It´s some time ago when the WordPress.com people introduces WordAds. They talked about WordAds first time in November 2011 and I reblogged the news at that time. WordAds is a program that allows bloggers of the wordpress.com community to earn some money. This works on the way that they can enable ads on your blog and you will be paid by cost per impression (CPI) or in other words, the more people visit your blog the more you can earn.
Now some people would say that they don´t want ads on their blog but the reality is that there are already ads on your wordpress.com blog unless you paid for the no ads upgrade. I started blogging with the intention to have a platform where I can write down my thoughts or where I can collect content I produced. We get a lot of stuff for free here on WordPress and this is awesome but when I heard about WordAds, I started to think that it is just fair if I can get a share of the revenues and ads that are shown on my blog anyway. That was basically the reason why I started to apply for the WordAds program and my blog was accepted. If you want to learn more about WordAds, then check out their website.
Nothing did change for me. I was still here to write down my thoughts or some things I know and the only difference was that I now would get a share of the revenue. I thought this would be fair. I didn´t start to fight for traffic to earn more, I simply did what I always did, writing about all my different interests and that not in my native language (as I mentioned often, I enjoy to learn english).
Over the time I found a lot of blogs where people state that WordAds wouldn´t allow them to make meaningful earnings, while I did notice the exact opposite. I thought some people would expect to get rich quick while I never expected that I could live from blogging as this is rather unrealistic for a “fun blog”. It also must be considered that WordAds does pay out much better if visitors come either from the USA or Europe. That´s what you can find out on the WordAds blog and it seems that this has to do with the advertise partners which pay much more in the USA and Europe. This sounds very logical and if your traffic comes mainly from India (as Example), it won´t allow you to earn much. Another thing is that you usually need thousands of visitors even from USA or Europe to see meaningful earning. But I don´t want to dig too deep into this subject as I do not work for WordAds. I just can tell you what I found out on my own.
What I want to show those who would like to give WordAds a try, is that I do think you can earn some Dollars with WordAds in case your blog is targeted to the above mentioned areas and if you have at least some thousands of visitors and page views per month. It still won´t make you rich but it is enough to call it a good revenue for all the hard efforts to share opinions, knowhow and what not. It is even enough money that could be used to upgrade our blogs, to compensate domain costs or what ever. As you can see, I simply disagree that it is too less because it depends on the traffic and some other factors. This is why I want to show you my information’s and my experience with WordAds. I do think it is better than some people wrote. But enough, let´s dig into some data now.
One important thing to know is that WordAds does only pay out if you reached $100 of earnings. I activated WordAds on my blog in July 2013 when my blog received 7639 views in the month. I guess this was pretty low traffic and I was a little bit disappointed too when I saw my first earning of $4.28 but there was a slightly increase in traffic the following August month and this resulted in $5.33 of earnings but as you can see, with this traffic growth rate I would wait round about 18 more months to see a $100 cash-out. I noticed that any amount of page views below 10000 could be considered as low traffic when we talk about the revenue I saw. I even started to ask myself why they accepted my blog but on the other side I remember that they warned me. I asked my self if it is worth to show ads on my blog but I stayed cool as they would show ads even if I would deactivate WordAds as long as I wouldn´t rent the “No Ads Upgrade” which I didn´t plan to do.
I started with the Simple Ad option the first two month and decided to let them activate the Optimized Ad layout in September when I remember right. in September 2013 I got 13015 views on my blog and $10.76 were added to my balance. In October 2013 my traffic was doubled and $22.58 were added. In November 2013 I received 54572 page views and I remember it was due to the fact that a very popular news magazine linked to one of my articles. This did catapult one of my articles on the first Google page. Some other articles got attention and links as well and the game changed as $48.22 were added to my balance. With a balance of $91.17 I knew that I would only need another month and $9 to reach the minimum cash-out level but I received 43278 page views and $42.09 were added so that I overstepped the minimum cash-out level with $133.26 and I received it on PayPal.
In my table you can see that the ad impressions are always different to the page views my blog received. The explanation is simple. Many people run ad blocker for example and that means that not every ad will be shown. I calculated based on the six months that 44.83 % ads will be blocked by people. This is the average value based on all months and this means you can basically cut your traffic by half to understand how many page views will give you revenue. I visualized this with a graph in Open Office…
This is also visible in my first image with the table. Basically you would get an average of $0.20 per 100 ad impressions but as I explained, ad impressions aren´t the same as page views due to the fact that many people simply block the ads. This means you would rather get $0.09 if we talk about 100 page views.
Now we could even calculate a dozen of different things out of these values. How much monthly stable traffic would we need to get $100 out each month? Well we take the entire value of 149978 blog or page views from my table and divide it with the entire earnings $133.26 of all months together and then we need to multiply the result (round about 1125.45) with the value 100. We will need a monthly traffic of round about 112545 page views. I love rule of the thumb estimation and would say that you simply need 100k page views per month to get $100 out each month. Some might argue now that this is not much but multiply it by 12 and you have $1200 extra revenue in a year for what? For doing what you would anyway do if you are interested in blogging. Writing! I´d say take the money or let them take the money. It´s way enough money to compensate your costs if you have a domain or if you pay for other upgrades.
I showed in my table that it is possible with consistent blogging to double the numbers. Sure, sometimes it is also based on luck if your articles get a lot of attention or in the best case if they get links to increase your Google visibility. But it doesn´t matter anyway. If writing is your favorite activity and if you write a lot and if you believe in your activity, sooner or later people will find your stuff. Yea, you will need a minimum amount of page views to get accepted to the WordAds program but I thought it is not too much. I guess that this is the last problem if you already have some thousand visitors each month.
Many people think that it is unethical to get a little income as a blogger but some forget that we put a lot of efforts into our things and it takes time and sometimes even money. I do think it is ethical very reasonable to get something back for our efforts. And to be honest, what do you mean how bigger networks stay alive? Do they write all the cool stuff you can read everyday for free? No, they have revenues too. I won´t refuse to accept revenue as well. Apart from that, nothing changed.. I simply continue writing about my interests.
Do you run WordAds on your blog? What is your experience? Or have you thought about giving it a try? Tell me your opinion in the comment section if you like.
Diary of Dennis 
Hi Dennis,
I just want to say thanks for this blog entry, I just activated WordAds today and have been reading multiple people’s experiences.
Your article here has been by far the most informative and accurate, as I am trying to calculate what I may be able to expect for income.
My blog averages around 100,000 hits per day, with spikes as high as 500,000 (1.5 million per day in the past), so I am hoping this could potentially generate solid income.
Thanks again for the effort you’ve put into these calculations and writing this review, it’s been very helpful.
Best,
– JMS
Thank you James for your feedback. You have some impressive numbers with your blog. This sounds very motivating. I think in your case the revenue wil be much higher if the traffic is mainly from USA and Europe. It´s great if you can get something back for you efforts. Have much fun James and thanks again for your feedback about my article. 🙂
it’s been a couple years since you wrote this dennis … i’d love to hear how things are going now.
Many people including me experienced a cut in earnings of 50%, but WordAds promised the rates would increase again… I do currently monitor how things will work out in the beginning of 2016. They did publish WordAds 2.0 and they said they would get more advertisers on board with the new tools. I planned to write a newer review, but I have many other things on my to do list, including a blog rebranding, so it’ll take some time.
HI Dennis, Thanks for your article, I really enjoyed it, as I am considering if I should go premium or not, and it’s really hard to find any info about the exact amounts a blog can make. Would love to know your thoughts about WordAds now, if that’s possible.
Thanks 🙂
Hi there. You need premium today? For what? I think you just need a domain to use WordAds… isn’t it possible anymore to get a domain without premium plan? I think most of the features in the WordPress premium plan are worthless, but the domain definitely makes sense. My thoughts about WordAds, I do still use it and get regular payments. In case you can get a domain only, and if you have nice traffic with visitors from Europe or North America, I would still suggest WordAds to you. The rates are sometimes a bit lower now, sometimes higher because they introduced a bidding system for advertisers, which means now advertisers can bid on your ad-space, and that’s how the rates are calculated. Since this is now more functioning like an open market, it became even harder to calculate or predict the payments. But I still get payments every one or two months, depending how things go, which season, how much traffic and if my ad-space was sold out. If you plan to get a domain anyway, I’d suggest you to give it a try, but I wouldn’t just get a domain because of WordAds alone… but again, if you want a domain anyway, give WordAds a try later on too!
Great reply, thanks Dennis. You certainly have given me some food for thought about going premium and Wordads. I wasn’t quite sure why I wanted it, I guess that’s the reason I asked for the info, you’ve been very helpful 🙂
I did the same back then. First I searched information’s about the program and then I waited with the decision. But I always wanted to have a domain for my personal blog, and when I got mine, I also thought I could just give WordAds a try and sticked with it until today. 🙂 So, take your time… if you are serious about blogging, you will eventually want to purchase your personal domain, and from there you can freely try WordAds since their only requirements are a domain and decent traffic (althought I’ve heard they lifted the traffic requirement but I am not sure). Thanks for stopping by!
Nice review on Wordads!
I just activated Wordads last month, hoping to see some results soon.
By the way, good job in increasing your web views! 43000+ views a month in less than a year is really impressive.
Have a nice day.
Nice to meet you. Hope you will be happy with WordAds too. It´s a cool program in my opinion. And thanks for the compliment about the review and my numbers. I fell in love with blogging some time ago and I guess consistent blogging and a little bit luck might be the reason of my blogs growth. Hope you have much fun with blogging too.
would you please tell us what was ur status of income, views and impression for Jan and Feb??
I can only talk about January since the February income is not visible yet. January was $32.45 with 17,243 ad impressions and 48928 views.
In February I had nearly 70000 views and I am very nosy how much ad impressions I had in February. I will find out in some days when the numbers are released by WordAds.
I want to know how do they count impressions..!!
I have 3 ads on my page.. so is it like 3 impression for viewing one page or 1 impression( for 3 ads combined) for one page..??
I have contacted them in 2013 with the same question via email. I asked them “I have read about the Optimized Ad layout. As it would show two more ads per page view as the ad layout I have activated right now, I wonder if it would also count more impressions per pageview than now?
They answered “Yes, that would be effectively 3x the impressions (accounting for ad blockers and such).”
So, it will count more impressions, yes. And this was really my experience. I got more impressions when I activated it, while it´s hard to say as my traffic was increasing at that time too. Hope this helped you.
Whats the ideal date of payment???
and btw…y cant i see any ads on ur blog??
They usually pay around the second or third week of the following month.
Your blog is hosted at wordpress.com and I did disable ads for logged in wordpress users. It´s an option you can set. All other logged out or not logged in users, for example users that come through google, will see ads.
But why would u do that?? I mean you could earn more money if u allow everyone for ads..rite??
or it doesnt make much of difference..!!!
and m bit very much curious about my first income.. this is my 3rd month..and last month i started ads…i could manage to get views of 2 lac ..m just curious to know how much i shall get..
most of my public were from India and Philippines..!!!
I target my blog to Google Search and most traffic and visitors (90% I would say) arrive via Google Search. Then I would say there are 5% of visitors via Social Media channels and referred links and the other 5% are WordPress Users. While this is my rule of thumb estimation… but the visitors from WordPress are really a tiny percentage of all the other visitors. It wouldn´t make much of a difference and I thought I won´t show community members ads (yes, a little bit of community kindness is intended from myself).
As stated in the article. If your main visitors aren´t from Europe or America, you won´t get much of a revenue. This is due to the fact that ad publishers from other places can´t pay that much like those from Europe and America. I´m sorry to say this but visitors from India and Philippine won´t let you see much revenue.
You would need way more visitors than I have and even then it would probably be a very tiny revenue. This is also the reason why you find so many “bad reviews” about WordAds. They talk about “earned 2 Dollars a month” and rant about WordAds that the program is bad. But it´s not… it depends where the visitors are from. Asian ad publishers for example don´t pay much, that´s why.
Hoping for the best though..
What countey ads do u have the most..i.mean tell.me top 5 .
I wanna target them …and how do u target google search??
Yes, hoping for your too. I wish you much luck.
I guess you mean country visitors…. Ok, again quik rule of thumb estimation then… all time country charts in the dashboard:
First place…
1. USA (maybe 80 % of all time visitors since blog birth)
Then other 20% shared by…
2. United Kingdom
3. Germany
4. Canada
5. Australia
and then a dozen of other countries.
You can tell Google with help of the Webmaster Tools what kind of audience you are targeting. You can choose a country there, if you like. It´s not must.
Other key factors are logically…. the language you write in… if it is the USA, you must write in english for sure. Then you must logically write about things that people ask Google often (also depends… it´s clear that someone from the USA probably wouldn´t search for a local music group from India as example). You must hit topics that are asked in the country you want to write for.
You sure should always add the right keywords to your articles.
I think this would be the basics about targeting to a set country. I guess my list is not complete. But that is basically what “targeting” to certain people means.
Then it also depends if you have a niche blog or a broad blog. As I have a broad blog, catching readers via Google works better. A niche blog would rather create a loyal user base and would not need much Google traffic as the loyal readers will find more content that they are interested in (higher click through rate). As you see… it´s a complex topic and not easy to answer to in a comment.
Wow…
I suggest you to write a blog on this topic..
Wish I cud double follow u..hehe…
U explain too good.
I might do this someday. Wrote already a lot of articles about similar subjects.
Got my first ads revenue today..here is a quickie..
Views after i installed ads: 150000 views (approximate)
Ads Impression: 52000
Earnings: $49
Unable to judge whether its a good performance or average or below average..!!
I would say this is not too bad. One third of your views lead to ad impression and two thirds not. It seems that you have a little bit more visitors who installed ad blockers or visits that didn´t lead to ad impressions. In your case it seems to be around 30% ad impressions in relation to your traffic. But the revenue for your ad impression seems to fit to what I calculated in my review.
I´d say $49 dollar is not bad. If everything stays fine, you will get a payout every two months. Unless your ad impressions increase or decrease.
If you ask me, It still looks fine. I´m happy to see that you get revenue for your work too.
Thanx Denis..!!!
I read that somewhere…That Wordads doesnt show ads in few countries..( for example,say something like Vatican City, Libya, Somalia, Suriname etc)..I have around 10k visitiors from such smal countries..may be thiese views couldn’t convert into ads impression…!!
Btw, what is the other way to not count a view as ad impression apart from ad blocker?
Again to mention, 70% of my visiots were from India+Philippines, which are few of the lowest paying countries..
However, I have strategize after having words with u last time..this month, i have higher portion of USA, UK, Canada, Netherlands and Australia visits in ratio to Indian and philippines compared to the ratio of last month..!!! and views wise i have already crossed 1 lac till now..so lets see how it works now..
I think you mentioned already one of the biggest alternative reasons, why traffic wouldn´t lead to ad impressions. One reason could be that there are no advertisers in that particular country. You mentioned it already.
Another example would be that one of your visitors goes through too many of your articles. The visitor maybe would “let me say” see for example ads on the first 10 or 15 posts, but at some point WordAds would block his IP for a while. I don´t know the exact numbers, however it is very logical that WordAds want to prevent this. If your visitor looks at more of your articles, it might happen that he won´t see ads after a while. But the visitor will see ads again if the IP is reset (which happens all 24 hours wiith internet service providers), or if the visitor has run a cookie cleaner and reseted his router on his own, so that he has a fresh IP.
That together with adblockers, would be the main reasons why impressions wouldn´t count, I guess. Maybe there are other reasons, who knows. However, it wouldn´t be different if you would host your blog anywhere else and if you would use Google´s AdWords system for example.
To the other point, yes as I said… Europe and American visitors lead to better revenue. However, don´t forget that it isn´t all about money. You should also consider to reach your target group. One big suggestion is, not to write just because of the money.
The biggest risk here would be that your readers could notice it! That could backfire at you at some point. I´d suggest, do what you always do… write for you and your readers and if it leads to revenue, then everything is fine. But I would create stragegies around the readers and not around the revenue, if creating a readership and having fun with blogging, is your main goal. Only writing to increase the revenue, could cause the opposite. Just want to mention this. But if your articles fit to the American and Eurpean visitors, I´d say… yes mix it up… good job.
@Denis..!!!
Nope, when i said I am targetting USA and European countries, Quality was by default assumed. The thing is that my blog is a niche blog of all the pageants and fashion. SO i can cover any region as i follow Miss Univers and Miss USA as good as I follow Miss India and other national pageant. Hence I and my team thought of globalising the blog rather than just keeping it Indian.
Moreover, for us to generate sufficient revenue is very imp. We dont keep a single money in our pocket actually, we conduct contest of People’s Choice where ppl vote for contestants and we send trophy and gift to the winner. Moreover, we also donate certain portion of our earning for social cause NGOs. Hence, we were trying to generate as much earning as we can so as to support these two reason. None of my team members are willing to generate livings out of this ads income as we all are well settled in life. We were curious to learn things and we learnt A LOT after starting blog just as a hobby..!!!
