Okay, I’ve got the AdSense action up on LearningPhoto now under the individual entries. Between TGB and this site I’m now making around 130 impressions a day. LearningPhoto should add at least another 25 a day.
It should be understood that this is very lightweight traffic. Reasonably speaking, I would probably need to be generating about 10 times my current traffic before I see any real revenue from AdSense. Some of that I can gain by restricting feeds, which I’m still not sure I want to do. I also need to raise the profile of the sites in general by posting on other blogs and message boards where I can bring something relevant.
I also need to have some reasonable submission mechanism for pages like MacNN when I write relevant Mac articles on TGB. MacNN can bring thousands of visitors a day and both times I’ve submitted to them, they have accepted the links.
I also need to kick The Big Swede and Bryan into gear getting up some posts on TGB. The Big Swede should by now have a huge list of post topics related to managing a K12 lab that I’d like to read, and some useful scripts he’s written that he could post. Bryan should also have some good stuff in mind with his new job coming up. Between the 3 of us we should be able to consistently post 3 items a day, and that would help our readership tremendously.
I’m kicking around the idea of starting a blog specifically dedicated to making money blogging, and documenting our path towards profitable blogging. There’s a lot of information out there of varying worth and it would be nice to bring the good stuff together under one roof. I wouldn’t expect it to make much money in and of itself, as I doubt keywords like blogging bring in much earnings per click, but it would be fun to do some specific studies in ad placement and publish the results. I’m still kicking it around as an idea.
I am starting to believe that one could support oneself on ad revenue by running a handful of useful sites. You’d have to spend a lot of time on the marketing side of things, making sure your ads were done right, and on creating a great site in general that gets good page views, but I think it’s definitely doable.