January 14, 2004

So I've started an experiment with my website.

Sparked by the optimistic article Blogging for Dollars, I decided to give it a shot - what the hell, right? - and try and make some cash off the long and laborious hours I spend on my blog.

And after all - that silly little resource page on my site about the "NMI: Parity Check Error" consistently places in first position in Google on search terms of "NMI Parity Check", "Parity Check error", etc. (you get the idea), and I get quite a bit of email from random strangers, who have found the page and are looking for help.

The cited article above stresses that blogging for dollars should only be attempted if the topic you write about is reasonably narrow. The NMI Parity Check subject certainly is just that - ask anyone who has wrestled with that error and they'll tell you that there is virtually no information out there on the Net about it (which I guess would explain why my page rates so high...).

As suggested in the article, I went ahead and signed up with Google's Adsense program which pays you a few cents every time a reader clicks through on an ad. While I'm not particularly fond of advertising on personal websites (people, please stop putting those horrible blinking neon ads up!), I was pleasantly surprised to find Google's text ads to be as elegant and understated as ads can possibly be.

24 hours after putting them up (and I refrained from placing any ads on my blog homepage as y'all can tell), I remembered to check my Adsense account - and looky there! I'd made $3.24! With an average click-through rate of 4.5 percent! And all that without having to lift a finger. Zero-effort money is of course always the best.

Encouraged, I decided to do a little grassroots marketing for the site, and put a short note about my resource page into some newsgroups where the Parity Check error had been discussed. The next day, my Google stats told me that traffic on the page had gone up nearly 400 percent!

And yet - my click-through rate was exactly 0.00 percent.

What is happening? Are the ads not interesting? Is the placement not obvious enough? Is the experiment a failure?

I'm afraid it's too early to tell. But input from any alert reader is most welcome...