Mamas On The Web

Adsense reports are a great way to stay motivated and earn more

A few days ago I sat down and agreed with myself to do the meticulous task of creating my own customized Adsense reports.

Any Google Adsense publisher can download reports right from their Adsense account, but I’m ridiculously anal about my numbers so I had to create my own reports. After a couple hours I had what I wanted.

I made seperate sheets in OpenOffice’s Calc for each month of each year that I’ve been an Adsense publisher. I then created another sheet that pulled the totals from each month to create a monthly/yearly overview.

I printed off this overview and have it sitting right in front of my monitor. I’ll update it weekly so my numbers stay current but the main purpose of doing this is to use these numbers as motivation to continue to keep those numbers growing.

I can also see which months performed better and figure out why. This helps me get rid of the ads that are sucking and tweak other ad units to do even better.

My intial goal will be to increase my Adsense income every month by 50 percent. I hope that isn’t an unrealistic goal but I’ll do my best to make sure I don’t eat my words after the first month.

At first I was simply aiming to do better than the previous month, but I realized this wasn’t a specific enough goal. If this goal of increasing my Adsense income by 50 percent isn’t challenging enough, I’ll change it to double every month.

Wish me luck and pray that I don’t embarrass myself!

And if it helps, try creating something like this for yourself to keep motivated. Not only is it a great way to keep your momentum going, but it’s exciting to see that all that hard work is paying off.

Add comment April 26th, 2008

Swipe Files

Have you ever read an email or a sales page and you thought “Wow, this is really good! I wish I had thought of that”. I have many times.

Awhile ago, I started two ’swipe files’ for myself, one in my email folder and one on my desktop. When I see emails that I think are particularly good (especially if I’ve purchased the product) I’ll save it to my swipe file. Same thing goes for a web page or blog I like. If I see a new concept or I like the layout, I’ll save the page to my desktop swipe file if I need some inspiration later.

The key is not to copy these pages or emails, but to use them to come up with new ideas for yourself. Take the idea and improve on it, but don’t blatantly rip it off.

I’m kicking myself for not starting my swipe files sooner because there have been lots of great ideas that I’ve missed out on. So if you haven’t started your own swipe file, you should do that now. You’ll thank yourself later.

Add comment May 16th, 2007