If you don’t mind can you please send me a screenshot of the ads you see on my blog?? I wanna know what kind of ads are displayed in Germany. 🙂
Cool. I didn´t assume that purposefully quality wouldn´t be your intention. It´s just still worth to mention in case other people read here. Targeted traffic will attract readers. If you realized your niche can attract world wide users, why not? I would say, go for it! In this case you do everything right 🙂
I have send you an email with the requested screenshots, while it won´t look that different I guess. The ad size is probably the same size, only the ads are different I guess. Btw. I removed your email address in your comment, due to the fact that it is never good to publish an email address open (scrapers could harvest the mail to send you spam, so don´t publish your email open anywhere).
Hello there,
Very good article. Exactly what I was looking for. WordAds have been activated in my site (Greek language) oraria.gr (which means timetables). I have 22k views per month but with only 15 posts or so. So I am optimistic. Do you know when the first count is being done (after a month). Can I follow my wordads stats per day or so?
Many thanks.
Not daily, only monthly… they usually post the stats in the middle of the following month. You get the announcement via email and then you can take a look at the WordAds dashboard.
Many thanks Dennis
You are welcome David, good luck with WordAds 🙂
Great Article Dennis, I really enjoyed reading it (your writing style is simple and easy flowing). I found your post because I have applied for WordAds few minutes ago and I wanted to see what other people are saying on the topic.
I find it disturbing to know that around 45 % of your visitors are using AdBlock… It feel that it is unethical, it is like going to restaurant to eat without paying. But I guess we have “the spammy sites” to blame for this and not those who install Adblcik, because when I visit some sites I have to battle my way through popup ads and countless advertising windows to close before reaching the content, It could get so irritating and I almost feel like using adblock. Who pays the price? descent sites that have passive and useful high quality ads.
Goodluck with your blog, keep up the good work
Your compliment about my writing style is motivating. It´s not my native language and I always try to improve myself but it is nice to hear that people were able to read my articles. Thank you.
You made a good point about the Ad-blockers. I have a AdBlock script installed in my browser too, exactly due to the reason you mentioned… I dislike intrusive ads like popups. But there are many sites I visit regularly and if they have clean ads without popups, I do put their sites on the exception list of the script, so that they get revenue through my visits as well.
You are right… the “black sheeps” like agressive internet marketeers for example and some other people with their intrusive ads and sometimes even scam, did lead people to the opinion that it is better to block ads and even better all java scripts for example with “no-script addons”. You made a good point. It´s indeed sad that fair people suffer from this situation now too. However, I think there are still possibilities with 45 % ad impressions. When traffic grows over time, it will still lead to a little revenue as it is still better than zero impressions.
Thanks for stopping by and I wish you luck with WordAds and your blog project too. 🙂
Hi Dennis,
Here I am, 7 months later. Finally my site got approved for WordAds and i just feel great about it. it is also very nice to see that you are still very active on WordPress and that your blog is almost (top 100,000 on Alexa) 147,557. Your story is inspiring :), are you considering being a full-time blogger now?
I am also writing an article (which I plan to update regularly) about my WordAds experience, here is the first version of it: http://humanbreeds.com/2014/10/13/wordads-advertising-on-wordpress/
I used your viewership and earnings stats in my blog and linked back to this article, so I hope that you are Ok with that.
Hope to hear more of your news soon,
Thanks you
Hey!
Congrats for being approved. I guess you are already motivated but with my experience, WordAds will motivate you even more. Nice to hear that you are in the program now too.
Yes, I am still active. I have no schedule but whenever I am inspired, I do share some stuff here. I pretty much enjoy that and don´t plan to stop.The fact that this blog is something like my diary, that allows me to write a lot of ideas or thoughts down that can´t be called niche issues.
The blog got some traction as other bigger sites have linked to some of my articles, yes. Yet I do think Alexa is pretty inaccurate. I think it´s easier for us here to push Alexa stats as the community and visitors are mainly blogger themselfe who have all kind of webmaster toolbars installed. But anyway, yes the blog has already pretty good stats in general also when we talk about Google. I am always amused when SEO agencies contact me to ask me if I need help. I never answered because one look at their sites makes me laugh. They probably should help themselves before they seek clients. Also it really shows that they don´t know nothing about websites.
I wouldn´t say that I am a full-time blogger. I guess this would imply that I could live from the blog income alone, but I can´t. It´s just some extra pocket money that I am thankful for. I think there are a lot of alternatives to monetize the blog but you know, we are just allowed to use WordAds here. But since we have the big advantage of free cloud hosting, no matter how much traffic we get, I prefer to stay here. This alone is a really big compensation that would otherwise cost a lot if you would host on your own.
I have read your review. Pretty much like your style of preparation. I really like how it looks visually. That´s still something I am often too lazy for. I prefer to write and don´t play much around with font colours and so. 😦
It´s totally ok that you took some numbers from my article too. And thanks for linking back. I actually like the idea to compare the results of different WordAds members. Cool idea!
Thank you for your update!
Great article Dennis. I’ve recently started a blog and I decided to apply to WordAds right off the bat, understanding that it will probably not pay anything for a long time. Since there are already ads it seems to make sense. Your breakdown was comprehensive and easy to understand. Thanks!
Thank you. I hope you applied to WordAds with another blog than the one you used to comment here, as they only accept blogs that are linked to a domain name. But I assume you did it the right way.
I applied recently with another new blog too and had bad luck as there was not much traffic on my newer blog. It seems that they tightened the requirements. I hope you have luck anyway.
Nice to meet you.
My blog would be classed as having low or even very low views per month. I had wondered about Adwords if I ever crossed the 1000 view threshold. Really appreciated your clear and consice post. Can I ask how often do you post? Currently I post weekly. Cheers. Andy
The program is called WordAds. By the way, you would need a domain to be accepted and not a free WordPress URL. But I guess you might know this already as you was just talking in theory. I wish you much luck. Blogging takes time.. maybe you get on board of WordAds too someday.
About my posting interval… It varies but you could say 30 and up to 70 articles per month. It really depends on my mood. I post daily unless I take a break for some days.
Greetings
Thanks for ur help. 🙂
You’re welcome 🙂
Hi Dennis,
Awesome entry. Like the others here in your comment section, I’ve only been approved for WordAds yesterday and I’m still in disbelief. I found your post by googling on what the average earning is for Wordads and I learned a lot from your entry, so thanks for that!
My average page views was around 20k per month but it climbed to 30k starting this year. Based on what I’ve read here, I’m hoping I’m at least good for $15 each month for my stats. Anyway, thanks again.
Regards,
I´m happy that you could gather some informations with my article. With 30k views you are really on a good way to get something out of it, if the visitors are mostly from Europe or North America. I think your estimation could be right. Maybe $15 or even $20 could be quite right. Hope your stats will climbing over time so that you work pays off well. I think we all put a lot of efforts into blogging and to share things with people. It´s really cool if bloggers get something back for the efforts 🙂 Good luck!
Got the results of my first month as a WordAds user. Have to say I was completely surprised by the amount, in a good way of course.
http://comicnewbies.com/2014/06/19/first-wordads-payment/
This looks very good to me. Looks like your blog does very well too and that there is potential. It´s also interesting to see that every thousand ad impressions make a difference in a few dollars. You got 21.660 impressions with $47.69 in the month where I got 23.332 impressions with $51.26.
You´re and my latest revenue confirms that we get around $0.22 per 100 impressions.
Seeing your and my latest revenue and compare them with latest months I see three possibilities…
1. They managed to get more ad partners on board so that they can pay out better since the last half year.
2. The revenue per impression will increase on different levels calculated on the entire traffic so that higher traffic blogs get a better cut than blogs that have less traffic.
3. Due to the different ads that are shown and that might give different revenue, it´s not possible to get an exact value of revenue per impression. Also since the impressions come from different countries that pay more or less.
Anyway… it´s now save to say that around $0.22 per 100 impression is disbursed to the blogger if the overall ad impressions are above 10.000 and mostly from Europe or USA and so. Our both recent pay per impression values are still quite coincident with the stats on my charts from October 2013 to December 2013.
I think I should either update this article here some day or write a second review with all the latest numbers of the last months. I might do this some day.
Also thanks to you for the response. Quite interesting to see and to compare the impression payout. 🙂
Great analysis. I’m excited if #1 and #2 are confirmed to be true. I’ll let you know if the .22 per 100 impressions theory holds true next month.
Cheers!
Thank you. Let´s see next month. Quite interesting and thanks for your informations as well. 🙂
Hi Dennis,
Sorry to bother you again about some question on WordAds, but you’re the only one I know who’s been at it for a long time, and extremely accommodating with answers. 🙂
I finally earned a 3rd payment and I’ve exceeded the $100 requirement. I checked their FAQS and saw this:
“Automattic will issue monthly payments approximately 45 days following the end of each month in which the applicable ad payments are received by Automattic.”
Does this mean I would need to wait 45 days starting September 1st before I get paid the full amount?
Thanks!
Hi Chan, you don´t bother me 🙂
The note in the FAQ is indeed a little bit confusing. I can just suggest to join the WordAds group and private blog of them. I think you got an invite when you have been accepted back then. If not, write them an email that you would like to get access to the group and the private blog. Then follow the blog via email notification. They don´t post often.
I say this because…
I got the email of the latest blogpost today that they posted the latest earnings, the earning of July 2014 last month. At the same time they mention:
“For those with a balance over $100, payment will be issued to the PayPal address you have provided at Settings > WordAds in your blog’s Dashboard by the last business day of the month, August 29.”.
That means they updated the balance today or yesterday. Added the July balance to your account and if you´re now over $100, you´ll receive payments in August 29. Basically 15 days later. It sometimes varies when they will update the last month balance but it happens usually at least near the middle of the month. And a half month later they will pay out if you reached the amount.
Not sure why they mention 45 days. It´s either an oudated FAQ, or I have now explanation for it. Whenever they updated the balance in the month, and if I reached the amount, they paid out on one of the last days of the month you reached $100. As said, usually a half month after the update at the end of the month.
If you´re not member of the private WordAds blog group yet, I suggest to ask for invite again. They will invite you. They describe much better in the monthly balance update posts when you will receive your payment. 🙂
Hope this helps you.
Ah. That sounds a lot better than the 45 days I read. I just reached $100 for July so if everything is treated the same, I should also get the payout at the end of the month.
Will definitely look for that group/blog. Thanks again!
Exactly. I think you should get the payment too by the end of August. 🙂
Oh by the way, I think the rate just got higher again (Yay!). Last time we spoke the rate was $0.22 per 100 hits. I applied that to my ad impressions right now and it seems I have an extra $5.
July payment: $70.15
Ad Impressions: 29,747
Just thought you’d like to know!
Congrats. Not sure if the rate is higher. It´s hard to say due to the fact that the payout depends on where the visitors are from. My earnings vary a lot too each month. On the other side it might be that they were able to increase the rate. I noticed too that the payments are a little bit stronger now. Hope it´s really due to an increasing payout per ad impression. Thanks for telling me your latest experience. 🙂
i could relate to your post 🙂 i got invited to join wordads around August 2013. I wasn’t really expecting to be invited because my stats went down after i moved back to wordpress coming from hostgator from an average visit of 15K a day i was back to 1K. I am surprised that i already hit a 100USD just this month. My first month earning was 3USD LOL. It started to increase by December 2013. I wasn’t expecting to earn from blogging, it was just pure fun. It’s nice to see though that 102.19USD earnings on my dashboard. I’ll just wait for it to get credited on my paypal 😛
Great that you get your first payout! I like your approach how to blog as I do it the same way. It´s basically to have fun sharing ideas, knowhow, stories, photos or what not… but we put a lot of efforts into it so that it is just fair that we get a share of the ad revenue. 🙂
Congrats to your earnings. 🙂
“I wasn’t expecting to earn from blogging, it was just pure fun.” <— This! I couldn't agree more to this.
Yea, this is really the best approach 🙂
Good review Dennis!
I think I will use Word Ads too.
If it´s the blog you linked to your name here, you will need a domain name first, just want to mention it but you maybe have read it already 🙂
Thanks for sharing! I googled and found your blog. I am not anywhere near the blog views you reported, but I could see the potential because most of my views are from searches.
Can I ask, have you thought of changing your blog to have more control of the adds? I think wordpress.org gives you this flexibility, though I haven’t looked into whether it would be worth switching over.
I had own wordpress software installed on rented webspace or hosts in the past for other projects and the problem is there that most web hosts will kick you out of the contract if you reach too much traffic (for example if one of your posts goes viral) with your blogs. In this case you would eat too much bandwidth as they often say and they usually don´t like this because your blog would consum more bandwidth than the other customers of them.
Only solution would be to rent cloud hosting but this would be more expansive then. But this is what I love about wordpress.com, as we have cloud hosting here and that for free. Lots of traffic would not be a problem here and it really doesn´t matter here. But apart from that, you are right, self hosting would allow more ad control and overall flexibility when we talk about design decisions and so on.
But I will stay here anyway as I have experienced how fast it can happen that one of your projects gets viral traffic and if this happens, then it is too late. Here I don´t have to be afraid. It would be only worth to switch if you get so much in that you can afford rented cloud hosting. I simply dislike to get into trouble just because one of my blogs gets too much traffic from one day to the other. It´s more save here I think.
About your blog…. Yea, it takes some time but since you have search engine traffic, it´s a good signal. It takes time but if you don´t give up, more traffic will come. I think you will get to this point too. Good luck 🙂
Thanks so much! Good things to think about.
Great article! Do you by any chance know what the minimum view you have to get each month is in order to be accepted for wordads? I can’t seem to get a straight answer. Even an approx answer would really help. Thanks!
Thank you. Some say and experienced that they have been accepted with around 20.000 monthly page views. But I have been accepted with around 5.000 monthly page views back at that time but I remember that I wrote them an email to ask about the status of my application and they said that my blog seems to have a nice history of traffic increases each month and potential, which is why they answered to my mail that they would accept my blog.
So, if your blog shows heavy growth each month, it might be worth to write them a mail. Otherwise some say that 20.000 page views should do it but don´t forget, this is speculation as I never heard the WordAds team mentioning any numbers. I at least didn´t find out much too.
Thank you so much! I really appreciate it.
Your welcome 🙂
Brilliant article ! ive seen so many with the opinion that wordads isnt worth trying but ive never thought that and i always got the sort of results you have seen so im glad it isnt just me ! im getting to the stage now where im getting between $55 and $120 a month and as you say people will say bloggers dont deserve that but i couldnt disagree more with them after all the hard work we put in.
great work keep it up 🙂
Pretty much agree with you. It´s up to you if you monetize your content, the readers get entertainment or find useful information for free, while you did put efforts into the content creation. I always thought it´s hilerious if people say that ads aren´t ok. I only would agree if we talk about obtrusive pop-up ads, which is why I have an adblocker installed on my browser but I allow serious blogs and magazines to show me ads, if they aren´t too obtrusive. I think content publishers need a way to get something in for the work, so that ads are completely fine.
I´m glad that I´m not the only one who thinks that WordAds is not too bad. Your income is great too! Cool that your work pays off too. Wish you much success. 🙂
Thanks for the statistics! This is exactly what I was looking for. I currently have the completely free version of WordPress and write a very niche craft blog. I’ve been pleased with my viewership since I started last year, but my viewership at this point would only earn me about $25 per year according to your numbers, which doesn’t justify paying to upgrade my domain name and messing up all of my current links. Thanks again for the information!
Thanks for stopping by. I agree with you that $25 dollar a year wouldn´t justify paying for a domain. I experienced that traffic won´t stop to grow as long as you won´t give up to write. Maybe next year it looks better for you, I´m sure. Wish you much luck. And thanks for your opinion. 🙂
It is a great article! But as you know, wordpress.com has space limit as 3G, if there are lots of pictures, the limit will be reached soon. May I know how you consider this problem? The wordpress.org hosting by the host company might be a good solution. And you can put more Ads to the blog to make more money. I am thinking of a switch. Do you have any advice? Thanks!
About the space limit of 3gb:
It´s not possible to fill it up to the maximum because 3 gigabyte are 3.145.728 kilobytes and you never should upload images in maximum size, most bloggers resize them to about 100kb and the images are still huge enough for the web. Not even professional magazines would upload full size images because they would decrease the load time of the website and this is for search engine optimization very bad. So, images shouldn´t be much bigger than 100 or 200 kilobytes and if you resize them to around 700 – 1000 pixel width, they won´t be much bigger than 200 kb. I usually have all my images 100 kb big and this means I can upload around 31.000 images but before I achieved this, I would probably be dead anyway. 🙂 If you don´t know how to resize images, you might want to read the article I wrote about it: https://diaryofdennis.com/2012/07/11/tutorial-converting-batch-rename-and-batch-resize-your-photos-with-irfanview/
So, again. Your 3gb of space limit are way enough to upload over 30.000 images and I assume you never will reach this point if you resized all your images as all people do it.
