Part of me can’t quite believe it, but May 30, 2010 (today) is the 5th anniversary of this blog. I made the first post on May 30, 2005, shortly before the publication of my book Make Easy Money With Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program (details here).
Those first few weeks of posting were pretty lame, I must admit. At the time, the blog was actually called Make Easy Money With Google to go along with the book’s title (that was never my title, BTW, the working title for the book was “GooglePot”, i.e. “how to make a pot of money with Google”, and neither I nor the marketing folks at Peachpit Press could come up with anything really good), but I had to change the name of the blog after Google sent me a notice they were going to stop serving AdSense ads on the site because it contained their trademarked term “Google” in the domain name.
In retrospect, a bad decision. I should have just dropped the AdSense ads (which I did recently anyhow) because the ads on this site have never amounted to much anyhow — an audience of AdSense publishers just doesn’t click the ads. Too sophisticated 
I had a lot of incoming links to the makeeasymoneywithgoogle.com domain, so moving to memwg.com required a lot of careful redirection. I should have at least taken the opportunity to come up with a good brand for the blog instead of just taking the first letter of each word to make a domain name. (On the plus side, a 5-letter domain name makes for shorter URLs…) Yes, I called the blog “The Unofficial AdSense Blog”, but the domain name should have matched that.
Really, I should have gone with a less spammy-sounding domain name from the beginning, but it was natural to match the book title with the blog title. But something shorter and more brandable would have been better. Although I don’t know how I would have come up with something that didn’t include either “Google” or “AdSense” in the domain name and would have had the same problem with the ad delivery.
Titles and domains aside, I’ve derived a lot of enjoyment from this blog. It exposed me to blogging in reality (as opposed to just reading about it) and led me to have great conversations with a lot of interesting people. And I hope I’ve been able to provide some useful information to my readers over the years. Not quite sure where I’ll take the blog next, but so far it’s been a great ride!
Eric,
I am a relatively “newchum” to your blog but you are someone I always read. The above post being no exception as it was interesting to hear of how everything started and some of the decisions that you had to make. Hindsight is a great advantage, isn’t it?
Congratulations and I wish you all the best for the next 5 years. Please don’t stop.
Sticking at anything for 5 years is a nice feather in one’s cap, Eric.
It’s especially in a our articificial MMO world where a lot of people quit in 5 weeks becuase the promised riches aren’t there.
I’ve learned a few things here and I’m still running blogs that depend on your Privacy Policy plugin and the very useful SEO Siloing plugin, so thanks you again for being one of the really helpful and most approachable and friendly people in the industry.
Loking forward to the enxt 5 years.
How old is a five-year-old blog in Internet years? Must be ancient! Congratulations!
I’m looking forward to at least five more.
Congrats mate! Wow, 5 years is surely a long time for blogging and glad you go trough it so I can learn much from your writing.
Congratulations; this is quite big anniversary
Congratulations, 5 years is a lot of time, keep posting great content!