Does Google AdSense make sense with blogs?

Most of bloggers that are hosting their blogs themselves, are trying to scrape some income from the net to cover the hosting and other costs. I’m not an exception. In fact, my dream (or fantasy) is that Nomadig.com would provide enough money and contacts that I could concentrate fully on being a digital nomad…

With the current ad rates, it will take ages. Maybe my grand-grand-grand-children would have some possibilities with the current set of growth.

When I started to ponder this, backed with the data in my ShortStat stats, I found out that 20-25% of visitors check the journal front page, 5% see the site front page (no ads) and additional 5% reads the blog with RSS (no ads). Some of the most frequently visited articles generate additional 3-4% each and the rest is scattered with the information pages (travel, gadgets, money).

So the blog generates roughly more than half of the traffic. No wonder, as it’s updated frequently and it seems to contain some interesting articles. But, I think that the people reading the blog, people returning to the site, do not click that much of the ads. My eye, for example, has trained itself to skip Google ads in other blogs that I read frequently. It’s safe to assume that other people active in the blogosphere have similar habits. Also the contents of the blog change so rapidly that Google is not able to match it with ads that fit the text. The content is quite mixed, too, so you can’t really have a good set of targeted ads.

But those people that find this site, especially the pages outside the blog, with Google or other search engines are more prone to click the ads, as the ads are targeted to the content of the page. The same applies, at least partially, to individual blog entries.

In order to get more money from AdSense, I need to get more visibility in search engines. Not by spamming my links everywhere, but by writing interesting content and getting people to refer to my site.