About wordpress.org versus wordpress.com:
Sure, the CMS software that you can download on wordpress.org to install it on your own webserver will give you more flexibility in design decisions. So if you are into CSS and PHP changes, it will allow you better customization. But there is one huge problem. It´s the fact that your hosting provider can kick you out of the contract if your blog gets too heavy traffic. This can´t happen here on wordpress.com since our blogs are hosted on a cloud. If we get viral traffic, huge chunks of views, it´s not a problem here. If you really want to host your blog elsewhere you are better off if you seek for a cloud hosting service if you expect to get too much traffic. This is the reason why wordpress.com is a much better solution for me.
About more money with a self hosted blog:
Yes you will have much more possibilities and not like on wordpress only WordAds. However, when you reach the point that your self hosted blog earns a lot, you probably also reached the point that your hosting service don´t want your blog on their servers anymore because your blog eats too much bandwidth. It happened to friends that their hosting providers simply did shut down their blogs and the sites were off until my friends found a better but also much more expansive hosting variant that is called cloud hosting. But again, here on wordpress.com we get cloud hosting for free. That is something you never should underestimate.
Let me know if you have more questions.
Thank you very much for your reply!
You´re always welcome 🙂
Interesting read, we are on our second month, In may we made $26 with 11,105 ad impressions, however this month our traffic has been in the hundreds of thousands…. So looking forward to finding the tally for that.
To be honest anything over $20 dollars a month pleases us as it covers the end of year upgrade costs.
Thanks for the review Dennis, its really helpful 🙂
Thanks that you let me know 🙂 Nice to know that people find it helpful. 🙂
Dennis, finally I made my first wordad earnings and it’s really impressive I must tell you. 91, 155 ad impression resulted to 205.34 dollars. What do you think? I don’t know if you can still remember me, we exchanged mails couple of weeks back.
Hey Timothy! Yes I can still remember you. Congrats for your earnings. That is pretty nice in my opinion. Good to hear that you work pays off!
Hello Dennis,
Thank you so much for this post! It is exactly what I was looking for! I don’t have nearly enough popularity (lucky to get one hit per day), but in the future, I’ll definitely look into WordAds! Once more, thank you!
Thanks for your feedback! It takes some time to build up the own blog but if you are patient, it will work for you too. But as a long-time blogger I suggest you to not only blog because of traffic or money, but I guess you won’t. I think the focus should be to have fun but if managing a blog becomes your passion and if you later have the chance to get a little pocket money from it, it’ll be that bonus motivation. Good luck to you!
Thank you! Honestly, I blog because I want to help other people; the likelihood of a blog actually becoming as successful as yours is rather small. Thank you again for the support!
That’s the right approach!… helping or entertaining people. On this way it’s not unlikely that you reach the same point. As you enjoy to share with people and as it is your focus, you have already achieved one thing, having fun. That alone is already enough. If you then find out that some of your articles get asked, it’s the perfect extra bonus. You have the perfect mindset for it, I keep my fingers crossed for you 🙂
I’m just a personal blogger who was patient and who talks about a lot of different things. I believe the reason why people think it’s not easy to get visitors, is the fact that 90% of the people give up after let me say a half year. I found some statistics about that some time ago. A half year is not much time in the blogosphere and some have too high expectations. The other 10% are long-time bloggers who realized that it’s a passion anyway and that it takes time to get more pageviews but if it happens, it’s rewarding and motivating. So, you’re expectations are not too high and your reasons for blogging are perfect and could make you be one of the 10% who can’t stop to blog because it’s fun. 🙂
Hello Dennis, I sent you a mail. Kindly check and reply…. Thanks
Saw it now. Sleeped longer and I guess we are in different time zones 😉 I’ll reply within the next minutes 🙂
Thanks bro I truly appreciate your friendship.
Thank you Timothy.
I would like you to say a BIG THANK YOU to your this post Denis..!!
because of you, I could do something which I thought is impossible in the beginning..i.e. getting a good earning from WordPress by less yet quality posts..!!!
I would love to know how your stats and earning has now evolved over a period of 11 months from December 2013..!!!
If you remember, I just earned 2.5$ in my first month..and now i earn more than 100$ on an average every month..I am unable to upload an image so sharing an image link here: https://thegreatpageantcommunity.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/pic2.jpg
It’s not a spam btw..lols 😛
I am very happy that you get something back for your efforts. 🙂 Thanks for letting me know your recent success. It’s very cool! My payment are usually around $50 to $90 depending if it was a good or bad month. Winter is better than summer anyhow. So, in my case I usually get payments every two months. It’s pocket money money but still useful. 🙂
How is that possible??
I analysed you blog stats on pagerank..!!
It says you have more than 180000 lac unique visitors and 49% of them are from USA..logically you should be earning in 1000s’ $…Your page rank is also 3 which is very good for a non-niche blog…!!! M surprised..
If you don’t mind, can you pls share your stats?
No, it’s not 180k visitors a month. It’s about 50k to to 70k monthly visitors but they are not unique IP’s but views. I think my blog has problems with the bounce rate. For a general blog it is of course quite difficult to keep all viewers on the site. If someone finds a Photoshop tutorial of me, he might be interested to learn graphic design, but he might not be interested in my cat stories or the photos of my cat and so.
I have a big mix of subjects and most users stay for one or two posts until they leave the site (expect photography interested wordpress.com users who seem to like browsing through my photos). Another reason could be, I did only enable ads for non logged in users. So, as you can see because you are logged in right now, you don’t see ads. I disabled it for the WordPress community. It would be probably more if I would enable it for WordPress users too but I don’t want that. I have so many WordPress readers and they comment on my blog, they share and they engage with me and that is already helping me and my my blog enough, I don’t want them to see ads, they do good things already. However, logged out users see ads, for example the ones who find my blog on Google.
I work on a pure tech niche site to build up a niche too, however, I do enjoy more to write on my personal blog here because I can write about so many topics. And with time, I guess the stats will be better. I mean if I compare the last year with the recent years, it looks good. Time and diligence is on our side, if we are patient and if we don’t give up.
About my stats, I won’t share them in detail yet. Maybe a small snippet of it in a new future review of WordAds. But I don’t want to fully publish all stats every time. Don’t get me wrong, this has nothing to do with you. I suggest you to not share too much too. You shouldn’t open your complete stats to anybody. It’s your internal stuff and people shouldn’t know everything about your blog.
Hi Dennis, I found your blog while googling for WordAds reviews as I want to apply for the same. You have come up with a wonderful post that answers every question that was on my mind. However, I am not a serious blogger like you, but recently (22nd Nov, 2014) upgraded to custom domain and don’t have many views. But the way you have explained everything in your article and in the comment section it will help me develop a strategy on blogging. And finally, I second MantisShrimp that your writing style is awesome. The article is so reveting as well as your replies to readers’ comments that I could not stop reading till the last comment-reply. And one must learn from you how to care about one’s blog readers. Thank you for the post!
Hi! It makes me happy when people say I was able to answer all of their questions with my article. This is good to know!
You got the domain and that is the first step, everything else is just time and passion. 🙂
It’s good if you develop a strategy and I suggest you to create content always if you are inspired and if you look back later, you really will think “Wow, did I create all those articles?” 🙂 I noticed that it doesn’t feel like work if it’s fun, and blogging is fun. I am sure you will be rewarded too because it’s sounds to me as you would love blogging too. Good luck!
Thanks for appreciating my writing style. I am German and it feels good when people do also like my English writing, because this is not my native language.
About comment replies… you are right. That is very important. There are some people who don’t do that, maybe because they are shy, but it’s really important to connect with people on your blog. Good to know that you know about the importance too, it will help you to connect with your readers. 🙂
Thank you for your nice feedback and again, good luck!
Thank you for your good wishes, Dennis and you too keep writing such enlightening articles for us 🙂
Thank you too 🙂 I will! 🙂
I must warn everyone concerning WordAds. They are not at all like dealing with the WordPress.com side of Automattic, Inc. They will not work with a website owner in good faith. They will terminate an account without any warning or even trying to work with a website owner over perceived violations of their terms of service. They also wish to withhold payments in the month that the alleged violations were spotted by them.
The problem with them is that once the account is terminated then they do not wish to allow the website back into their revenue sharing program.
We had 4 posts out of 8,000 that they found objectionable and instead of working with us to correct what they found objectionable they just up and terminated our account claiming our posts violated the Mature Material clause. They can determine according to this clause that anything could be Mature Material and just up and terminate an account without notice even thought the WordAds TOS does not state that.
We currently have a lawsuit against them concerning this matter that is still in the court system. At the time our account was terminated we were averaging over $300 dollars a month in revenue. Not much but enough to offset some of the losses our site has.
WordAds is our website’s only means of generating revenue on WordPress.com as they do not allow other advertising and circumstances prevent us from seeking other hosting. So we are going to fight them concerning this.
All WordAds had to do is notify us of potential TOS violations and we would have taken care of the matter immediately. They never even had the courtesy to notify us the account had been terminated and why. We had to contact them to find out what was going on.
That is not a good way to do business and look how much advertising revenue they are losing on our site. It would have been better for them to work with us instead of against us.
Hello. It’s sad that you had this trouble, however, I think I can see the problem with your site. I did just check out your site with SEMrush and saw that you are targeting indeed some mature keywords with some of your articles.
However, I wish they would have given you some time to explain you or to remove your problematic posts. But I think you should understand that advertisers can’t and won’t have their ads on any keywords or any article. WordAds clearly mentioned it too.
To be honest, if you wouldn’t have targeted mature keywords, you wouldn’t have had this trouble. In my experience it is very easy to work with WordAds support.
I hope there is still a chance for you to clarify the problem, but as I see it, I don’t think that you much of a chance with a lawsuit against them as they clearly state the rules.
Anyway, good luck.
I won judgement on the lawsuit to the tune of $2,000 dollars plus filing costs. Right now I am seeking to collect on the judgement. Maybe that will teach them a lesson in how to conduct business properly. Their terms of service does not state anywhere that they have the legal rights to terminate an account nor withhold payments in any manner as they did with our site Their rules,as you call it, are not clearly defined in their TOS and open to many interpretation especially the definition of Mature Material as that is in the eye of the beholder. That could be a innocent as Bella Thorne in a bikini on a beach if they so wished to see it that way. We only see it as entertainment news reporting with no other intent.
Hey this post is very useful, thanks for sharing. My blog doesn’t even come close to that much traffic in a month so I’ve got a looooonnnggg way to go =) How did you get a lot of traffic in such a short time? Impressive stuff.
I am happy that you thought the article is useful. As I started this blog here in 2011, it took me nearly two years to get to the stats shown in this article. I think it always takes a little bit of time to establish a blog. I hope you get to this point too.
Answering your question, I think there was also a little bit luck.First I wrote some guides about a computer game and didn’t think it would be too useful for people but then I realized I actually answered some questions with it that were heavily asked by people via Google. The game had quite a big community so that many found here via Google. Later I wrote some other articles about different subjects that turned out to be heavily asked too. So, answering niche questions, things that you know about your field, that works quite good in my opinion. But then there must also be some luck that some of the people who visit your blog create backlinks from other places to your blog, I got some very nice backlinks from some people who found my guides.
I think it is a mix of it. Answering heavily asked question about your subject area, and getting backlinks or that people share your article link elsewhere. Fun fact is that you can’t always influence it… I wrote articles where I thought “This post must work very well” and after publishing it and months later I realized the articles didn’t work well. Then I had those articles where I thought “I don’t think that many will ask for it but I publish it anyway” and they became my most asked articles. It’s really fun because it never works out as you think.
What I usually suggest is to never give up, create ideas, work on them, publish them and forget about it…. then again, create more ideas and publish your ideas and never stop. In the blogosphere it takes time to get attention and as said, we can’t always influence what will be popular and what not, I mean sometimes it works as you can research what is asked, but it doesn’t work always as you also have competition and you must research too if there is way too much competition writing about it too. Because I really dislike this kind of rocket science, I publish whatever is in my head and hope some articles will be asked.
What I want to say with it, keep it going! It just takes time. Some things work well, others not, but overall it takes a lot of time. At some point I didn’t take that much care anymore if someone would read my articles or not and I really can suggest that because it makes me more lucky about the hobby writing.. I don’t have to ask myself always if something works or not, I publish it because I loved to write about it. On this way you don’t notice the time anymore that it takes, because your focus is writing and not traffic. I enjoy the writing and if one of my posts is asked, it makes me happy but it won’t make me sad if another article doesn’t get that much attention. For example my private cat images and a lot of my photography is rather asked by the photography WordPress community but not really by people who come here via Google. Anyway, I like to publish photos of my cat. Then I have articles where it is the other way around.
So if you can influence it at all, then probably only with quantity, which means write a lot. On this way you find out where your ideas work and why. Or with quality which means writing about things that others didn’t write about, but things that answer questions that are asked. But even then you need some luck that people not only like your article but do also share it and you need of course time. I published quite a lot of articles and it took me time too.
My suggestion to you is… Don’t give up, realize your ideas, share what you know and make it a habit but don’t force yourself. Write when you are inspired, share things you like and know. Over time it will produce fruits.
In contrast to most so called “blog experts” I do not think that there is a special recipe for much traffic that always would work or help us bloggers. If anything influenced my traffic, then probably the fact that I wrote regularly to find out if things work or not. So, “Don’t give up and work on your ideas” is probably the best tip you can hear, it’s at least how I did approach all this 🙂 Good luck!
Hey Dennis – firstly, let me just say that I’m grateful & appreciate you taking the time to share your experience, tips, pros & cons re: WordAds. Phenomenal!
I will definitely take your suggestions on board & cross my fingers heheh There are so many other WP bloggers out there wondering the same thing so your response definitely helps.
Your blog is fantastic btw!
Thank you Ailene, I am happy that it was useful for you to hear about my experience. When I started, I had so many questions too and found help from others. This is what makes the blogging community strong 🙂 We can share our experience 🙂 Good luck to you and your blog and thanks for the compliments!
This is a great article! We are also currently waiting to join the WordAds program and are in the midst of building our fan base. Any suggestions for that? :
Hope you get into the WordAds program soon, it’s very motivating.
I can not give you much tips about building a follower base other than beeing consistent. Many follower will come with the time, some will go, you probably can only influence it with consistency and time.
However, I do suggest to focus on getting articles and keywords ranked high in Google. That’s where massive traffic comes from. I don’t want to say that I do not honor my followers, I do, I am thankful for their visits, but when it comes to quantity, massive traffic is usual redirected by the Google search. That’s where I focus. The WordPress community is pretty small compared to the visitors you get through search engines.
Great article! I needed in-depth information about WordAds and the user-experience, and there is a lot to be learned from your article. I’ve read in the WordAds FAQ that my blog would need thousands of page views; right now my blog doesn’t have those numbers. I was starting to think that once I’ve applied for WordAds, I would need to do something drastic, like write a new post daily. But when I read your post, I really appreciated these words I didn´t start to fight for traffic to earn more, I simply did what I always did, writing about all my different interests.
I am glad you liked my post. I hope you can enter the WordAds program soon too.
About my words, yes, to be honest, we all love traffic and I always get a smile if the traffic of my blog increases again, but if I would only focus my thoughts on this, I would create too much pressure on me and that would kill the fun for me.
I think a lot of people give up as they see the traffic is not increasing fast enough. I always thought if traffic or money is the only reason why I blog, it would be very likely that I give up blogging if traffic and money is not there. I think that’s why I wrote this line. Because, the fact is, it takes a lot of time to establish a blog.
I enjoy blogging for many other reasons, which is why I think that blogging for traffic is a very bad idea. If you think too much about traffic, it might disappoint you at some point if the expectations don’t come true fast enough. That’s what I mean 🙂
Anyway, it’s healthy to check out the stats regularly (I do this once a week). It’s also not bad to optimize articles to get more traffic, all that is totally fine, it’s just that I prefer to set my expectations very very low, on this way I can not get disappointed if things don’t work out well. I think this strategy made me keep the blog updated 🙂
I am for example aware of the fact that my technology related articles get me much more traffic than my photo posts or photo stories… but yet I still do publish more articles with photos and small stories more often, because I do enjoy it so much.
Anyway, considering this, your “drastic” idea to create a post every day is not too bad. Regularity is good, but I would say it different… do create posts whenever you feel to do so. Don’t force you to anything, don’t focus your thoughts on traffic alone. You can work on the traffic, but don’t make it you single reason why you blog. On this way you will get amazed if your traffic increases, but you won’t be disappointed if not. 🙂
Yes, I agree. That has actually been my attitude towards blogging all these years, to write about the things that I was passionate about, whenever I felt the passion to write about them. I’ll be entering my 10th year of blogging on May 23, and I thought it’d be a cool change to get my own domain. I guess for a moment, I felt some pressure thinking about what can happen next after I make that level-up move.
Thanks again for your wise words!
Wow! Then you are the last person I need to suggest this 🙂 I am glad you are doing it the same way since many years, it works already out well as you have been active for so long.
