Why our loss of revenue will help YOU!

So we “lost” a ton of money.

And that loss is something that can benefit you.

Before I tell you what the loss was, let me tell you why this benefits you.

If you try to do everything from scratch, it can take you a long time to learn “how” to do those things.

When you start from scratch you have to solve every problem yourself. And sometimes you don’t even know there’s a problem. Starting at the beginning with everything you do takes a lot of time, effort and energy.

It’s called reinventing the wheel. And you don’t need to reinvent the wheel…

…if you allow *other* people to make mistakes so you can benefit from those mistakes.

There’s a big “IF” there, but we’ll cover that shortly.

Let’s get to the loss of money.

One of the multiple streams of revenue that we enjoy is from Adsense. And we have Adsense installed on a range of blogs in different niches.

That’s multiple streams of revenue via Adsense.

If you’re not aware of it, Adsense is a way to make money passively. Once you’ve set it up (the right way) it can produce income for you with very little ongoing work.

We have multiple sites in multiple niches all monetized with Adsense. Once we have the content set up (we use high quality content) we don’t really need to do any ongoing work. There’s the problem. It’s incredibly easy to “set and forget” when you’re monetizing via Adsense.

And that’s what we did. We set up sites, added hiqh quality content (very important to have high quality!), added a nice theme, added some images and then….we sat back.

Money came in on autopilot. Over time the money increased. We’re talking about many thousands of dollars a month. All earned passively, once the site is set up.

Very nice, right?

But here’s where the money loss comes in. We sat back. And sat back. And…sat back.

And then we had a thought. What if?

“What if we experimented with different types of ads and different layouts?”

“Could we earn a little extra money?”

Grow your revenue

This is called optimization. And it’s hard work.

You have to change one element then collect and analyze the results, compared to the original results. If the results are better, you now have a new baseline. But you don’t stop there. You start another optimization trial. Rinse and repeat – right?

And we were delighted when we saw some small percentage increases in revenue. Success!

On the next testing we tried something that sounds easy, but boy it was not! We’re all pretty technical people here so we’re not usually fazed by technical issues. What we did was add in something called link ads underneath the header of our sites.

It’s not easy! Every WordPress theme is different and they all seem to have their code in different places. We had to work out – for each theme – how to integrate the “link ads” so they appeared in the right place.

What happened next was unexpected. And it’s the reason this blog post exists. We would encourage you to learn how to modify your own blog themes so you can use “link ads”. When you see the figures below you’ll definitely want to!

We tripled (yes tripled) our RPM earnings
RPM has continued to increase. It’s now $12 RPM – if you don’t know what a good RPM is, even $3 RPM would be nice to have. $12 RPM is fantastic!
We earned $133,815.40 *just in Adsense revenue* by using the new ad layout.

Oh, one other thing before I forget – we made sure that our sites were mobile responsive – very important!

Let me explain the significance of what I’ve just shared. With no change to the content (no new content on the site) we earned 300% more just by changing ads layout. That’s all we did. To show you the difference, look at the image below.

But to increase by 300% took us some time, trial and effort to learn how to make the change.

You can do exactly the same with your sites. You can test, tweak and improve. The time and effort you spend working out how to incorporate link ads will be repaid *every single day* after you make the change.

It was worth our time – it’s a worthwhile investment of your time.

What do those link ads look like? The screenshots below show you how they look on a desktop machine. For privacy reasons we’ve blurred any information that will allow the unscrupulous to go steal our content!

You’ll notice that you can’t really miss the link ads. They’re right under the header image. Anyone viewing that site is going to see those ads first.

That’s what we want – ads in their face.

We also added two ad units in the sidebar of the blogs (check the screenshot). One other change we made was to remove extraneous information from our sites.

We WANT people to see the ads and have nothing much else to click on – if the only clickable items on a blog are the ads guess what?

It increases the chance that someone will click on the ad!

The video below shows you an example of where we made the change to the coding of our site themes. Every theme is a little different. Your site may need code elsewhere. But once you’ve found where that code goes for your theme you’re set.

It took us probably a week or so to get that integration and code just right.

It will probably take you longer, unless you’re very experienced.

Is it worth the effort? Is making 300% more revenue every day for a one-time effort worth it to you???

It was for us.

Of course now we make sure we build sites with link ads from day one. We have a best practise formula that we apply to every site we build (for ourselves or for clients).

And you should do the same. Test. Experiment. Learn.

Then replicate. Or, to coin a phrase that you’ve heard a million times before….

Rinse. And repeat.

Adsense is still a big money earner, despite what some people believe. It’s also one of the easiest ways to start making money online without your own product, or doing massive product research. The reason is simple. Google knows what adverts to show to the people coming to your site. Google knows how to squeeze as much money out of traffic as possible.

That’s one of the reasons we let Google optimize which adverts show on our sites. But we give Google a helping hand by optimizing where those ads show!

And the results (as shown above) speak for themselves.