Monetize Your Blog - Progress Update

Hi Everyone,

In my February 11 post (view it here), I mentioned that I was setting up a blog to monetize with Google adsense, based on some instructions contained in some free videos I found. This is the first update on my progress.

Well it was easy enough to set up the blog and monetize it with adsense. I followed the instructions from the videos which basically state to search Google hot trends and publish posts to your blog about the hottest trends, then you put this information on sites like Digg and Propeller. In theory this should drive viewers to your blog and hopefully some of them will click on the ads.

This worked pretty well and there were definitely people viewing the blog however I did not get any clicks on the ads. In looking at the ads Google placed on the blog I noticed that many of them did not have much to do with the content of the blog. I feel that this is the primary reason that there were no clicks. Another reason is that the blog covered to broad a range of topics.

So what am I going to do about it you ask?? I have a background in quality management and have decided to apply quality management (QM) principles to my approach. One of the primary methodologies applied in QM is the Shewhart Cycle, also known as the Demming Wheel. You can find more information about it here .

Basically it is the cycle of PDCA which stands for PLAN => DO => CHECK => ACT

I had the initial plan which was to set up and monetize the blog.
I did it.
I checked it and noticed that although I was getting visitors I was not getting clicks on the ads.
So that brings me to the act portion of the cycle.

The actions that I am going to take are:
• set up a new blog that has a narrower topic

• pick a topic that people are passionate about and therefore have a reason to view it and click on associated ads

• find out how to select the ads myself rather than have google select the ads in order to ensure that the ads are relavent to the blog topic

Hopefully I will see some better results after the changes have been made. This brings the cycle back to the beginning and you PDCA all over again. I will run this set up for a month and then report back on the progress.

If anyone wants more specifics please leave a comment and I will get back to you. Also, if any of you have attempted a similar approach I would love to hear how you made out.

Until Next Time…