About the pressure, I think you have not much to lose, we have minor costs here anyway. I just realized I would just pay the domain once a year and did it. I am pretty much sure you will go the right way with renting a domain, and with your motivation you will be in the WordAds program soon, I am sure 🙂
Great article. I have read many sites about targeting keywords and using ads to monetize your blog, but most of them advocate using self hosted WordPress with Adsense and Amazon Affiliate links. I wondered why I should bother with self hosting when using wordpress.com is so much easier and your comments on the matter confirmed my thinking. I’ve read that you can’t use Adsense but you can use Word Ads. I’ve also read that wordpress.com allows affiliate links as long as the main purpose of your blog isn’t to drive traffic to affiliate store fronts Your post says Word Ads pays approximately $100 for 100K views and I’ve read elsewhere that Adsense pays about $140 for 100K views.
It seems like the convenience of wordpress.com over the hassle of self-hosting makes it worth giving up the extra $40 or so, but I wanted to ask if you’ve had any experience with Blogger. I’ve read that they allow affiliate links, allow you to use Adsense, and provide free hosting without a mapping charge if you buy your domain through Google Domains. I wonder if they are worth giving a shot or if wordpress.com is head and shoulders easier to use and better at drawing traffic.
Hi Jonathan! I am glad you liked the informations. I am with you about the self hosted sites… for full flexibility it’s cool to have a self hosted site, but I realized I am quite happy with wordpress.com, it’s actually not that bad how many self-hosting advocates think.
You mentioned some of the points already. Affiliates are allowed here unless someone wants to make a full store-front out of the own blog like many SEO’s and marketeers do where they try to sell something on every single page. That is affiliate spam and not tolerated here, which is actually quite cool and probably the reason why our community here and the blogs hosted here are much more clean. Good point!
Then you name another good point, wordpress.com is easier althought we can not install our own plugins, but to be honest, I realized we have the most important widgets anyway. Apart from that, too many plugins would also slow down a self-hosted site, so I don’t see a problem with what we have, it’s enough I think. Appearance can be customized, and can even be customized more with the CSS upgrade.
Yep, the numbers are correct. And here comes the clou and what many people don’t realize. If you get your self hosted site to the point to earn $140, your traffic is already beyong what a shared host allows you to use. Your site will slow down all others on the server and eventually kick you out of the contract and you stand there without server. Happened often enough. That means you would now need pay more for vpn, dedicated server or cloud depending on your traffic.
The clou is, here at wordpress.com we have free hosting, to be more exact, free cloud hosting. It doesn’t really matter how much traffic our blog eats, we have it fast and free and we don’t get kicked if we receive too much traffic. If we consider this, we can actually earn more on wordpress.com with WordAds than on a self-hosted site with AdSense. Decent usage of affiliate links not even included in this theory.
I had self hosted sites in the past, however, for a personal blog with more than average traffic, I thought wordpress.com gives me a much better deal. The yearly domain fee is negligible and paid of with a tiny fraction of the ad income, apart from that I have no other costs but rather income only with this blog.
Self hosting is not bad, but I see no real benefits if we talk about shared hosting. It would make much more sense if the blog has both, insane traffic and insane income to be able to afford really good hosting. I think wordpress.com is pretty much superior to any small host which is why I decided to stay here.
It seems we have the same idea here. When I mentioned the points in webmaster related forums, some people either laughed or started to troll me, so that I gave up to mention it. I guess some people simply dislike to hear that there is someone who made a good alternative experience. I guess both hosting solutions make sense, at the end we need to decide what works best for us, for me it’s to stay here.
Talking about WordAds, I think I should write a second and newer review at some point. I am in the program since a long time now and earnings have been stable at around $100 – $150 payouts every two months. I have now 50k – 70k views on average per month since over a year (depending on winter and summer), which means the $100 for 100K views theory does still fit well, I think that is what someone can expect from WordAds if these visitors are mainly from the US and Europe. As I am in the program since a long time, I can now usually guess the next payout pretty well when I look at the last month traffic. I mentioned this because I still think the the math factors behind WordAds are very consistent.
Answering your question about Blogger now. I had a blog there as well but abandoned the project there. I exported the most important content to other domains, I still had some less important content there but eventually abandoned the blog completely. Why? Also a personal decision, I disliked the usability of the backend. I prefer to work with the WordPress backend, much easier to work with. About traffic, I don’t think that it matters where you host, I did successfully get traffic to blogs no matter if they were self hosted, on Blogger or on WordPress. I suggest to host and blog with the services you like. Blogger is not bad, it’s just not my thing. I suggest you to try out both, you can still export and import the stuff later on if you are settled anywhere. 🙂
I think wordpress.com is a good way go when you are starting out. If your site ends up with an insane amount of traffic, then you can decide if you want to stick with WordPress.com and make money from WordAds or try self hosting.
Forums are good for trolling people who don’t agree with them. Of course if you want to place ads and affiliate links everywhere, self hosting is the way to go, but you have to hope your host doesn’t terminate your contract if you are successful.
The most compelling argument I heard against wordpress.com is that they can shut down your site at anytime for any reason without notice. I read somewhere that they shut down a site back in 2010 with 200 articles even though there were only two affiliate links on the entire site. I don’t know what the policy was then, but their current policy seems to allow affiliate links as long your main purpose is to offer original content.
My site is about a TV show and the only affiliate links I have are to buy the seasons of the show on Blu-ray or DVD. I hope that is acceptable for a site about a TV show. I also only offer links to the remastered releases and not the substandard releases that were done in the past.
I had the links in the side bar but took them out after reading your reply about having affiliate links on every single page and reading in the wordpress.com forums that they aren’t allowed in the sidebars. I thought it was more of a service to my readers than anything to have the seasons listed in the sidebar with the links to buy them since Google searches for the seasons often have the old substandard DVDs coming up first. I can understand WordPress.com not wanting links to ten different cameras, ten different HDTVs, or ten different expensive items in the sidebar , but I had thought that links to each season of a TV show would be fine. However if wordpress.com frowns upon putting any affiliate links in the sidebar, I can live without putting them there.
I remember wordpress.com was a little bit more strict back then about the affiliate stuff. Would be bad to get banned, but last option is that they will still offer you to export content to use it elsewhere, that just aside. But sure, we shouldn’t take it that far.
I am not sure about the forum post, they can be good indicators but it depends how old the posts are. I’d suggest to ask wordpress via support ticket to get a more clear answer, because I can not see a problem with your particular affiliate link.
From a reader point of view, I would notice if you write a lot of fluff where you would even suggest me to buy the worst TV show. However, I would also notice if your suggestions are original and honest, as same as your content. That’s at least where I draw the line when I read content. I do actually have no problem to purchase through affiliate links, I did that often when the content main purpose was informal and not to sell every kind of “junk”.
That’s where I come with the marketing and SEO example again… they seem to know how to piss off readers… you maybe know these posts like “10 ways to increase your traffic” where you get 10 fluffy and basic tips, but at the end they try to sell you access to a SEO tool or to a eBook. Now that would not be a problem, but some go so far that you can clearly see that all their articles go that direction… heavily keyword optimized to get your attention, very little information in the content, but a huge image with an affiliate link. Apart from that, they would suggest anything to get you click on their affiliate links. If the whole blog is set up that way, I’d say that is a pure storefront and not an informational site.
Now back to your case. Your affiliate link to the TV show that you write about seems to be very appropriate, I agree. That’s what I think,… I hope that you find out it is permitted.
For now it’s just good that you removed the link until you find clarification via support. 🙂
To add something small unrelated to affiliate but related to honest ads… that is for example one of the advantages of self-hosted sites and Google adsense or AdWords… I prefered the dashboard where I could disable certain ads that I did not want to suggest my readers.
Here at wordpress and WordAds, I would have to contact the WordAds team to disable a particular ad that I don’t want to show on my blog… I did that once when one of these strange “check your computer securty” ads appeared on my blog because I dislike to suggest these strange “security tools” that are actually everything else than a real security tool.
However, they remove ads for you too if you write them, also they usually take care and it doesn’t happen too often that bad ads get into the rotation. But I wish it would be easier, but they said they work on something like WordAds 2.0… I hope it will have a dashboard then that I can manage and remove ads that I dislike easier.
I don’t know how much they are fare on giving you revenue share thru Ads. On my blog SQLwithManoj.com I got the WordAds enabled this March- 2015, so:
On 2015-March I got 36k hits, 16k impressions and $26 earning
On 2015-April I got 40k hits, 17k impressions and $27 earnings
But 2015-May I got 44k hits, but just 14k impressions and just $14 earnings
Don’t know how does their logic work and how much it is fare!!!
They had trouble to fill all the ad space in May. I spotted a lot of blank ads on my blog and the earning decreased by around 50% as well. They said this is an industry-wide problem.
There is also a forum post: https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/unusually-low-wordads-earnings?replies=8#post-2410477
They working on it, they also working on a new WordAds 2.0 and it will come out very soon. They promise it’ll be better again soon. I hope so.
Thanks for your Reply. yes, I also observed blank spaces few times. Hope they make it better soon.
Your blog is a great help, thanks!
I hope so too. I am glad you find my blog to be helpful resource. 🙂
This is a very informative article, and I think my question was answered, because I couldn’t find anything helpful in Forums.
I set up my WordAds in January when my traffic started to increase, and was approved within a few days (and a little shocked!)
My first earnings were very low, but they have been increasing a little every month. My latest payment for June was $24.06 with 26,904 views, which finally brings me over the $100 requirement for a payment to be made.
I was a little worried though, because my Earnings tab showed no payment was made and I did not see any kind of “transfer funds to Paypal” button or option, so my assumption is the payment goes to Paypal automatically but I am not sure because I can’t find any information.
In reading the replies here, someone said the payments are made at the end of the month. So I guess that means I have to wait a couple more weeks to see my payment go into Paypal–is that the way it works? I’m a little concerned because I’ve had problems with Paypal in the past and just want to make sure there isn’t some issue with my payments.
But anyway, excellent article. Thanks!
Your assumption is correct. They just announced the earning of June a few days ago this July. They always do it this way.. you do for example don’t know your July earning yet since the July didn’t end yet, they will announce it in August.
Next thing you need to know is that if you did hit the earnings of $100 last month, they will pay it out at the end of the following month. In you case it means you get the $100 hit in June paid out July 30.
They always send an email when they announce the earnings of the last month. The last one arrived a few days ago….
They also cover this subject in the FAQ: https://wordads.co/faq/
I hope this helped you 🙂 Good luck with your blog!
Thanks for the information. I never have received an email announcing my earnings though. I have no idea why. The email address on file is the correct one. How do I contact them about this?
These email notifications are basically blog posts, they have a private blog that only WordAds users can read. When you started with WordAds, you had the chance to opt in when I remember right.
I believe I missed that too back then and when I heard about this I asked them to invite me to the private blog too. So, you could contact them at: https://wordads.co/contact/
Tell them you want an invite to the private WordAds blog since you are membe too, and since you don’t know how to join.
But it could also be that you did follow the private blog back then, in this case it might be that you just didn’t set up email notifications for that blog. In this case you can check out your reader and click on the settings wheel beside the link “Following”. Check out if the private WordAds blog is in there, if so, click on edit below it and activate “Send new posts by email = instantly”. 🙂 Hope this helps 🙂
Thanks, Dennis.
You are welcome 🙂
Thanks! I just joined here after writing for a sports blog that received millions of views a month. I wondered what the ad revenue was like with WordAds so thanks a ton for the insight.
Thanks,
Jamie
Hi Jamie. I am glad you could find some informations with my guide. Good luck with your blog 🙂
I’d love to see an update now that it’s been a year since the post. I’m sure you have more to stay on the subject and more data.
The data did present the monthly outcomes very well until April 2015… you could basically take any month of 2014 or the beginning of 2015 and the calculation formula of my review would be still spot on. I usually was able to calculate the last month income more or less accurate before they mentioned the months earnings. However,..
Since May 2015 they really had trouble to get new advertisers on board. My calculation didn’t work anymore since May 2015, now I would have to cut the usual 1000 views formula in half, a loss of 50% revenue per month, the rates lowered that much. The problems started in May and was still there in September. There were for example many white and blank ads, basically ads that no one booked and that wouldn’t pay. I currently wait if it will be better in October, they did mention they try hard to get the rates back up, and that they work to get more advertisers.
I planned to write a new review, I just was not sure if I want to reveal all my traffic data from 2013 to 2015, I need to think about this more. I might write another excerpt at some point with a half year of actual data or so. I might also calculate the average per 1000 views from 2013 to 2015 without mentioning each months traffic. So, I was thinking about a more actual review, I just was not sure yet how to present the data.
That’s great info, thanks for the reply. Have you explored any other avenues that are permissible by WP dot com?
I experimented with Amazon affiliate links on my high traffic articles, however, since we can not use plugins like the one you can use with a selfhosted blog, the one that will change affiliate links depending on the visitors country, it’s not working very well here at wp.com. While most of my visitors are from the US, there is an incredible huge percentage of European visitors too (and other places)… so, that alone is a problem because there is Amazon.com affiliate program and Amazon.de (for example for Germany) and so on.This makes it difficult. With selfhosted sites you only have to hope for a good click-through-rate and that someone buys something at Amazon in time frame of 24 hours after they clicked your link, because there are plugins that can automatically refer the visitor to the proper Amazon country page. Further, you can not embed java script here, stuff like product images or embedded product reviews, all you can do here is using text links or plain HTML code.
The next problem is, my blog is broad, and most of my articles are informal tutorials, or often also just photo posts with text. The informal posts don’t work well with Amazon as users usually visit via Google with a certain question, and the article gives the answer, it’s not that these visitors have an intention to buy something, they want to get an answer or learn something, and once they found the answer they will leave the site, and that’s why not a lot of people clicked on my Amazon links when I experimented with my “How to” articles.
For the photo posts, they have low traffic anyway, I do upload them to share what I shot with my camera, but there is no chance that I could monetize them. I actually planned to write more reviews, I think they work much better, because you can review a product and you can include a link to the product page,.. people who find the review via Google, they are the ones with a buying intention. There is a higher chance that you earn with product reviews, but then there is the problem that you need products to review, or at least the experience with certain products so that you can write about them. And finally even then you have the same problems I mentioned at the beginning, we don’t have a lot of options here to implement it perfectly.
I like the Amazon affiliate program a lot, but my broad blog is not a good fit despite the good traffic, and the restrictions we have here make it difficult to implement it well.
Amazon works, I had a German PC gaming and technology related website, it was a niche site and not so broad like this blog here. Also it was a selfhosted site, I had much more options there and Amazon affiliate links worked fairly well, I still regret that I sold this site back then to someone who made a good offer.
Here at wp.com it’s more difficult. As said, I think it can work, it’s just so limited here, after many experiments I decided I am not happy with it, I stopped to try to monetize my articles. I think if you write a lot of reviews about books, or even better if you write about more expensive products, Amazon links might work for you, but it won’t do magic here.
To be honest, with this blog here I just take the WordAds revenue and see it as small pocket money. If I would want to get a decent income from blogging, I would probably set up a selfhosted niche site, write content for the site in a timespan of one or two years and then I would start to monetize the site with affiliate links. I have experience with all this, I sometimes get the idea to do this again, but imo I am just happy with my broad blog that serves as a creative outlet. While I am limited here with ideas to monetize the blog, I think broad blogging is much more relieving to me than niche blogging that would force me to stay within a subject.
Fab post Dennis, just compared your earnings with an Phillipino and an Indian blooger at http://cafearjun.com/2015/11/13/wordads-vs-adsense-how-to-maximise-revenue-from-your-blog/ . My question – since you’re doing so well traffic wise, why haven’t you moved to wordpress.org self hosted yet?
Cool, I did check your article and dropped a comment. Thanks for mentioning me.
The traffic did improve a lot since I wrote the review… I had several German websites self hosted in the past, one of the main problem was always traffic at shared hosts, because I would eat up all the bandwidth in no time… with this blog here for example I would be afraid to make the move, because the blog can get 2000 – 9000 visitors per day now, I think every shared host would kick me from the servers, especially at rush hours there can be a lot of traffic. So, a better option would be something like a small VPS, but that is too expensive in my opinion. Here at wp.com we have free cloud hosting, super fast, and free, that’s basically why I did stay here.
Of course there would be more options to monetize the blog if it would go self hosted, I could probably earn more, but then I would have to pay the money upfront for a good server, before I even start to earn money, and that is risky. My general blog is anyway hard to monetize, that’s why I am ok with the broad ads of WordAds, I can also use Amazon affiliate links in certain articles if I want, that is not forbidden here… that means I didn’t make the move, because it would cost me much more, and because I believe I didn’t have reached my maximum potential traffic yet.
However, I might set up a few smaller site projects in the future, I always wanted to set up a German technology magazine… if I do this at some point, I can use the money I earn with the wp.com blog to compensate the costs I will need for the new German self hosted project, or for other website projects in the future. But at the moment I am pretty happy with what I do here, I just need a better looking domain name at some point to get more motivation again, also I work on a new CSS layout right now to be happy again. 🙂
Please i am from Nigeria and paypal does not support receiving payment in Nigeria, how else can I get paid
There is no other option than PayPal. You can only receive WordAds payments via PayPal.
