WP Minisite Experiment: the first revenue

If you are new to my newsletter or don�t remember what this live experiment is about, read the last private posts starting from August 2006.

This time it took quite long to get the site indexed in Google and Yahoo - 7 days! Once I saw it (www.myhomecleaningtips.com) indexed in Google, I added the AdSense code directly to the template for individual posts. You might also notice that I have changed my theme to a fixed width layout and 3 columns on the index pages, whereas the individual posts have only 2 columns. This gives the AdSense ads a better exposure and it almost doubled the CTR.

In August, the site has earned $ 6,78 and this month (September 2006) it has earned $ 40,90 from AdSense clicks.

For the site promotion I have only submitted it to some RSS and blog directories (as shown in my blogging video tutorial) and submitted one article to a few (I think it was 5 or 6) important article directories, until yesterday: the second article was submitted to 5 directories which took another 15 minutes that we�re going to add to the total time investment.

Unfortunately, none of the visitors took the opportunity yet to submit an article or a question. Remember, one point of the experiment was to find out if we can get users to submit content, so we do not have to write all the content ourselves. Maybe I should just tell them to submit their questions/articles through the contact form instead of requiring users to register and post to the blog by themselves.

By the way - I noticed that it was not a good idea to place a form on the contact page of my blog. This form is also getting spammed by automatic blog commenting tools. I�ll need to find a way to include those security codes into the form to prevent software from submitting junk.

I have still 8 original articles left over that will be used for the site promotion, i.e. I�ll submit those to article directories over the next 3 months in order to steadily increase inbound links, traffic and profits.

As I have paid a ghostwriter to write the articles, it will take another two or three months before I actually begin to profit from the site if AdSense continues to be the only revenue stream.

Total time spent: 11 hours 30 minutes
Total money spent: 159,40 $
Total money earned: 47,68 $