{"id":27225,"date":"2013-06-20T02:37:21","date_gmt":"2013-06-19T15:37:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/problogger.com\/?p=27225"},"modified":"2013-12-03T13:50:38","modified_gmt":"2013-12-03T02:50:38","slug":"adsense-turns-10-years-old-why-im-grateful-for-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/problogger.com\/adsense-turns-10-years-old-why-im-grateful-for-it\/","title":{"rendered":"AdSense Turns 10 Years Old: Why I’m Grateful for it!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"NewImage\"This week Google’s AdSense program celebrated its 10 year anniversary with a post on their blog<\/a> and a G+ Hangout.<\/p>\n

While they launched AdSense in June of 2003, I first began to experiment with it on 7th October that year.<\/p>\n

I had been blogging for around 11 months by that point and had begun to experiment with the Amazon Associates Program <\/a>as a way to help me cover my costs of hosting, domains and design.<\/p>\n

So I signed up as an AdSense publisher and set up my first ad to put on my blog.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I had no idea what I was doing and so put the ads at the top of my right hand sidebar to see how they would perform.<\/p>\n

At that time the only way you’d earn anything from AdSense was if someone clicked the ads so I made them bright pink and green to stand out. Boy, were they ugly!<\/p>\n

The next morning, I woke up to discover that I’d earned my first $7 USD from AdSense. I was pretty amazed by this as it was significantly more than I was able to make from Amazon. Over the coming days, I watched in amazement as I continued to earn a few dollars here and there.<\/p>\n

It turned out that that first days earnings were artificially high as some of my loyal readers thought it was a good idea to click the ads repeatedly to make me money. Things quickly settled down and by the end of the month I’d earned $42 USD.<\/p>\n

By no means was it spectacular money but it was enough to give me a little hope.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I began to experiment with placing a few more ads on the page and tweaking the design and colours I used. I discovered that blending ads into the design<\/strong> of the blog was better than making them stand right out. I also discovered that putting ads into the middle of blog posts<\/strong> worked well.<\/p>\n

The results of my experiments were that I quickly saw my income from AdSense rising. The next month I made around $90 from AdSense, the following month – December – around $170 USD.<\/p>\n

I began to experiment with a new blog in the months that followed – a camera review blog. This really helped things to grow a lot faster and blogging was fast becoming something I saw as a part time job.<\/p>\n