Hi Denis
I am new to word press. I placed a blog yesterday but I am unable to understand that how I earn money through blogging. I search many things for this like adword , when I activate it is not activate it show that now I am unavailable to activate it. Please help me to activate and tell me the reason about no activating it. Please
Hey! Don’t worry, we all started at some point with WordPress. First you need to apply for the WordAds program, you can do this here: https://wordads.co/signup/
Next you open your WordPress dashboard here: https://yourblog/wp-admin/ (change “yourblog” to your domain) and then you look for the menu entry “settings” where you hover with you mouse to find another menu entry called “WordAds”. When you are in the WordAds page in your blogs backend, you will see a text called “Show ads to”, where you can enable it for “Every visitor” or “Every visitor, except logged-in WordPress.com users”. You can disable it again if needed if you check “Do not show any ads”. There are a couple of other options, they are self-explanatory… you do for example need to add your PayPal email adress to be able to get payments there and so. I hope this helped, and have success and fun with your blog!
Very very Thanks denis
You are welcome 😉
hi Dennis,
Yesterday i submitted an application to wordads. Luckily today, one of my self hosted wordpress (non wordpress.com blog but with jetpack enabled) blog has been approved *horray*. I hope wordads as good as Google Adsense.
Best regards from Indonesia 🙂 *sorry for bad english 😆
I didn’t even know that selfhosted sites with jetpack plugin can apply to WordAds as well… that sounds cool, I wonder when they started to enable it for jetpack blogs. 🙂
I think it started around november 2015 (wordads 2.0).
So glad that wordads finally “open” their heart to self hosted user 😀
I monitored the WordAds 2.0 release, and they mentioned the improvements in a blogpost, but they didn’t really mention the opening to jetpack blogs, or I did miss a line in their post 🙂 Anyway, it’s indeed a great news! And thanks for telling me, I will tell it some friends who have a selfhosted blog and jetpack. It’s really a cool news 🙂
You’re welcome, Dennis. There is a paragraph that mention indirectly:
“Existing WordAds users aren’t the only ones to benefit from the changes in WordAds 2.0. For new users, we have done away with the separate application process. Any family friendly WordPress.com blog with minimal page views will be considered for immediate admission to WordAds.”
Since that, their FAQ changed as well. You can see my review at my blog http://www.ahyari.net/apa-bagaimana-wordads/ (Indonesian Language; but the screenshot will explained the whole application process).
Um, sorry for my bad english grammar 😳
You’re English is fine, I understand it, and by the way English is not my native language either, I am German 🙂 Have a good time!
Thanks Dennis 🙂
Maybe around February 2016 I will post the earnings (if any) and compare to the adsense.
Have a nice day 😉
If you like, drop a comment then, I am always interested to hear how WordAds is doing on different blogs 🙂
Hi Dennis, its me again 😀
As my promised, i posted about my earning in December 2015 (to be exact just six day since i implemented WordAds on my blog – Dec 26 – Dec 31, 2015).
You can view a screenshot on my post here http://www.ahyari.net/review-wordads-di-blog-indonesia-worth-it/
So far, in my blog that almost of visitor came from Indonesia, WordAds is awesome!
Regards
Thank you Jimmy! This is very impressive, you had a lot of ad impressions 🙂 I hope this will work for you each month, and that it even improves further. Good luck with your project. I wish I could read through your blog, but it’s not English or German… anyway, I am happy that it works so well for you. I am glad you kept the promise and came back to mention how it worked for you, I am always curious what kind of experience others have with WordAds 🙂 Good luck!
Thanks Dennis 😀
I think your blog have a lot of ad impressions too since your alexa rank is under 200K (y)
I hope so; lets wait til next February how wordads run on a full of month in January
Good luck for you too 😉
Alexa is a bad metric anyhow, I don’t know why I am below 200k. I probably get some decent traffic compared to the majority of sites, no question, but not that much that I could be anywhere under the top 200k websites. In December I got 90k views with 34k ad impressions and earned around $36. So, I play a league below you 🙂 But your WordAds stats are motivating and show what is possible. Anyway, I think we both take blogging serious, so, lets hope for us both to improve even further 🙂 Thank you!
You’re right, Dennis. In fact, since August 2015 ago, I decided to quit my job as a pharmacist at state-owned company 😆
So that I can focus on managing many blogs (which of course, get revenue from there) that I developed since 7 years ago.
Luckily, my family supports this decision. Especially my wife, she was very happy that I could have more time to be home with -two- my daughters 😀
Hopefully, today’s achievement will be better in the future; it is also my hope to you, Dennis. You are a humble person who always reply to my comment; although my comment has bad grammar
Thanks
I do understand this decision, because I like the idea to generate income on our own, that’s what the web allows us to do today with blogging, YouTube and all the other possibilities. It’ll take me some time to quit everything else, but that is definitely something I am up to too, because web income is smart income, and as you said, you can manage your time better when you are your own boss. 🙂
Thank you Jimmy, and don’t worry about your English, I am German and English is my second language as well, which means I am not perfect either. I could understand everything you wrote, and the more we use English, the more we do improve 🙂 Nice to meet you Jimmy!
Hi Dennis! Just want to ask. How does WordPress.com pay you? Do they pay you through PayPal? By the way, awesome post. 🙂
Greetings Joshua, yes you are right with PayPal. Once you are approved, you have to go to “settings>WordAds” in your dashboard, and there you can drop your email, the one you use for your PayPal account, and there you will get the payment after you collected at least $100. 🙂 I hope this helps.
I know this was written a while ago, but it’s really nice to see an honest review about WordAds and you do not hesitate to share your earnings. Thanks for sharing. It is much appreciated!
I am glad your thought my review was useful 🙂 Thanks for visiting my blog Marieke 🙂
Nice review dennis 😀
I am glad you like the review 🙂
This post was so straightforward and useful– thank you!
Thanks a lot! I am happy if my articles can help people to get certain informations 🙂
Very interesting post about a really “dark” matter… I’ve been considering running ads on my blog for some time now, but I can’t quite decide yet.
However, you should consider your orthography. No tilde (´) character should be used in the apostrophe’s (’) place.
Best regards.
As mentioned in the review, WordPress does show ads anyway for logged out users, so, you could at least show a single ad unit under the posts, but that is of course a decision you have to make. I have ads enabled for logged out users, and enabled ads for WordPress users. WordPress users can not see them, I do this because the community is supportive enough with the sharing, commenting and reblogging. So, this is something you can decide when you start to use WordAds. It’s good to take your time to make a decision, I did that too.
Thanks for the tip about the apostrophe. It’s funny, a half year ago I learned to use the right apostrophe in English, because someone told me this too at that time. Since then I do it correctly I believe. The WordAds review was written before that time. I am blogger since 6 years and wondered if I should go through all of my posts to correct them. but this would be a hell of work. I might do this with the most important posts, started with articles like the WordAds review. So, thanks for the correction anyway, much appreciated 🙂 If the other person wouldn’t have mentioned it back then, you would have been the person to improve my English now! 🙂 Thank you 🙂
Very glad to read so nice reply. You know, it isn’t very common to tolerate linguistical suggestions like you did. People just tend to get angry for some reason.
As a final advice, I would encourage you to “correct” these older posts because using the Replace tool of any word processor you could just correct all tildes to apostrophes in about two minutes… 🙂
Best regards.
True, I know, but if they would accept the suggestions, they could improve the written language. Well, they will miss out on this 🙂 You are right about the correction with a word processor, the only problem is that I have quite a lot of posts, around 1600 posts. But most of them are just diary entries, I will rather correct the tutorials and reviews, the most important posts, but even then I will have to do this at least 100 or more times 😀 I will put this on my to do list, because I think it will make it easier to read. 🙂
Hi Dennis,
Ads are running on my Blog for 2 months now and the income is rather disappointing compared to the table and the data you provide above.
For November I get $0.49 with 4713 impressions and for December I get $0.91 for 10183 impressions.
Should I assume that this is happening because of the Greek language content? Or should I wait that this will improve somehow?
Any tips on settings that i should configure in order to be sure that I am not losing something?
Many thanks again.
It could have to do with where your visitors are from, but there is another problem… WordAds users experienced a big cut since some months, and WordAds staff said it’s because they try to get new advertisers on board to create more competition and to make the rates go back up. They said things would change with WordAds 2.0, but now that it’s already released, I don’t see any improvements. The payment is much lower today than you see in my review. I might write a new review at some point this year, because the data is indeed not up to date anymore due to the mentioned problems. They still promise to make the rates go back up, but currently I am very disappointed too.
Thanks so much once more Dennis. That was really helpful.
What is the formula you used to calculate earnings per impression/views and ads blocked
Just want to make sure I didn’t use the wrong formula.
I don’t know what you mean… If you know one month of your traffic (views), and how much ad impressions you had, and how much you earned in this month, you can calculate all kind of stuff from there with basic math. Assuming you have 1 ad banner activated, every ad impression means someone loaded your site and didn’t block the ad. Thus, you only have to substract the ad impressions from the views, and the result are the page loads where the ads have been blocked. For the earnings per impression, you only have to divide the earned money per month by the impressions, or views depending on how you want to calculate the result (views or impressions). From there on you can multiplay it by 100 or 1000, depending on how you want to show the results (earning per 100 impressions or earning per 1000 impressions). Of course it all depends if you want to calculate in the blcoked ads or not… so, it’s up to you what you want to show.
I mean what “formula” or “maths” are you using to get the earnings per 100 views/impression and ad blocked in %
I have already calculated it using excel sheet but I am not confident with my formula
Really helpful blog for newbies like me Dennis. I am pretty new to wordads and was looking out for information as to how it works and your blog answered most of my questions.
I am happy you could gather some informations in my article 🙂
Dennis is there any minimum traffic criteria that we need to meet before subscribing for wordads. I understand that they revenue generated is directly proportional to the number of hit, but was wondering if we need any minimum traffic to be eligible
There was definitely a traffic criteria back then, but I believe they lifted the criteria a while ago if I understood this post right: https://wordads.co/2015/11/02/introducing-wordads-2-0/
But I am sure there is still the criteria that you need to get your own domain to be able to use WordAds.
They still have the minimum traffic criteria. Found this in their FAQs
Q: I applied to WordAds. When will it be available to me?
A: Our advertisers do have a minimum traffic requirement. Once you reach that, your application will be automatically sent to them for evaluation.
Q: What is the minimum traffic requirement?
A: We cannot reveal the exact minimum publicly, but a site generally needs thousands of page views each month to earn meaningful revenue.
That is interesting. Could it be that they never changed the FAQ? Because I know this text is quite old. I believe the only way you can find out is to contact the WordPress support. I am very curious if they just didn’t change the fact or if the criteria is indeed still there.
Let me check with their Support. That would be the most reliable source 🙂 .. btw got a mail also stating the minimum traffic criteria.
Thanks Dennis.. This information helps a lot 🙂
I found this article very useful. I can now compare and analyze. I was just thinking to use wordsads. Thank you. Have a great weekend.. 🙂
I am always happy if people found one of my articles useful. If you decide to use WordAds, I wish you luck with it 🙂
Thank you Dennis, not fully sure of it. still thinking to use WordsAds or not! But your article was useful. 🙂
Take your time to make a decision, I didn’t hurry either when I decided 🙂 I am glad I could help 🙂
Ok sure Dennis. I will think on it wisely. Thanks. 🙂
Amazing advice! Was truly curious of the fact but I’m glad to have stumbled across this post!
I am glad you like the post about WordAds. 🙂
hi dennis.. i’m a junior blogger. how long your wordads approve by wordpress? 1 week 1 month? because i’ve already 1 week sign up for wordads but they still not give approval.
In my case it happened back then when I had 10k views per month, it happened right away when I remember right.
Honestly, I don’t understand your praise. I’m not looking to get rich quick or even a living wage or anything like that, but I don’t want to feel like I’m giving advertizing a free ride. Receiving a measly handful cents for every hundred views while the advertisers make several dollars for each individual view isn’t “a cut of the profit”, by any stretch of the term. That’s less than a percent of a percent of “a cut of the profit”. That’s just a token payment so they can truthfully claim that they paid you while simultaneously robbing you blind and keeping 99.99% of the profits for themselves. And since they’ve deliberately set it up so you can only cash out at $100, a number the average blogger will never reach due to the criminally small cut they’re “receiving”, the overwhelming majority of so-called “members” will never be given access to a single penny of their so-called “cut”, regardless of how much AdWords claims to have “paid” them. How can you honestly defend this sort of scam?
The average street-corner beggar makes more than ten cents per every hundredth pedestrian.
To be honest, there is an easy solution if you are unhappy with them, de-activate it and move on. Now it seems you are more frustraded than thinking logically. Especially if you talking about a scam, and that I defend a scam, think about your choice of words for a while. Here is my opinion about your comment…
The WordAds rates were incredible low by the end of 2015 and in the beginning of 2016. But over the last two months, the rates stabilized again back to a normal point, in fact to a higher payout than before the hiccup.
Over all, since I wrote this review in 2014, I would still stand for most of the points I mentioned, because the program allowed me to buy an expensive DSLR cameras, one tele lens, and a couple of other nice things. So, if I use your words, I didn’t get rich, but I was able to made some good purchases from something you call a scam.
Now to the facts, as someone who owned a self-hosted site, I can promise you, whenever you work together with a middleman, they will take a fair cut. In the case of self-hosting, it was Google who took the cut, with my wordpress.com blog WordAds is taking the cut. I see it much different than you, I got a free blog here on a super fast cloud, purchased a domain back then, and enabled the ads. So, basically I got a lot for free, except for the luxury of premium services, and on top I could even earn some money.
While I would agree that they should just get rid of the $100 payout limit, I don’t see how it would change anything for the majority of bloggers who seek a dime. Now that we both are completely honest with each other, let’s go one step further… the majority of bloggers, no matter if self-hosted or hosted for free on wordpress.com, wouldn’t even get to a $100 payout even if there would be no payout limit. This is due to the fact that advertisers simply pay you for the traffic, for visible ads, and if the ads are just seen by a few hundreds visitors per month, why should they pay you a fortune? You said it on your own, you will not get rich, especially not with pay-per-impression or pay-per-click advertising. It’s just a small extra income, and you would be advised to try affiliate marketing if you want to see a better payout, because that’s where you cut out the middleman and where you can get higher provision.
So, I absolutely don’t agree with you that WordAds is a scam. However, I’ve been worried that the payout decreased a lot some months ago, but I see it improving at the moment, because the two last months have been quite good. Now I don’t know what your traffic is, but I regulary get a payout from WordAds and that is totally fine with me, I’d be on your side as said and would like to see that they keep the rates up and that we don’t see a hiccup again, but I can’t see how you call it a scam. I am pretty much sure you would be frustrated about Google Adsense and others as well.
By the way, where do you get your numbers from when you talk about “less than a percent of a percent”? To me it seems, you are just ranting non-sense. I would have much preferred to read objective criticisms but now your comment is nothing more than a rant without much substance.
After I read this blog, I decided to apply for wordAds. I applied on 21 march 2016 and just received my first payment. But it doesn’t match with the numbers from your table. I received 59234 ad impression but I only got paid $1.01. Most of my viewers are from USA, so I don’t really understand why I got so much less compared to the numbers from your table. Or do they pay less in 2016? I think i’ll just give wordAds another month and if it does pay so little, I’ll stop with it and maybe try Adsense.
The WordAds rates have been lower over the recent month and do not match with the numbers of my review anymore…. I mean, at times they do match, and other months they don’t match, with that said, the WordAds rates did flucuate a lot over the course of the last months, and sometimes they have been incredible high and sometimes incredible low.
However, in your case, there seems to be a problem. Your payment is way too low. I can think of three things…
1. Try to contact WordAds support, maybe there is a miscalculation, that happened last month for example.
2. I hope it’s not the case, but it also might be that your blog is receiving an incredible amount of bot views or bot traffic, and if this is the case, your 59k ad impressions are not worth anything for advertisers, but I hope this is not the case.
3. You don’t get American or European traffic at all. Advertisers don’t pay a lot of money for the other continents, as there is no money to be made. But I still think that $1 would be way too low in this case, you would probably at least make $5 or a little more.
I hope it’s just point 1 in your case, so, try to contact WordAds to clarify if there is a problem.
By the way, you can’t try out AdSense on wordpress.com, unless you move your whole blog to your own hosting provider to become a selfhosting blogger.
I got around $20 this month for 30k ad impressions, it’s too low as well, it would usually be around $40 or even $50 for 30k ad impressions in my experience. The rates do definitely fluctuate at the moment, but not so much that you would just get $1 for 60k impressions… I think there might be a problem in your case.
thank you. I contacted them, but they say there was no mistake and it wasn’t bot views.
I hope the situation is stabilizing over the next months for you. Since two of the mentions points are not the reason, it’s probably the third point I mentioned, I guess you don’t get enough ad impressions from countries North America or Europe then.
My site has 2k view and 1k visitor per day, premium plan is 9$ dollar is Wordads a safe bet for me? Help!
