I'd like to extend a big thanks to Matt Haughey. Last week Matt posted a very informative article, Blogging for Dollars, about his experience with Google's adsense advertisements.

Back in July I mentioned how it would be great if I got a nickel for each person who read my how-to article on installing Pergo Prodigy. That article, an article on making Ginger Beer, and of course my Electric Car Conversion rank very high in search engine results and are responsible for much of this site's traffic.

Reading Matt's success story I wondered if adsense might work on these pages. It wouldn't be the first attempt at defraying operating expenses. A couple years ago I put a donate link on the EV site, but it didn't gather anything but electronic dust. In a few places I have links to books on Amazon which I get a miniscule cut from, but that's only generated a little bit of money over the years.

One attraction of adsense is the automatic targeting. If a page covers a specific topic and is well "googled" (indexed) the ads tend to be very focused. Over the years I've had hundreds of folks send email asking where they can buy a vacuum pump or some other car related equipment. It would be great for the advertisements to be right there on the page...and for me to get a cut. ":^)

After reading Matt's article I applied for an adsense account and by Monday I was signed up and ready to start. It was easy to get the HTML code to insert into the pages (custom layouts and colors) and then just a matter of editing a few templates and html files on my webserver. We were serving ads in no time.

The ads on the EV site are very good, I even checked out a couple (I'm starting a new EV conversion project this winter). The pergo page is right on as well. BTW, I don't plan on putting ads here or most places on my website for that matter. Some places it makes sense (and money) but on most pages it doesn't.

The next morning I checked the account and discovered that not only did three hundred people view the ads, but many of them clicked through. I made five bucks. Hey, that's a hundred nickels!

It's not completely perfect. One of the things I get lots of hits for is a page titled Upper Body Workout. I suspect most of the people searching for that term aren't really expecting to find themselves on an EV conversion web site talking about lugging batteries. Still, I was kind of hoping Google would target a few home gym ads on the page.

I'm not going to quit my day job or start visiting Porsche dealers anytime soon. It's just cool to see enough money coming in to pay for the monthly web hosting costs and a little left over to buy new music and support other web entrepreneurs.

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