Beginning of the end for my text link business model? | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

sensetosave said:

Anyone else use this business model? What do we do?

@Kacie

I don't have the answer for you unfortunately, but wanted to give you some hope.  Last January (2011) my adsense check was almost $5k.  I barely knew what I was doing, but luckily stumbled across a few keywords that were paying pretty well.  I was averaging between 100-120k visitors per month and was on cloud nine. 

I got hit by Panda in April 2011 and saw my traffic hit new lows May, June, July, and August.   I went from averaging over $100 per day to $20 on a good day.  Talk about frustrating. 

That's when I realized I couldn't be dependent on source of income.  At the time I really couldn't do text links on my homepage (and don't really do them now on my main site). 

I started focusing on building my email list, doing an occasional sponsored post (I'm very selective on which ones I accept no matter what they pay), affiliates, affiliates, affiliates, and now banner advertising. 

This month my traffic is back – finally!!.  Although I think I'll pass 100k in visits my adsense is still only 1/3 of what it used to be.  I wish I knew why, but I'm just thankful that I added other income sources to diversify. 

I guess the moral of the story is to not get discouraged.  If you truly love blogging then by sticking with it you should have other opportunities present itself. 

Good luck!

Excellent Advice Jeff. In the beginning your only source of income is private sells. At a certain stage, those links causes negative effect. Through google and through readers dissatisfaction. 

Big blogs do not depend on them, visitors are enough to keep them going through CPC, CPM ads. So, just have your blog grow bigger and money would follow. Don't get disheartened. 

Frugal dad gets 8k per day, Trent gets 30k per day. Now if you put it against Jeff's numbers thy are earning more than 20k easily through their banner ads. They don't even have adsense. (its different story that they are now sold).

Not everyone can be like them but we can definitely try to reach Jeff's Numbers, which is way more than what I earned on most profitable month through private sells.