Hmm, 2k views are fine if most of them are from North America or Europe. You won’t get rich. I have very similar stats and earn $30 or $60 per month. To be honest, just recently, the WordAds rates were a bit instable (last month for example I got just a bit over $20, this was the lowest payment ever but the stats didn’t change). So, buying a domain to be able to use WordAds? No, currently I wouldn’t suggest it. But if you plan to purchase a domain anyway, you might want to try out WordAds for some months anyway. So, as said, purchase a domain if you need it, but don’t purchase a domain for the only reason to use WordAds. There are much better reasons to purchase a domain.
and I don’t see any ads on your site! I start doubting myself, help….
If you use WordAds, you have two options…
1. Enable ads for all visitors
2. Show ads only to people who are not logged in.
I have choosen to use option 2 and I don’t show ads to WordPress users who are logged in. Reason is, WordPress community members are the most active visitors, they are in the minority since I get so much more visits via Google, but the WordPress community people are the most engaging people. What I mean, they are the minority, but they are much more likely to comment, to share my articles, and so on. As a thank you, I want to spare them the ads, it would just be a few dollars more if I would show them ads, but as said 95% of my visitors come via Google and see my ads. So, to find my ads, log out of the WordPress system, type in my domain and click on one of my articles and you’ll see the ads.
Thanks, I think I’ll try it, this post help me a lot for thinking, and hopefully it’s a safe bet, by the way the link you give me seem useless. I don’t read js you see
What kind of link do you mean? I didn’t give you a link 😀 Anyway, yes, I think a domain is useful anyway, and if you get one, you could also try WordAds then. Have fun!
One more thing, wordads ask for name during registration, can’t I go with my nickname, maelstrom?
I think you should use your display name of WordPress, in my case it was Dennis, I guess it’s Maelstrom in your case. But I can’t see the invitation form anymore to be completely sure, since I am already invited to WordAds. Anyway, when logged into WordPress, and when I visit the WordAds site, it shows me that I am registered with the name Dennis, and my email address… so, it should be your display name Maelstrom I think.
Hi, thanks for every possible advice, now I’ve made up my mind and just threw $18, hopefully, It can recover my monthly expenses. I wish your post can save a soul, sound exaggerating but it possible!
Since the domain is a yearly cost, it’ll just be expenses of $1.50 per month. As said, an own domain has a lot more advantages than just the WordAds program, for example building your own brand, being the owner of the domain, ranking or building up the own domain and so on… anyway, I hope too you will profit from WordAds with your domain. 🙂
Hey, How long wordads program will take? I heard, from rumours, it take a couple month??
You mean the WorAds approval? Back then when I started, there was this traffic criteria that I had to met, but I believe they lifted the criteria… what helped me was to write them a mail and I asked for approval and they replied that my blog would be approved. You might want to write them a mail and ask for approval 🙂
Did wordads tell you that your traffic need improvement or you asked them first? Sorry to keep asking you questions.
Don’t worry about the questions, it’s ok to me, I’m a blogger and happy about comments or if I can help someone with information’s 🙂 I met the traffic criteria back then before I wrote them a mail, so that they approved my blog after I had send them a mail. At that time, the criteria was like around 10k visitors or views per month, they never said that, but that’s what most approved blogger’s assumed. But as said, I think they don’t even have that traffic criteria anymore, although I can still see it their FAQ. I would ask them in a mail if they can approve your blog, or if there are any reasons that could extend your invitation process. I could imagine that they go through each application one by one, to see if the applicants met the other criterias like the WordPress TOS and so. Anyway, in my experience, the WP support has always been very helpful and answered most of my questions. And again, don’t worry about your questions, I ask a lot of questions too in the web if I try to gather information’s. 🙂
Thx! My wordpress have received invitation wordadsgroup.wordpress i think. Not time to be happy yet, but thanks!
Cool! That is a great news! 🙂 Yes, now you need to check out how it goes for your… I hope the outcome will be good.
The stat is monthly update right? Anyway, I don’t really care about the outcome as long it can cover monthly expenses that including internet and electric bill. Now my mum lost her reason to complaint if I keep playing my phone.
Yes, the WordAds stats are updated by the end of the next month. So, if you ran it for a month, you will see what you earned 30 days later. For example, I will see on June 30 what I earned in May. Yes, I see it very similar, I want to cover my bills, but usually have a little bit more and it’s nice pocket money 🙂 I know I won’t get rich, but something between $50 or higher is totally cool pocket money.
Getting rich is out of question but pocket money is cool, When I first run my blog I put adfly (I’ve removed it though) and other ptc link and I earn 80$ in two month, so I think its cool but I considered wordads since adfly is hard for other to use. Anyway, why I still don’t see ads in my site? I guess it will taking a quite time.
As written in my other comment, check if it’s enabled in the dashboard under “Settings” > “WordAds”. If it’s already enabled, it might take some time, yes…
https://wordpress.com/themes/twentyeleven/ I’m using this theme, can you check if it support wordads?
I used this theme once and it’s definitely supporting WordAds. Here is the list of supported themes: https://theme.wordpress.com/themes/features/wordads/
I see the ads are partly activated… looks like it takes some time. You have one blank ad in your sidebar… however, there is no ad shown yet, it’s a blank box… maybe it’ll take some time until your ad space is filled with advertisers.
But I don’t see any ads yet (incognito). Why is that?
Do you have it enabled for “Every visitor” or “Every visitor, except logged-in WordPress.com users”?
Yes, I use incognito to preview my blog.
I am not sure what you mean by incognito, there is no incognito option in the WordAds settings.
I mean I’m using Incognito tabs (Google Chrome)
Ah! Ok, I use Firefox… I assume the Incognito mode of Chrome does block ads, but that’s just what I assume. You might want to try without. 🙂
OK. Gtg, it’s 3am in my time zone. Its kinda fun talking with someone you don’t know in internet, maybe we can talk about other things later. A bit more episode and sleep I guess.
Maybe it’s fully loaded when you wake up… good night for now 🙂
Also make sure that “Do not show any ads” is not marked. You find the WordAds settings in the dashbaord under “Settings” and then “WordAds”.
Dennis, my name is Brandon and I own Bwrightsports.com. I have 3,800+ views total, far from where I want to be. Do you have any tips on boosting my blog’s numbers? I cover the sports teams at my University and surrounding high schools. That is the focus of my blog. Also, I only average about 15 or so hits a day (spikes when I post a new article, then fades). Lastly, with my current numbers, do you believe I should even start with WordAds? Your numbers far exceed mine, so I am just wondering if this would be a waste for me right now.
Hi Brandon,
Despite what those self-described blogging experts say, I don’t think that there is too much rocket science, or that there are many factors at play other than content quantity and time, to boost your numbers. I had absolutely no concept with my blog, not even the domain name is a good brand name because I didn’t care about it at that time in 2011. If you are interested about my personal approach, I wrote a little bit about it by the end of the year 2015: https://diaryofdennis.com/2016/01/02/my-blogging-concept-and-the-year-2015-in-review/
I think there are only a few factors at play. Time (consistency, or not stopping to write articles or post stuff), not listening too much to those blogging experts but trying out the own ideas, and not forcing your self to anything but write if you feel inspired to craft content or to share media. It shouldn’t be a job, it should be a lot of fun. So, my tip really nails down to this: Log in if you feel inspired and get your ideas on the digital paper, the more often you do this, the more often you will get inspired by subjects in your niche. If it becomes a fun activity, you will keep it going for many years (in my case since 2011 with this personal blog here). More content ideas also mean that you have more to offer for what people might search for, and thus some of them might link back or share your content.
I am not sure if you can get high traffic with every niche… I had it easy as I write also about pc games and technology, while my personal fluff barely gets visitors, as same as just a few enjoy to browse through my photography categories, but even then I still enjoy to craft not so popular content. Anyway, almost all my high traffic articles are within technology category or gaming… I didn’t apply any rocket science like keyword research or other strategies like link building… with PC games for example I just know what people want to hear or what is trendy or very controversial, and I write about it early. So, that’s maybe one tip I can give… try to find out what is trendy in your niche, what people look for, if you can answer their questions, write guides, or entertain them with topics related to your niche.
Apart from that, be yourself… if you think your ideas are great, they probably are, if one idea is not that good, move on and craft your next articles, they might be better, that’s how I play the blogging game. Don’t listen to pseudo-experts, because it takes time to read all their fluff about marketing, and most of it is pure nonsense that gets copied and pasted from one marketing blog to the other… the truth is, it’s about how big your niche is, how often people link to your content, if you can create a community, if you are the first one to cover subjects, and if you will not give up… but it is even more so that it’s about you having fun, basically just about writing and sharing a lot of own content… it always nails down to content creation and time (endurance to stay in the blogosphere). Since you have a pure niche, and not a general blog like I do, I am pretty much sure that you can create an active community around your site, and that they might see you as authority at some point and come back to your content or link to it. So, to me it’s just about regular writing, and sharing the stuff to social media channels at times. Doing this for years leads to more traffic over time, that’s just everything I did. The links I needed for Google ranking came from alone over time the more content I had to offer, there was no extra work at play. So, I see it a bit different than those who write a lot about blogging tricks.
About your current numbers… Are these 3,800 views monthly? If that’s the case, I would wait with WordAds, because I don’t think that you will get a pay out at this point. It’s maybe still too early now, it would be about earning pennies in a month, but that shouldn’t put you off, we all started somewhere, with time and content your traffic will increase, unless you give up.
I wish you much fun with blogging, because with fun you will call readers 🙂
Dennis,
First off, thank you for taking the time to send the thoughtful and detailed response. I appreciate that. I am definitely going to apply some of these techniques in my personal experiences. I agree with you that the biggest thing is having fun. I firmly believe if you aren’t having fun with or passionate about something then you will not give your 100% full effort. I definitely try to in my blogs and reporting and I hope it shows.
Secondly, unfortunately these are my overall views. 3,800 total. It’s not much, but like you said we all have to start somewhere. My goal is to get to 10k in all by graduation (May 2017). I figured I would get slim to nothing with word ads for what I have now after seeing your chart, but I thought I’d ask. Thank you.
Lastly, since you like to play PC games, I am sure you have a steam account. I jump on there every so often. My screen name is bw84 if you’d like to play something sometime.
Thanks again,
BWright
Exactly, fun counts for all interests… I play the guitar since over a decade, I could only learn it as I enjoyed the tune of the instrument, even if it took me quite some time until it did sound ok. When I felt that there was no progress with my guitar playing, I dropped it for some weeks and came back with new iron will, that’s why there was progress in the long run, some things just take time. I made this guitar/blogging comparison a few times in some of my articles because it fits nicely. You are right, you need to be passionate about something. 🙂
Brandon, althought your stats are lower than mine, 3,800 is already a good sign. Remember when you had hundreds of visitors, now you are already in the thousands per month, and with time you will add another digit 😉 Just take a look at my July 2013 number in the table, it was almost 8,000 views, and see how it increased the months later, I bet that’s possible in your case too. I had just a bit of luck that a major website linked to my site, that did of course speed up the progress a bit, which means it can definitely take longer but it doesn’t have to, with social media we have options to get our stuff in front of people. I could have given up in July 2013, but I didn’t… also 2012 must have looked similar to your numbers. So, I encourage you, it looks already like progress in your case, I bet your numbers will have improved a lot one year later, your goal is not set too high and I believe you can do it as it is a very realistic goal and because a year is a lot of new content 🙂 Some people set unrealistic goals, which is why they get disappointed when they realize that it didn’t happen.
Hey, cool! That’s funny, yeah, sure we can add each other on Steam 🙂 We can play games, althought I am not up for voice chat yet since my spoken English is much more worse than my written English 😛 I tried to look up your screen name but couldn’t find you, I am going to mail you my profile url so that you can add me.
wordads got worse after new year.. many people decide to self-hosted and try to applicate GA.. what happen with wordads this year?
The last month was pretty good in my case, but yeah, there were some really bad months with WordAds. I hope too that they improve the program and rates further. I think you would lose more money if you would go self-hosting, especially if you have a high traffic blog. I prefer free cloud hosting with no limits over cheap shared hosting where you can get kicked out of the contract for too much traffic, or expensive VPN hosting that would eat up all your Google adsense income in no time. I think wp.com is still the best choice and quite effective if you don’t put everything in one basket.
I think godaddy offer unlimited bandwidth
You won’t find any host with unlimited bandwidth unless it’s a cloud or something. This is false advertising of GoDaddy, but most hosting provders do this type of false hosting. Read GoDaddy’s ToS for example about webhosting….
“In the event the bandwidth, number of websites or disk space usage of your website presents a risk to the stability, performance or uptime of our servers, data storage, networking or other infrastructure, you may be required to upgrade to a VPS or Dedicated Server, or we may take action to restrict the resources your website is utilizing. ”
What they mean by this is, that if you eat up all the bandwidth of the websites that sit on the same server rack like you, your recourses will be minimized. But that is not the only problem…
Reading further….
“All Web Hosting and WordPress Hosting plans, including the unlimited plans, are subject to a limit of no more than 250,000 inodes per account for Linux® hosting accounts or 500,000 files and folders per account for Windows® hosting accounts. The plans are also limited to no more than 1,000 tables per database and no more than one gigabyte of storage per database. Any account or database that exceeds these limits may be issued a network violation warning and will be required to reduce the number of inodes, files and folders, tables or gigabytes (as the case may be), or may be temporarily or permanently suspended, in our sole discretion.”
These are the term most hosting providers add into their ToS. If you get too much traffic, your account can get terminated, but most of the time you will get a warning to upgrade to VPS or dedicated servers, if you can afford it, otherwise your website will be history and you will be forced to move your complete site with our backup after it’s terminated
So, shared hosting and lower end hosting plans are a no-go, unless you don’t expect that you site will get high traffic at some point. I had one of my hosting accounts of a German technology site suspended from a host, and it was a true pain to get this problem sorted out. The only real solution is to get into a higher end plan rat some point, but that’s what we talked about, it’ll eat up your Google Adsense earning. you will stand there with plus-minus-zero of income. Of course, that doesn’t count if you do affiliate marketing in addition. or if you have other income sources to afford the VPS hosting.
When it comes to the lower plans, it’s not very difficult to kill the bandwidth of these plans, all you need is the Reddit hug of death…or a post that gets viral on Facebook. If you don’t expect your content to go viral, these plans might work for you, but I expect my content to go viral, since this happened from time to time, and then the server load is incredible high if you are hosting on your own.
I am not against hosting companies, I just don’t like these shared plans, and I only would want to host on a VPS with cloud, but since my income doesn’t allow me to do this right now, it’s music of the future for now. With a completely and perfectly monetized site this would make a lot of sense as you have a lot more flexibility on your own server, but as said, then you can’t count on Google Adsense income alone, you neeed to have your site fully monetized to make it happen with a profit. That’s what I meant, if your blog is personal and gets around something like 50k – 200k visits per month, free wordpress + domain is the perfect habitat for such a site (free cloud hosting, ability to link a domain, affiliate links allowed if you don’t go over the top with it, WordAds and so on…). However, this is just my personal calculation, everyone must know what is better for himself. I just thought I share what I experienced in the past, because there is no unlimited bandwidth with regular hosting plans, even if some companies like to tell us. 🙂
Just on a sidenote, GoDaddy is by the way the worst hosting provider you can find… there are better hosting providers like “A Small Orange” for example… but even there you have no unlimited bandwidth on a shared plan.
Hi dennis. June has pass, but I can’t see my June earning.. why is that?
You can only see the May earnings, you will see the June earning by the end of July.
Hola, yo tengo mi blog con anuncios de Google Adsense, y ya no me dan las ganancias que antes me daba, quiero cambiar de anuncios y parece que WordAds me esta convenciendo y me gustaria probar. ¿Cuales serian los pasos a seguir para que me pusieran los anuncios?
Hi! No hablo español, Lo siento. You can contact WordAds if you click on “contact” on this site: https://wordads.co/
I have a question that I hope you can answer for me Dennis. I am looking to upgrade my wordpress site to the Premium account. I see that I will have a choice to have “no ads” as well as to run WordAds. I am pretty new to blogging and just starting to want to take it to the next level, so pardon what may seem like ignorance. But don’t those two things contradict each other? If you pick to have No Ads, wouldn’t that mean that you couldn’t run WordAds? Thanks ahead of time for your time!
Hi Ashley. Yes, you make a very good point! I don’t have the “no ads” upgrade my self but WordAds is still working. See it like this, if you have WordAds enabled, they override the WordPress ads, or in other words, you get a cut from the ads you enable. To be more clear, when I disable my WordAds feature, there is still one ad sometimes below my posts, but I wouldn’t get a cut. So, I have WordAds enabled with 3 ads, and I get a share from the income… I one ad in the sidebar, one on top of the site, and one below each post… especially the ad below the post will override the standart ad from WordPress, because that’s the only location where they would show ads even if you wouldn’t be in the WordAds programm, as said, with the difference that you wouldn’t get a share from the ad if you are no WordAds user. That is what I experienced. I hope this information helps 🙂
You don’t need premium plan for wordads, you only need a custom domain at 18 per year
That’s true, absolutely enough. I do also have just the domain, because in my opinion the premium features aren’t worth it…. here is why…
1. Unlimited pages and blog posts – Well, we also have unlimited pages and blog posts without premium
2. Custom Domain $8.25 per month vs. $26 per year if you rent without plan (inclusive private registration)
3. Hundreds of free themes – There are enough without premium plan, and if you want a special one, you can purchase it for a one time fee.
