Does AdSense Work? A Singaporean Perspective

Many of you have heard of AdSense. Some of you who like myself have started trying it out recently. And some of you are even AdSense experts making decent pocket money running AdSense advertisements in your blog, website or portal.

Is AdSense for real?
The burning question that I had when I was in your shoes on 27 March 2007 when I first started my AdSense journey was... Is this for real?

Like many sceptical Singaporeans, I thought will an idea like AdSense work in our context? Isn't it more US-centric and hence most of the value will be created there and not here? These and many doubts filled my mind as I hesitantly dabbled in the world of AdSense. As expected, because I was only "playing" with it and not seriously thinking about how to run a proper blog, my results were mediocre to say the least.

A slow start in AdSense
I had an AdSense account since 27 March 2007 but didn't really go into placing Ads and more importantly creating focussed content on my blogs until sometime in mid-May 2007. Hence, my early results were not surprisingly, dismal. Average single digit number of page impressions and a click-through-rate (CTR) of 0.00% which translates into earning of ... a......grand ..... total of...

Zero, nil, nada, kosong and 零蛋!


I began to read up about how AdSense works and what it takes to generate traffic to my blog. What I learnt was to engage the internet community, to participate in relevant forums, to post quality content about things I know and to develop a niche where I am comfortable blogging whether AdSense earnings comes (or not!). Lo and behold, my results starting to become better as I blogged on specific topics I understood, for example, treasury bills. I also blogged about my approach to financial freedom and discussed topics that were generated because, you, readers asked questions about how to invest in this type of instrument or that type of instrument.

Turning the corner
My efforts were starting to bear fruit. Prior to the increased intensity and depth to which I wrote my blog posts, my results were only a meagre USD 6.41 as at 31 May 2007 as seen below:


But it climbed up steadily as what I wrote appears to have resonated with my audience, my page impressions started to go up to 100, 150 and hit a high of 274 at one stage! Consumer behaviour is such that typical click-through rates are closer to 1% to 5% for the "average" website and I was quite happy to see that as at 15 June 2007, it has grown to the current USD 48.99 for the period of 1 June to 15 June 2007. I would like to thank all readers who have found value in my blog in learning and sharing together about how we can grow save money, invest wisely and grow together on our journey towards realistic financial freedom.

Google AdSense allows you to request for cash-out only when you reach USD 100. Hence, I am still working hard to deliver useful content in this and other of my blogs so that more people can join this learning journey together towards total financial freedom. ;-)

What I continue to learn from my AdSense journey
I learnt from my AdSense journey that it boils down to human behaviour and you need to generate genuine human traffic so that the relevant ads when delivered to the targetted group of potential interested visitors will translate into a click to the advertiser's webpage. In order to do that, there are no shortcuts except to write useful content, have a clean design and to invest in writing about things you love or or passionate about. Like many of you, I am passionate about financial freedom but I am realistic enough to understand that there is no short-cuts to success. My blogging regime takes me past 1 am most nights and can be very tiring physically. But mentally I am all charged up and enthused because I believe in what I write and I write what I believe in.

For those of you who may have that hidden talent, that pet topic, that immense experience in a field or domain that many others do not possess. If you are able to write, an articulate your thoughts and have sufficient IT skills to set up a blogger / wordpress blog or your own website, consider trying out AdSense. It might just earn you enough to pay off your broadband connection and perhaps help you add to your retirement fund! ;-)

Be well and prosper, and you may prosper in five cents and ten cents with AdSense.