Two weeks of AdSense

Not as impressive. We made $3.50 in the first week, but as of the beginning of week 3, we only have $3.96 total. A lousy $0.46 in week 2.

As a responsible marketer, I’m going to chalk it up to the holidays. Who visits the web over the holidays anyway!? Doesn’t the entire world shut down? Our traffic was down only 36%, but ad clicks were down 92%.

As a responsible marketer, I’m going to point out that there’s no way that these trends can be statistically significant with traffic and click volumes that small. (the 92% drop? try 13 clicks in the first week and 1 in the second week.)

As a responsible marketer, I’m going to tell you that these things take time - patience is required to really see the fruits of our labor.

But as an anxious site manager and AdSense addict, I’m going to say I’m disappointed.

One week of AdSense

And the grand total is:

Three Dollars and Fifty Cents.

Not bad, considering most of the week, we only had a 90×468 on the homepage. I’ve added a 160×600 to the right side of most pages, which has really bumped the impressions up.

$3.50 x 52 weeks = $182 we did not have before.

Baby Broke Ribs

As in I am a big baby, and my ribs hurt. I was in the gym the other day - first time I’ve been in a gym in a long time. My coach, Juli, had given me a lifting protocol to follow, as well as several workouts to do in the final weeks of 2007. I am actually really excited to begin training again - gotta get ready for Ironman next summer. But that’s another post - more than likely, many posts.

 So I am in the gym (that’s me, below)… doing Hamstring Curls:

and what should happen, but I popped some cartilage in the front of my ribcage! It’s an old snowboarding injury, that somehow always manages to f- with me at exactly the wrong time in life. It is not as bad as it has been in the past, but just a real annoyance that I could have easily done without. 

Hot.

One of the photos in my (as of right now) generic flickr photo widget on the side of my blog is of this little gem above. Very, very nice, and made by a kind of cool company, called Mission Bicycles in San Fran. They basically will build you a clean and elegant custom fixed-gear bike for $790, with a custom paint job, decent componentry which is easily upgradable, and artist-supplied decals. Overall, I’d say that’s not a bad deal, considering that there’s stock fixies out there with lower quality builds that are about the same price.

I think the only thing I would do to this bike to make it truly all matte-black would be to swap out the wheels for some carbon-rimmed Zipp 303’s with the decals removed. Of course, with this upgrade it triples in price, and loses the bomb-proof wheels that make a fixie a plow-horse as opposed to a show-horse.

I do like this company’s approach though. Order online, keep in simple with one product, but customize as people desire. Start small. Focus on quality. Here’s the founder’s blog. I hope these guys succeed!

Addicted to AdSense

Hello, my name is Mike, and I am addicted to AdSense.

<HI MIKE>

So I’m doing a little experiment with Google AdSense - I’ve added it to the homepage for my triathlon team. I call it “my” triathlon team because, first off, I love my team, and I feel a very tight bond with the group. But I also happen to be the president of the team, which means that I can exert a little influence here and there.

So in an attempt to gauge just how valuable a marketing tool our team website really is, I’ve added a 468×60 text-based AdSense box to the bottom of the page. Now I am addicted. I can not stop going into my dashboard to see if I have any incremental clicks on the page. So far today, the team has earned $1.22 on 49 impressions and 2 clicks. Not bad, I say.  However, I think about the spike in traffic we saw after one of our team members was featured on the MTV show “MADE” and I am kicking myself for not having it implemented sooner.

I’ll probably have to start promoting the website more heavily now - nothing crazy, just being sure to include the url in my email and forum signatures.

By the way - check out bostontriathlonteam.com to see it in action.