4. 13GB of space for files and media – It’s not even possible to fill the free space offered, unless you don’t resize your images.
5. Email and Live chat support – You also have email support with the free plan, and you can use the forum where you can get help too.
6. Advanced design customization – It’s just CSS editing.
7. No ads upgrade – Not needed if you plan to enable WordAds anyway.
So, I agree with Maelstrom. In my opinion, for what it is, the premium plan is completely overpriced and the features just don’t add up.
Thank you. I realize that you don’t have to have the Premium plan but I am signing up for it and on the site where it explains what you get with the plan it lists the option for “no ads” as well as “WordAds”. I just didn’t understand how you could want/do both?
Premium plan come with free domain. Then you can only choose one from those two; enable wordads, or disable ads.
When you are on the free plan, WordPress does show ads on your site sometimes. With these ads WordPress makes money but you don’t get a share. Back then it was possible to book the “no ads” upgrade, if you wanted to have a blog with no ads, but today it seems it is packet into the premium plan. WordAds however is something completely different, it will give you the option to enable ads but with the difference that you and WordPress share the income from the ads. So, yes, you are right, you don’t need both, the “no ads” upgrade is not needed if you plan to enable WordAds anyway.
Thank you Dennis, that helped a lot!
Reader from Calgary:
Hi!
I enjoyed reading the article.
I have my own blog which I must admit is an off and on…but mostly off platform. I would love to grow the readership, but am lost on how to do that. Any tips?
Also, I am confused on which of the 3 plans offered by WordPress should I upgrade to to get the best return..what is your advice?
All the best!
Q
Hi, the WordPress plans don’t really matter. I didn’t book a WordPress plan, I just connected my site with a domain because I think there is not anything else that would be useful. About growing readership, all I can tell you is that you need to craft content. It takes time until you see results, but I don’t really apply any magic tips to my blog other than writing content. I don’t believe in the tips that for example SEO’s and marketeers share, all I believe is that their tips will at the end only cause trouble. So, my personal strategy is much more simply, all I do is crafting content and not giving up with blogging. I fear this tip is not very helpful, but I don’t really do a lot more, except for common things like applying the right keywords to the articles, sharing them here and there, and so on. Stay motivated, come up with good ideas, over time this will show results. 🙂
thanks for sharing your wisdom!
I am glad if this article was helpful 🙂
What was the CPM for December 2016 ? Did the cpm increase from the bidding system ?
Last payment was November, December will be paid soon. Which means, I can’t tell you. The problem is that, even if calculated, the CPM is basically now meaningless due to the fact that they can bid different depending on your article. So, it might be that some of my articles had ahigher CPM than others. You can still divide the monthly payment through the ad impressions, but it won’t tell you anything about the real CPM. An article with just a cat photo might have a very low CPM, while a 1000 words guide about pc hardware might have a much higher CPM. Generally, it varies each month, calculated overall CPM increases, decreases and so on. As said, the bidding system makes it impossible to predict next payment.
I dont think that ads are served according to post content . I have an article about fitness and i have never seen an ad related to fitness but i found out that ads are served based on users search . If you search for plane tickets or visit booking .com then these ads will be served into your blog . How many impression did you get in the last stats ? I get 10K daily views.
I believe you didn’t understand what I said. For advertisers, they introduced a real time bidding environment, and yes it seems they can bid on individual posts and deliver their ads on the ad space of individual pages. You might want to read this post: https://wordads.co/2015/11/02/introducing-wordads-2-0/
The ads don’t have to be related to the post content, and yes due to the fact that they deliver ads from different ad networks, it’s highly possible that you will see travel ads if you visited a travel site previously. Due to the ad networks they can track it. But that’s not what I meant, I said that they can bid/purchase ad space of individual posts.
Hi Dennis, your post is one of the very few that are actually useful and written in simple words (for starters like me!). And I have to say that you are a great blogger: You take the time to reply to everybody, you make your readers feel appreciated. 😉
Keep up the good work and fingers crossed for my blog! xD
Cheers from the Netherlands!
Silvana.
Your feedback is as much appreciated 🙂 Back then it was harder to find information’s about the program, and most posts were rather negative and I couldn’t understand it, So, I started to write about it, I typed down my opinion with what I experiences or knew so far… turned out that people searched for it and liked my post. Today you can find a couple of very good reviews… My favorite WordAds review from another blogger is this one: https://humanbreeds.com/2014/10/13/wordads-advertising-on-wordpress/ with a completely different approach… the author Mantis mentioned his own experience and collected data from WordAds reviews of different bloggers. Give this a read too, it’ll give you a broader picture of how WordAds compares on different sites.
I am glad you like it that I reply to most comments. I see it the same, when I visit other blogs and the author replies to my comment, I feel appeciated as well. So, I always did the same on my blog. Also it’s fun to talk with different people about the same interestes or topics… commenting is just another form of communication and I am generally quite chatty 😀
Thank’s for your comment, and I will definitely cross my fingers for you.
Netherland? Cool! You’re a neighbor! Greetings! 🙂
Thanks for the links! I will read them as well. I’ll keep you posted on the success of my blog 😉 Cheers!
Yes, cool. You’re always welcomed with updates… other readers might go through the comments and see how things are going for other people… so, it might be helpful for the next person 🙂
Hey,
It’s been a month since I started blogging. I use WordPress.com. Yet I have not applied for WordPress. I was wondering if you could tell me about whag domain to use or if it is better to use personal or business plan available on WordPress.
Also, I went through the comments. You stated that most of your traffic comes from google. How did you do it? Mostly the traffic on my blog comes from social media.
Hi Divya,
Back then it was possible to just purchase the domain on wordpress.com without any plans, and if that’s still possible I would just go with the domain only. The wordpress plans are worthless in my opinion, but I respect if someone sees it different, which is why I highlight that it’s just my opinion. Talking about myself, I just have that, a privacy protected domain and the free plan. I pay $26 for this blog per year, that’s what the domain costs plus privacy protection. They take around $35 for the smallest plan, and it adds nothing of big value, which is why you are cheaper with just the domain and protection at $26. Unless they changed anything, you do just need the domain to apply for WordAds… but as said, unless they changed it. You might want to ask them first via mail.
Talking about traffic, I didn’t do much else than crafting content to publish it and did that regularly for several years, since 2011. I know some of these pseudo-marketeers and SEO’s want us to believe the opposite, but there is no magic trick to get stable organic traffic. It’s all about publishing content regularly. It’s really that simple, and these so called blogging-expert make it more complicated than it is. You remind me to craft a post about it, I always wanted to write about this and I really should do this some day but for some it would be a totally unexpected read. BUt in short, I think I achieved the traffic with persistence, with honesty (I just write about things that interest me). For me the writing, publishing and sharing part is fun, when I take a break for a month I feel bad. So, it was always easy to get inspired, but in real life I am also a chatterbox (laugh), which makes it easy to come up with words for an article as well.
If blogging would be work for me, I would have given up, like most people do before the first year even did end. I love to share pictures, thoughts, short articles and sometimes very long articles.. always depending what I have in my mind. And I think that’s all what it takes to get traffic over time… it just takes that, time. My very first year was like getting 10 visitors per day if I was lucky, now it’s a couple of thousand visitors per day. I think you need to keep your blog active, and fill it with content. I don’t write about postage stamp because I find collecting postage stamps very boring, but my point is… if that would be my or your hobby, you would find readers if you write about it. In my case, and probably also in your case, the subjects are different. Readers will find you, be original, try to inspire yourself… when you write about a special subject very often, the Google algorythm will notice at some point that you clearly have to share a lot about this subject, and thus your related categories or keywords will get weight, no matter if you already have backlinks or not. This is my philosophy, and it’s very controversial because SEO’s and marketeers want us to believe that it’s more complicated. You probably heard about link building and other strategies… I never did that. My whole link profile is completely natural. By that I mean, 95% of the links are caused by strangers because they shared my content. I maybe did create some links, but these are probably links from my social media profiles like a Twitter link, or stuff that my blog did automatically post to Twitter and stuff like that, but all other links are created by strangers.
Usually when I mention this, people say “But that sounds like a chicken egg problem, how could your blog become visible if you started with zero backlinks?”. That’s the fallacy.. people did preach so often that links are most important, so that today nobody can imagine that the Google algorythm envolved over time and that it’s not all about links. I don’t have prove, but I know my blog well… and I am pretty sure what I said is happening… There are more mathematical weightings, for example how often did you write about a certain topic? I did write often about technology, PC gaming, photography.. Especially tech and gaming gives me a lot of traffic. It became easier over time, and looking at my own blog, I think it’s that, the Google algorythm is aware that there are a lot of in-depth articles on certain subjects. It happened very slowly, but the more articles I had in a certain category, the easier it became to write new articles that attracted more and more traffic, the more I covered these subjects. New articles got more traffic over time, but older articles did even inherit the sstrength in many cases.
I think I could write 20 pages about it, but my comment is already long. I can just give you the tip to focus heavily on content creation. Google knows how to get good articles in the front of people, and contrary to the general consensus, it’s not all about getting backlinks first, that’s how it was two decades ago but that time is gone. Backlinks are still nice to have and will push you further, but if you get them naturally over time, you won’t get into trouble with Google, and you will sit behind a stable blog with a very healthy backlink profile. So, without comming up with technical analysis that would prove what I say… I just think I am right, that’s how I achieved that. I never cared about the SEO and marketing bla bla. I did read SEO and marketing subjects, because some things are good to know, but most of the stuff is really just that… bla bla bla. It’s however good to know a bit about keyword research. I’d lie if I would say that all about SEO is bad. Keyword research is something you need to know. You need to know on-page SEO and stuff like that, or how to inter-link related articles and so on. But if you know the basics already, you’re good to go and I come back to my main philosophy…. content and patience. And don’t get over your stats too often, especially not at the beginning. You will rather demotivate yourself if you look at the stats every day. As I said, the activity should be fun, because you want to craft a lot of content, and without fun that’s not gonna happen. So, find out what you love to write about, find subjects where you become a chatterbox, where it doesn’t feel like work while writing the article, where it more feels like talking with a friend. Find things that are inspiring, or find out what inspires you the most.
I think it’s not bad to get social media traffic. But I myself prefer organic traffic. Everything I post at social media is posted automatically. You can connect your blog with Twitter for example, and new posts are shared without your help. That’s how I do it, but I don’t really care about social media anyways. To me it’s just extra work for nothing, and with nothing I mean it’s traffic that will die out as soon as nobody shares it anymore. I had a few viral posts, and the traffic was awesome for a short time, but I have articles on the blog that drive a lot more traffic over time without end in sight. Sometimes when time is left or when I am bored, I share my favorite content manually but generally I don’t do this a lot. I heard some people say that you can kick-start your blog with social media, and I believe them, but it never worked for me and I dislike to spend all my time on social media channels, because with the amount of time I could also be productive on my blog, or with other activities like hiking or my photography projects. Also here, social media or not, I am honest and say it’s a matter of taste. I don’t question that it can work well for some, but you have to like it.
It’s already 2017 and this blog was started in 2011. It’s hard to compress the experience of almost 6 years in a single comment. But I hope I could inspire you a bit. Don’t get caught in the SEO and marketing world… create posts for your blog and have fun while doing so. That’s most important, and I am pretty sure you’re not an exception, I am sure if you keep it up, traffic will come to you as well. Fun fact… the first time I got 1000 visitors a day, I was blown away… I really couldn’t imagine how that would be possible with a personal blog that is not even a niche blog but a super mixed book. At the end I realized it’s like with every of my other activities. I mean how is it possible that I can play guitar today? It’s possible because I started to play guitar a long time ago. Same applies to your life… you probably achieved different things too and you can be proud about it. Blogging is that, it works out well if you start, if you don’t stop, and if there is iron will.
Your words really inspire me.. Thanks for the advice
Cool! Good luck with your blog! 🙂
hi there, I’m a novice blogger. Thanks for sharing your experience! Nice stuff going on here. Cheers from Italy 🙂
Hi! I am glad you liked the article 🙂
Very Informative article out there Dennis, There are tons of guides on Google ads but very few about word ads. I googled it and landed on your page, It was a great read!
Thanks for stopping by and I am glad you found the to be article helpful 🙂
Thank you, Dennis, for this — it’s the most helpful piece I’ve found. I have a blog that at times generates significant traffic (would generate more if I could be consistent about writing for it), but because of the nature of the subject — supporting free, democratically-controlled public education — I haven’t activated Word Ads. Now, however, I have a new venture on a new blog where I did activate Word Ads, so I’m curious to see how it plays out over time. That new blog has gotten some press in the past few days, so it’s generating some modest traffic. Hopefully it will build a decent following over time.
I am glad that you think the article was useful. I hope it will play out well with WordAds on your second project blog. My article is quite old and my traffic developed quite a bit further over the years, but I’d still say the math in my article is about right, and you can get around $100 if you manage it to get 100.000 views on the blog. It’s sometimes more, sometimes less, but that’s due to the complexity as I mentioned, because some people could blog ads or advertisers pay way more for visitors from “richer” regions (EU, North America). I still use WordAds, because I find it fair that they share the ad revenue with us… Also it will motivate people to keep the blogs updated, that really worked for me and I hope for you too. 🙂 And awesome that your project got press, I had this happen to me too in the past, and it’s funny how it can rain visitors if media points to our blogs 🙂 Good luck and happy blogging! 🙂
Thanks so much for responding, Dennis. I know your post is old, and it’s helpful to hear your current perspective. At least at the outset, I expect that most of my visitors are/will be U.S./Canada, U.K., etc. As our new project is a travel project, it may get more international over time — we shall see (our family is picking up and spending a year “world schooling” around the U.S. and internationally).
And yes, the mainstream press attention certainly helps, although when your pieces are cross-posted, it’s also a double-edged sword, as folks read there rather than on your blog. The ones this week are native to the mainstream press, so no biggie there. Thanks again for your input! Happy blogging to you too.
That would be a good visitor base then. Also since this is travel niche, I think it might even work better for you. It’s just my theory, but my personal blog is way too mixed. I myself like to write about different issues, but I can see how it’s very difficult for advertisers to find out if they get value from my main url. The thing is, I write mostly about technology and gaming, apart from that I plaster my blog with my personal thought and my photography results… As it is now, I think advertisers book certain high traffic posts, but they probably pay less for the smaller ones inbetween. My theory is that I would earn more if my blog would be pure niche, because then they could target the whole domain and they would probably pay a better rate. As said, just a theory, but would be cool if you can benefit from it with your niche travel site. Maybe you let me know in the future with a comment if it works much better than expected 🙂
True, there are some pros and cons with mainstream media exposure… you’re right, when their post is up, the majority of people will read it there and a big percentage does also only share the press post on social sites instead of yours. But as long as you got a backlink, everything else won’t matter too much. One of my posts was mentioned by one of the biggest news sites, since then, the post gets about 1k visitors per day alone (stable since 3 years or so, and rather increasing than decreasing over time). The thing is, the visitors are not referred by this site anymore, but the backlink moved my post to the first page of Google for some search queries. So, if they mentioned your site with a link, you will definitely get long-term value from it, especially if Google visitors type in search queries with keywords related to your post. In my experience with different sites, you will have it so much easier than everyone else if you got press attention already with a link. These “high-profile” links do in fact boost your whole URL, and ranking other articles will become easier 🙂 The result is organic long-term search traffic, the best thing you can achieve with a site (because that’s traffic while you sleep, while other people have to work and post their stuff to social media to get traffic at all). You will most likely experience the same in the long run, that makes me happy for you 🙂
Hi dennis. In december I had 105 ad impression and my earning was $0.78 and in february I had 178 ad impressions and my earning was $0.13. How is this possible?
I can’t tell you… you should ask the support: https://wordpress.com/help/contact By the way, my earning were much lower as well in February and I filled a support ticket but I am waiting for a reply. Also you will find forum threads about the February earnings and it seems several people complain about it, including myself as said. They will probably tell us again that rates can vary or something like that. But with luck, there is really an issue with the calculation, that happened in the past too and then the payment will be re-calculated. One forum mod said they look into the issue, but so far there is no clear reply if that is an issue with the calculation or if the rates for February were just that bad and that we have to accept that. We will see.
I have been blogging since 1.5 years and now i am getting around 1.5k views per month. Is it good? How much time did it take you to get the number of views that you are getting now every month? From how long have you been blogging?
