSS display module for CommunityServer.
Brennan Stehling
I have been using AdSense since July 1, 2004 and so far I have accumulated $70. That sucks a bit, but I cannot claim to get tons of traffic. I have seen that as my traffic goes up I am getting more click-throughs and money. Like since January 1, 2005 I have over $50 in “revenue” from it. And in the last 2 months I received over $20.
And sometimes I choose to write reviews about books, products or services which I use and that generally gives AdSense something to chew on.
Most of my blog entries are meant to be informational, partially for myself as a reference when I want to remember something from a while back. But as a part of that I make sure I put in links to relevant websites. That may also help AdSense. This may help as the link in a specific blog entry does not appear in the navigational links or blog roll, so AdSense can assume if the entry links to a popular site on CSS design then your entry must be related to CSS and perhaps some ads for CSS editing products may be appropriate.