Written on March 30th, 2005 at 08:03 am by Darren Rowse

Exponential Blogging - Part II

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Why is Blogging naturally suited to Exponential growth of earnings using the adsense program?

In my previous post I shared some of my story as a blogger who has seen exponential growth in my Adsense earnings over the past 18 months of blogging (the blue graph to the left is an illustration of my Adsense earnings). Whilst at times there are some disruptions to this growth (usually external ones) I believe that the types of blogs that I run should naturally experience this type of increase in earnings for some of the following reasons (which are both byproducts of committed regular blogging but which can also be worked on to maximise growth).

Increased Readership

The main reason my earnings have increased since starting to blog with Adsense is simply that the readership of my blogs has grown. In fact if you compare the earnings graph above with the traffic graph (right) you’ll see the direct correlation. Increase the traffic to your blogs you increase the amount of impressions of ads served which (all other things being equal) will increase your earnings.

Following are some of the factors that have helped my blogs grow their readership over the past year and a half (and which have had a flow on effect to increased earnings).

More posts - the longer you blog the bigger your archives section becomes and the more doorways there are into your blog. A blog with 1000 posts has a lot better chance of being found by readers using Google and RSS than a blog of 100 posts (all other things being equal). Blog 3 posts per day for a year and you’ll soon have a 1095 post blog. I try and post 25 times per day or over 9000 times a year. Work hard on writing quantities of content and you’ll contribute tot eh exponential growth of your earnings.

More loyal readers - the longer you blog the bigger your potential loyal readership. Now of course this depends upon your quality of content, how useful your blog is and how you look after and interact with your readership - but over time as more and more people surf in you’ll start to find the same readers names keep appearing in comments and emails. If you look after these readers and keep providing the type of content they are looking for you’ll find that they’ll keep coming back and your readership base grows.

Search Engine Rankings Rise - it takes time but the more you blog, the more you should climb the Search Engines. This is a result of a number of factors. Firstly because it takes time to get indexed by SEs, secondly SEs tend to like substantially sized sites and thirdly because the longer you blog the more you’ll accumulate incoming links to your site (if you interact with other bloggers and write link worthy content) and the more incoming links the higher you’ll be ranked in the SEs.

More Blogs - I’ve talked many times here before about my approach to blogging being one of tackling a niche topic rather than having a general topic blog. My recommendation to bloggers wanting to blog on a diverse range of topics is to have a blog for each topic. This has been my approach and is another reason for the rise in my earnings graph over time. As I add new blogs to my stable of blogs I increase the overall readership that is being exposed to my ads.

Other Factors

Of course its not all about increasing your readership despite what the pretty graphs might show. Here’s a couple more reasons for my own growth of Adsense earnings that sprint to mind.

Better Positioned Ads - the longer you blog the smarter you should become with positioning your Adsense ads on your blog. When I first started using Adsense I had one ad on each page and it was positioned low on the page in an unobtrusive position so as not to offend my blogs readership. I quickly learnt that people don’t click on ads that they don’t see and began to experiment with new positions, different colour schemes and even new blog designs that were specifically designed to showcase the ads on the site. Each change I make I track using the channels feature - what works I replicate on my different blogs - what doesn’t I continue to tweak. Not every change I make works - but there have been numerous changes in positioning that have resulted in significant growth along the way.

Better Paying Ads - another way to get smarter with your ads is to target higher paying keywords in your content which trigger the better paying ads. My first blog was on spirituality, culture and my life here in Australia. At its peak it had quite a large readership but it never earned more than a few dollars per day because the topics I wrote about had no real commercial viability. As I experimented with new blogs I found that some topics paid more than others and might be worth investing some time and energy into. Not all of my new blogs are high paying (I also target topics with potentially high readership - and write some blogs that are not about earning money at all) but I’ll admit that some of my blogs were more about their earning potential than other factors.

By no means is this a definitive list of ways to exponentially grow your blog - its just scratching the surface really - rather its some starting points and things to keep in mind if you’re at the beginning of the long tail of a graph like the one above. Keep working hard, build your readership, get smart with your ads and don’t give up.

Feel free to share your thoughts, experiences and suggestions below in comments.

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