Catnabbit: A new reader-built site

Here's another new site for you from one of my readers. Catnabbit is a rather unique site of news and reports, by cats, for cats! It's a delightful site by a pair of cat lovers. And it's also a great case study for their use of AdSense. See how nicely they integrate a horizontal link unit at the top? And even their use of the referral buttons is good — did you notice the one in the bottom righthand corner? They're using the Ads Minded WordPress theme as the basis, by the way, so kudos to that designer for some of these placements.

The letter from one of the site owners was quite nice:

After I got the site somewhat organized I found MEMWG and your book helped me to start taking adsense (and adwords) seriously. The tip about the adwords traffic estimator was brilliant. I hadn’t even considered using adwords to help myself get more traffic and also to help me find what keywords would work best for advertising both for my site and on my site. I feel kind of silly calling it a brilliant idea, since it really is just common sense, but that’s what your book is for - to help me think of things that I hadn’t otherwise thought of myself. I’ve also played around with your google suggest explorer a bit. Then there was your tip to start using sitemaps, as well as your tips on how to help build traffic to my site… I could go on and on about how I built my site, but I’m sure you get the picture.

It's great to see someone enjoying not only the book, but also this very blog. She goes on to say:

I really don’t feel that I am making a lot of money right now, but from what I have read about adsense publishing so far is that if I grow slowly then I may be better off over time because I am putting more effort into the content and I’m not just out to make a quick buck. The biggest delight I have had in the last 6 months has been the laughter that the site has brought me. I think that your book helped me build a foundation that I could work from and I really appreciate it.

You absolutely have to be prepared to work over the long term on your site and to grow its traffic. That's how you're going to make money. I know, because I've been there. Even this little site you're reading now is on a growth curve with its AdSense earnings as it approaches its first anniversary.

I really enjoy getting these kinds of letters, so keep them coming! And the owners of Catnabbit want to point out that their labor costs are low because their cats do about 75% of the work for them

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

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