I started my blog by the end of 2011, and in the middle of 2013 I had about 7k views. So, for me it was 7k views per month after 1.5 years. Anyway, I still think your numbers are great. Trust me, the majority of people will never see that number because they don’t work hard on their blog. Don’t give up. You, as everyone else has two options… stopping, to never see the number increase, or to never give up and see how the number develops over time. Choose the last one, getting traffic takes time but if you don’t give up the number can only increase. To tell you what is possible… today in 2017 I get about 4k -7k visitors per day, not per month. That’s basically what I got per month in the middle of 2013. That’s the result of 5 years of regular blogging.
Never give up unless you think blogging is a pain… if you don’t think that, just continue blogging. To answer your question, yes, for the 1.5 years your number is not too bad and I think you can increase it if you keep your ideas flowing and if you don’t stop. Also, never read or listen to any SEO and marketing blogs… they are talking the same bullshit again and again, and the tips they give you will only make it more difficult to rank with Google because most of the stuff is very shady and the Google algorythm is way smarter than many people think. Do it on a honest way, just write content and have good on-page SEO and Google will reward you. Having some tags or categories that you write often about certainly helps, because the more you write about certain subjects in the same categories or with the same tags, Google will give you more weighting, more power and there is no chicken and egg problem like many people believe. You don’t need to create backlinks on your own, you need to write a lot, and other people create backlinks to your site organically. This is the way to go, and Google won’t punish your site. Meanwhile, all SEO and marketeers will fall into the trap at some point and get their sites punished and maybe even de-listed, while you or someone else who did it on a honest way overtakes their positions in the future. Trust me, if you enjoyed writing so far, there is no way you won’t increase the traffic over the next years, unless you apply too much of the SEO nonsense, that’s where you can fall back to the Nirvana of the web.
Also I wouldn’t care too much about the traffic that other people might get. I am absolutely sure that there are many private individuals out there with blogs that get twice or even ten times as much traffic compared to my blog (who knows, maybe even more)… I couldn’t care less, because knowing that wouldn’t change the fact that I like to write or share content. I am happy if the side-effect is that my traffic is increasing, but I am not unhappy if it doesn’t for a while or if it takes too much time. There is always someone who gets more traffic than you or me, but that shouldn’t stop us to continue to write. So, the real answer to your question is that it doesn’t matter if 1.5k per month is good or not, the answer is that 95% of the bloggers give up before their blogs get to this number because they blogged because of the traffic and not because they like to create content. The answer to your question is, if you have fun with your blog and writing, everything is already good, and the over time increasing traffic will just be a side-effect of the joy. Just continue 🙂
Thanks for the inspiration Dennis. I will write a lot now.
Good luck with your project! 🙂
Wordads is a big time scam.
Pageviews: 90K
#of ads in a page: 4 (header, below post, 2 in sidebar)
Ad impressions: 13k (Which I really doubt but told so by wordads)
Amount paid for 13k impressions: $1.45
Stay away from this scam or be willing to flush your money down the drain.
I wouldn’t say scam… the February payment was pretty bad yes…. but other months worked great. By the way, they can’t control your payments or the rate, they work with ad networks together, including Google Adsense and others. To say scam, they would need to have any control over the networks and would need to be willing to rip of users. Is this your first month? My experience is that many momths were great, and that the year beginns as slow as the last year. I guess it will improve again over the next months.
WordAds
Page View 05= 2.989 04= 2.522
Period Earnings Ad Impressions Status
2017-05 $0.00 209 Pending
2017-04 $0.29 261 Pending
Very very poor 😦
With this amount of page views you wouldn’t see any meaningful earnings with Google Adsense either. Just keep blogging, if you have the exact same amount of visitors but per day, you will earn $100 – $200 a month. Good luck!
thank you Dennis! This is so helpful for those people who just activated Wordads like me! kudos!
Awesome! I am glad you liked this! Good luck! 🙂
Hey Dennis!! Loved your article. I further went over the internet to learn more about Adwords and it seems that wordads will be activated only for Jetpack and premium users.
Any updates on the WordAds program as of now. Would be very glad to know. Thank you 🙂
I am not aware of this. I think you just have to apply. You don’t need to be Jetpack user. Jetpack users are those with selfhosted blogs, they can now activate WordAds too, which was not possible previously. You don’t need to be premium user either. I don’t pay for any plan, I just pay my domain. Not sure if that changed, but back then all you needed was a domain and enough traffic to your blog.
Hi Dennis
Great blog. However, I am getting a little bit downhearted with it all. I have 2 websites of which I’m really proud of. Although I get good reviews from my readers I struggle to get any great numbers. I have ads on both sites and to date not received a penny. One site has been live for 3 months and one for one month.
Any tips or advice?
Thank you
Keith
My advise is to stop thinking about traffic or money in the very first years. One of your blogs is live since 3 months, the other one 1 month…. that’s nothing and there is no way that you will get meaningful traffic with freshly created blogs in the first year unless you are very lucky. My advise is to not give up, because over 80% of the bloggers give up in the very first year because they realize that you don’t get traffic or money tomorrow…. it’ll take years to build a blog and even then it is a fight. Another advise is to never read blogs or articles of so called “blogging experts”. What I just told you, is what they won’t tell you… blogging is no rocket science, all it takes is time, patience, endurance to keep the own blogs updated for a very long time, and you must see this as a fun activity. Blogging experts or search engine experts want to sell you something, they want that you read their blogs and click affiliate links… it’s much easier than trusting pseudo-experts…
As said, keep your blogs updated, do it for the fun and don’t stop. If it is a fun activity, you will get traffic because as said, most people give up as they think this is hard work. So, continue to do what you are doing, but don’t stress yourself. Building a blog to the point that it gets a lot of traffic, does only take one thing, it takes a long time. But you know what time means, sometimes you look back and think “Wait, was that really six years ago? Oh my god, how time flies!”…. that’s for example what I think in my case. I created this blog six years ago or so, and if you ask me today, it felt like maybe 3 years. So, it really just takes that… time, and having fun.
Sorry, can’t tell you something else. I don’t believe in any blogging tricks. Most of these blogging pseudo-experts tell you magic tricks, but when you take a closer look and analyze their blog traffic, you realize that they don’t get meaningful traffic at all. If these tricks would work, why don’t these experts increase their own blog traffic? The answer to this question is quite simple. If these tips would work, everyone would have a high-traffic blog in no time.
I just can tell you what my idea was when I started my blog. I started with the idea that I will most likely over time increase my traffic with every article I write. Which means, I was very sure that one big factor would be quantity. And I was right. The next idea I had was that time would be on my side. Usually when I start with something, I don’t stop. That was the same when I started to learn playing guitar, I didn’t start this to give up, I did achieve my goals and can now play guitar. That was something I had in my mind too when I started my blog. I was aware that this will be a long-time activity unless I get hit by a lighning strike 😀 So, my goal was to keep it up for a long time, and to publish a large quantity of blog posts. I believed that this alone would increase the traffic over time. Today I can say, I was right. No fancy tricks needed. Just focussing on something and developing a new hobby or passion. That’s what I believed in, and that’s my tip I can share.
Good luck! I hope this was somehow inspiring. Blogging is really no rocket science, even if some people want to tell you this. It just takes time. Visitors will increase unless you delete your blog or unless you stop being active on your blog. That’s my personal experience. That’s how I see this 🙂 Good luck!
Hello Dennis
Firstly, thank you for a phenomenal response. The contents of which I have noted.
I have no intention of giving up on either of my blogs because I believe in them and I do have a loyal following. Although they are very different genres I get as much out of writing them as anyone else.
You are certainly right about so-called ‘experts’ out there. When you scratch below the surface it is easy to find that they are feathering their own nests by either trying to sell you something that other ‘experts’ have said or they are trying to sell you a service that increases your email list – of which both are wrong and false. I want real readers to enjoy what I write.
However, I have followed all the advice given and made links with google+, facebook, reddit, twitter and so on but my readership numbers have stagnated following initial set-up – and that goes for both websites.
I know I have said that I both enjoy what I write and I won’t give up on them. It’s just that it’s very frustrating when all the love and care you invest into each and everyword seems to fall on deaf ears. It’s almost like watching your children not develop in the way they should (poor analogy I know but it’s the best I can offer).
Anyway, if you get a chance have a look at them and see what you think. Perhaps I am doing something wrong, of which any feedback would be useful.
http://www.thecheltenhamhurrah.com is a comedy site having a poke at life in the town in which I live.
http://www.keithsstory.co.uk is a deeper page about male depression following domestic abuse.
Like I said, both of these sites hold value and I want to get the word out there to share with like minded folk.
Thanks again Dennis. Utterly brilliant advice.
Regards
As said, I believe you are currently overestimating what is possible with blogging or social media in general. The 1-3 months of existence of your blogs are really nothing. Someone could tell you magic tricks and you could apply them, but it wouldn’t change anything. My stats don’t allow me to look that far back, but I believe I had like 20 visitors per day in the first whole year, maybe 100 in the second and like 300 per day in the third year, and after six years it’s like a couple of thousand visitors per day. It just takes time to build things up. Some people are faster, some are slower, it depends on the niche but to see any meaningful numbers it takes years, sadly. It’s an extremely competitive space. But wondering about these things in the very first three months doesn’t help at all. Don’t focus on these thoughts, they hold you up, and as you have noticed these thoughts are frustrating. If you continue to monitor your success that closely in the first year, there will be many more frustrating moments. As you wrote, you’re in there for the fun and you want to keep your projects running… that’s all you need for now. Everything else comes with time.
I personally think if you say you see value in your projects, they definitely will gain value with the years. The best tip you will hear, and I promise this, is not to care about traffic or any other numbers at all, because this completely takes out any frustration levels. As I said, everything else will come with time. Also you are the only person who can evaluate your projects. No joke, I’ve seen people back then who commented on my blog that it would be silly to mix photography, pc gaming and personal life stories, and that it wouldn’t work to get visitors…. but yet I continued. And now I did almost hit the 4 million page views mark, which means if I would have listened to anyone, I would have given up and would never have seen this number. I don’t know your niche, I could tell you it doesn’t work, but yet it probably will if you are determined. What I want to say is, I don’t care if other people think the things I do on my blog will work or won’t work, thus I give the same tip to others too… in this case you… you shouldn’t care about anyone’s blogging opinion, not even mine. The reality is, what works for me might not work for you, and the other way around. I can’t tell you anything… and anyone who thinks he is an experts and means he could give you blogging tips is a liar. The internet (especially Google algorythm) doesn’t care if you do everything as someone else suggested… the internet does care if your site is still running in 5 years. Google has this fancy algorythm that works like a charm, with fancy math functions like “This site is already 2 years old, must be important, let’s give it a better position in search!” to name just one example.
I did take a look, and maybe from the technical perspective I can tell you something. The “thecheltenhamhurrah” site is one that I would close right away because the theme does force me to have scripts enabled. Some people like me do run script blocker tools like the Firefox expansion “NoScript”, and I barely make exceptions. A site does either show me the content right away without allowing scripts, or the site doesn’t and I leave the site right away. With this theme you will at least lose tech geeks as readers. I know all my friends handle it that way as well… scripts must be loaded? No thanks, I have no time to make an exception. So, the template you use there is one that might make you lose some readers right away, while the keithstory theme is fine, except that it shows a fullsize header right away (not my taste) instead of content (But here is what I was talking about previously, it’s a matter of taste and your the site admin, so don’t listen to me). Blogging is simply so much about personal preference, that you should decide what works for you, not someone else.
Since the Google algorythm (I guess you know this) does also care about how much sites do link to your site, we have another time factor. It takes so much time until people find your site and link to articles or the main page of your site. Over the years you get more and more backlinks, and thus your site ranking increases as well. Some people (mostly SEO’s) try to manipulate this with all kind of shady techniques to get a nice fast boost… but depending on the strategy, most of the will cry later when Google does de-list or punish their sites. Which is why I have a hard time to give tips… in my case, I didn’t do a lot of SEO, instead I waited until strangers linked to articles on my site (and this natural way just takes longer). I am not a fan of “fake it until you make it” because I wanted a long lasting site, with a very natural backlink profile.
Anyway, there are some legit or genuine ways to boost your sites backlink profile. As far as I know, the guys at Google don’t have a problem with guestposting. I never did this, but I heard about quite some people who have had success with guestposting. So, maybe if you want to speed things a little bit up, you could write unique articles and contact other bloggers to publish them on their site. That’s like a win-win, because you get a backlink from the article and they get an unique article written for their site. I’ve heard about many people who did speed their blogging success up by using this backlink strategy. Maybe this is something for you, but then only write articles for high quality sites with massive traffic or good and healthy stats. But again, this strategy is a matter of taste too… some people love guestposting, and then there are people like me who don’t because they think “Why to hell should I write a high quality article for someone else if I could just publish it on my own site?”. I believe, at the beginning it could be a nice strategy, but when you do already have a working site, it’s not really necessary. That’s why I mention it, it’s nothing for me, but since you just started out, guestposting could be a way to get some links pointed to your site. So, as you can see, not all SEO tips are just bad, some things work for people and are genuine. You need to find out what works for you.
Hi Dennis, do you still use WordAds on your blog? I don’t see any ads on your blog.
Not at this time. I have it disabled for a while but not forever. I am currently experimenting to keep my personal blog ad free for a while since I made a decent income with other online projects anyways. I currently want that my widget is visible on top and not moved down by an ad banner. I want to find out if I get more followers when ads are disabled, if people pay attention to my subcription widget and so on.
If you are not sure to use them and if you need an extra income, I would still highly recommend WordAds. Payments have been increased quite a bit last time I used them. They really improved over time and the rates are better than ever if you target European and US visitors and if your traffic is good. I am still very happy with them, it’s just that I currently can afford it not to monetize all my projects, to have some of them clean without ads.
Thanks for your reply! Your arguments make sense! For me, I’m trying to monetise my blog so I’ll give it a try! Your article is great, and your advice is greatly appreciated!
I am glad you liked my article. Yes, give it a try! It’s really a cool feeling when you can get something back for the affords you put in online projects 🙂 I hope it pay well for you too 🙂
Just made my first 13 cents. I just started my blog, so I’ll keep working at it. 🙂
Congrats 😛 I hope you can improve that 🙂
It can only get better from here! 🙂
Definitely 🙂 And that’s the right way to think about it 🙂 Blogging takes time, but in the long run it’ll be worthwhile, not to mention all the fun on the way 🙂
Awesome post! Just what my readers wanted. Reblogged.
Cool! I am glad you liked the post! Thanks for the reblog! 🙂
You are welcome!🌺♥️😊
I wish they give control how many ads to be displayed. A long time ago, they provide option to display “ads under post only’. And I always choose this option. But, now the option is gone and they start displaying too many ads : upper sidebar, under post, lower sidebar, sometimes abover header. It’s so annoying and distracting my visitor.
You have luck 🙂 These options are there: https://wordpress.com/ads/settings/
I wrote an article about it a while ago: https://diaryofdennis.com/2018/02/08/wordads-does-now-allow-you-to-customize-ad-placements/
It could be that you access your WordAds settings through the old dashboard, because there it’s not updated. The newer sidebar dashboard has all the options. Either use my link above, or click on Settings, then WordAds/Settings Tab.
Aha.. you are right. I found the setting in new dashboard. Now, I can make my blog less annoying for my visitor with less ads. Thanks.
Awesome 🙂 Happy blogging!
Hey Dennis,
I have just released my blog and I implemented wordads in my blog, but it doesn’t show any ad. Do you know what the problem is? My blog is not public for everybody yet, because I need to finish my blog first completely, but I have a domain etc.
Check the WordAds settings if it’s enabled. There are a couple of settings like “Everyone can see ads” or “Logged in people won’t see any ads” and stuff like that. So, it might be that you have something set wrong. By the way, when you enabled that option that everyone can see ads except logged in users, then you might not see the ads since you are logged in, as same as your WordPress readers won’t see them. But everyone else does. This is a setting I use. I could imagine you have that thing enabled too.
Generally you must go through every option and decide how exactly you want it to be implemented. If there is a problem that you can’t solve, you can also contact the WordAds team here: https://wordpress.com/help/contact
I hope you get it to work as you want it. 🙂
I haven’t been making any money so far, and I keep seeing WordPress ads on my site despite upgrading to Premium. Why is this so?
You need to go into your dashboard, find the settings of WordAds and enable it. You won’t make money if it’s disabled. By default, WordPress always showed ads to viewers at times… WordAds came many years later… so, it’s normal that ads are shown, but if you enable WordAds, you will get a 50% cut from the revenue. And since you most likely didn’t activate it, you of course won’t earn anything.
Hey Dennis,
WordAds have been enabled since I purchased the Premium plan but still haven’t been seeing any earnings.
I’m not sure if I haven’t been bringing enough traffic to earn money or something is just systematically wrong.
The earning reports are usually delayed. This might be the reason why you still don’t see anything. If you think something is wrong, you can contact WordPress here: https://wordpress.com/help/contact just mention that your question is about WordAds.
Okay, well I’ll check again at the end of the month and see if I receive my earnings then.
Thanks for your help!
It’s a pleasure. I hope things will work out well for you. Good luck with your website!