Vince Logan and EvaMendes.com: An AdSense success story

Vince Logan runs a high-traffic site and has recently published
ads on it using AdSense. He contacted me after reading my book
with some questions, which I was happy to answer. But after finding more
about Vince's situation, I decided to interview him about his experiences
with AdSense. Note that Vince's situation is somewhat unique: he had
an existing high-traffic site that he is only now monetizing. The kind
of numbers he's mentioning are actually fairly normal, probably even low,
for that amount of traffic. As he mentions, he's still learning
and playing around with things. Still, his story is nice to hear and
I thank Vince for sharing some of the details with us.

1. You're not the typical reader of Make Easy Money with Google: Using
the AdSense Advertising Program. How
many sites have you built so far and what prompted you to buy the book
given your level of experience?

I have built about 150 different sites from entertainment to retail to
not-for-profit. I heard about this “adsense” from a customer who wanted to
place a couple on his site. I placed a few on my site to see how it works
and I watched the money roll in. Well, only about $5 a day. I thought that
was pretty good. I decided to do a little more research and MEMWG popped up
a couple times. Having a Barnes and Noble across the street, I ordered it.
After reading it, I tweaked a couple ads and my CTR and CPM tripled. I was
bringing in an average of $30 to $40. A high of $70. No matter how “basic”
you think Make Easy Money with Google is, everyone who reads it will pick up something that they
didn't know.

2. If you're willing, please share some details about one of your sites.

I built EvaMendes.com as a hobby. I bought the domain about 4 years ago and
started making a fan site. The movie “Hitch” debuted and my hosting company
called and said that I needed to move the site because it was bringing in
about 1 million hits a day. I moved it to a dedicated server. I received a
call from Eva's publicist and the site is going 'official' in November.
It's also been nominated for an award from Movies.com, voting ends September
14th, so VOTE!!

3. How much money are you making these days from AdSense? How much were
you making when you started? Was it a slow and steady increase or were
there events that caused your income to jump?

I recently experienced a “no-no” with adsense that brings the revenue way
down. Not a violation, just a greed thing. [Eric: Vince put too many ads on his site and his numbers actually went down. Remember: less is more when it comes to AdSense. More about that in a future posting.] On average, I was making $40 a
day. Remember though, I have only been doing this a month and I already
have about $700 in my account. If I had to plot it out, the first days was
very low ($1-$10) then it shot up ($70) and then I became greedy and it went
down to $5 a day. The only event that happened was that I let it work and
didn't tweak it after reading Make Easy Money with Google. Until I got greedy that is.

4. In your review of Make Easy Money with Google you mentioned that you were able to make your
daily income jump from $11 to $70 by following the book's advice. What
specific advice helped you the most?

Having the confidence that it worked and making sure that I was doing the
'basics'.

5. Traffic is always key, what's been your best way of getting traffic
to your sites?

About 98% of my traffic is direct. They simply type in “Eva Mendes” in any
search engine or just add the dot com.

6. What more would you like to see books like Make Easy
Money wiht Google discuss?

The pitfalls, how does AdSense “really” work, how does AdWords work (that's
where AdSense ads come from), links to good AdSense sites, the rules and
regs on AdSense, a chapter on human behavior when it comes to ad placements
(advertising tips).

7. Have you given any thought to joining Yahoo!'s program once it's been
made public? Are you dissatisifed with AdSense in any way?

Of course! Yahoo has promised to “give more free money”!! I am not
dissatisfied at all. I will probably make about $1000 to $2000 a month once
the site runs for a little while (without me tweaking it). That's just one
site though. I have about 30 that are current. None of them pull the
traffic that EvaMendes.com does. Not bad for a hobby…

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