My motorcycle blog, Biker News Online, appears to be soaring on two fronts: traffic and earnings.

The increase in traffic seems to have occurred from mainly two things, one is the fact that it now ranks #1 on Google for the term, "biker news". We've been sitting at #2 and #3 for several months previously. The other thing is that I've boosted the number of tags on the blog, producing another couple hundred category pages, all of which get indexed on Google.

Thus far, traffic today seems to be three times higher than at the start of this year.

The increase in earnings is largely with Google AdSense. Naturally, the increase in traffic affects the earnings. But it is in fact earning a higher effective CPM than in past months. I think this has to do with the new page design that I implemented a month ago. The page design is wider than the previous design, optimized for screen resolutions at 1024 pixels wide, as opposed to the 800 pixels design I had before. This allows me to run the 160x600 skyscraper AdSense creative, instead of the previous 120x600 skyscraper.

The effective CPM is higher than before, at about $6.00 CPM versus about $5.00 CPM before.

I've also added graphical ad banners from Adify.com, one is a skyscraper located below the AdSense creative, while the other is a 300x250 panel located at the bottom of every article page. I've had some "decent" earnings from Adify on Junk Food Blog and DoggieNews. These are all CPM buys.

The reason for utlizing CPM buys is because my blogs are getting a lot of referrals from Google Image search. When people peruse the images on Google, it has the effect of generating a page view for me whenever they click on an image. So, by throwing in a couple CPM ads, I can monetize those views.

If the CPM ads on Biker News Online do well, I'll be really happy with the earnings performance, and as such, reduces my concerns down to just getting more traffic.  

Labels: Adify, Google AdSense, Monetization