If you are reading this article chances are pretty good that you are a regular reader at my blog www.financialjesus.com.

If you have taken some time to look around you might have noticed that there are some ads on the website – 2 inside each article ( 1 picture ad + 1 block of text ads) and some ads in the menu on the right.

Some of you probably already know this but each time one of you clicks on the ads on this site I make some money. The amount I make from 1 click is quite small – anywhere from 1 cent to 1 dollar (usually about 0.10-0.30 dollars) but since there are a lot of people reading this blog the numbers add up quite fast.

Below is a picture of my check form Google Adsense for 2669 dollars and 98 cents – it took about 1 year to earn.

My Google Adsense Check for 2669 dollars (Click for full size check)

I wish to thank you guys for sticking around and reading this blog. You are the only reason why I am able to earn money from this site and hopefully increase my earnings through Google Adsense in the future. Last time I checked there were over 80 000 unique visitors per month reading our stuff here at Financial Jesus!

What am I going to do with the money?

I am planning to use the money to buy a new car!  I will let you know once I get it!

Do you want to Make Money Online?

I am toying around with the idea to teach others how to make money online by making a special website or an online course. What do you think, would you be interested in something like that?

Please answer the question below:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Markus Frind is the owner of a website called Plenty of Fish – the largest dating site in the world.

His website is free for everybody – he uses Google Adsense ads to pay for hosting and makes enough to keep the site running. In fact – Plenty of Fish makes about 1 million dollars a month just from Adsense advertising. In addition to that, the good news is that he doesn’t have to share the money with anyone – he is the only person working for his website (his girlfriend also helps out).

3 years ago – in 2006 – he was already making over 10 000 dollars per day just with Adsense. Here is his Google Adsense check for 901 733 Canadian dollars  (735 567 US dollars)
The check is for only 1 month and is the largest known Google Adsense check ever seen.

Click for a bit larger image

The Website Itself

To tell you the truth – Plenty of Fish itself is a rather basic website that doesn’t look too good. Since I don’t know a lot about online dating I went to ZoomOnDating.com and checked out some other dating sites – I have to tell you that Plenty of Fish was probably the worst looking! But it’s also the largest in the world and free – so you really can’t argue with that. They must be doing the important stuff right!

For more information about people who make a lot of money with Google Adsense – sign for our  full feed RSS or subscribe via email.

I am only making baby steps with Financial Jesus and its capacity to earn money – but here are the income stats for January 2009.

Google Adsense Income -$15.25

Income – $4.12

Direct Links – $3

Total Earnings for January 2009 – $22.37

The kind of money I am making with FinancialJesus.com is little at most but I am still seeing potential for it to become my main income source.

In January I joined as my first advertising program besides Google Adsense. I have to say that  Google has not being delivering the best results for me but until last month I didn’t have the motivation to try other programs – BIG MISTAKE!

While  only made me a bit over 4 dollars I started using it in the end of the month – so it will make me a lot more in February – in just 3 days it has already made me over 18 dollars – that’s about as much as I made in January combined.

January was also the first month that I made my first direct sale – selling a finance related link for 3 dollars. I had no idea how much a link in my blog should be worth but after finding out that the text link service I also joined asks $15 for a link I will probably raise the price to 10 dollars.

My blog income goal for February is $77.63

Achieving it means I have made $100 in blogging this year in just 2 months (vs the 8 months it got me to get the first 100 dollars).

What to expect in February

New theme

I am going to shop around for a premium WordPress theme. While the one I currently have is fairly good, it lacks the ability to generate more page views and has a lot of other small shortcomings that together have a tremendous impact on the usability of Financial Jesus. I intend to fix this!

More content

My blogging goal for February will be 1 post per day – which makes out a total of 28 posts. While I intend to only write about the things that are interesting to myself I also have the SEO fact in mind. Managing to get 10 new visits from organic search results for every article I write will give me an extra 240 visitors per day. While it will be a challenge I have been using a simple trick that helps me better target my posts to search engines. Don’t bother asking – I will keep it a secret!

More marketing

I have done a little research and made a list of personal finance websites that Financial Jesus has to compete with. Some of these sites have more visitors and some have less – I have prioritized them and intend to write some guest articles and use an aggressive commenting strategy to get new RSS subscribers. My goal is 300 RSS subscribers by March. It’s difficult , but achievable.

More monetization

I will try some new advertising programs to try and make some money. It seems that all the famous bloggers are right after all – the key to making money is having a lot of income sources (it’s the same in real world). If anyone has some good ideas on advertising programs to try – please let me know and I might become your affiliate if I decide to join! I am also hoping for miracles from my future theme – hopefully it will be one of the answers to making more money online.

To stay tuned how I did on achieving my goals for February 2009 -  sign up to our  full feed RSS or subscribe via email.

One of my intents when launching Financial Jesus in May 2008 was to make some money!

I wanted to have a blog that looks good, has quality content, is well known and makes enough money to live on!

While I haven’t fully reached any of these goals – they seem more attainable than ever.

After reading thousands of blogs on the internet I dare to say that the quality of blog posts here at Financial Jesus is top notch (is this my ego talking?).

When it comes to my blogs design and the ability to make money – there is a lot to be done! I feel that the website should be a lot simpler and also incorporate some ads to pay for itself.

My Google Adsense Check

Despite many challenges – today is an important day for Financial Jesus. We just received our first Google Adsense Check!

Click for larger image

The Check is for 112 dollars and 31 cents and it took a total of 6 months to make this money.

I know – it isn’t millions but everyone has to start from somewhere! After all – I can promise that the next $100 comes a lot faster! After my post about how much money a website can make it feels that there are no limits!

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I am a big fan of Firefox and use it almost exclusively for all my web surfing.

Firefox was also the only browser that I used when redesigning the theme that this blog comes with.

Here is what I thought FinancialJesus.com looked like to our visitors:

And indeed it looked like this for 75% of all my readers – because they use Firefox.

Here is what FinancialJesus.com looked for the 24% of visitors who used Internet Explorer or Safari:

Notice the magically appeared Google Adsense ad on the right! It was not inserted there by me and until yesterday I had no idea that it was there at all!

Whose ad was it?

The ad was included by the author of my blogs theme. When redesigning the theme I tried to comment out the code for the ad but I did a sloppy job! The ad did not show up in Firefox but it displayed just fine in Internet Explorer.
This was totally against my policy of keeping the site clean and ad free. I have recently added some experimental ads but none of them were above the fold (the part of the website that is visible without scrolling down).

This ad had probably the best CTR on FinancialJesus.com. Unfortunately I have no way of knowing how it did, since it made money to someone else and I don’t have a way to getting my hands on its statistics!

If you want to be sure what your website looks like and you don’t like making money for someone else you should check your website with different browsers.

You never know when something strange (and somewhat stupid) like this happens!

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Don’t be too happy if you want to be rich

Good news everybody!

FinancialJesus.com has been up and running for 15 days straight and it looks that things are getting better by the day.
Sunday(that’s yesterday, baby! ) was our record breaking day with 579 unique visitors.

Here’s what happened during the first 15 days

FinancialJesus.com has a total of 34 posts and exactly 70 comments.

The comments part is what I am particularly satisfied with! It shows that there is already starting to form a small community around this website and that is exactly what I have been trying to do!

During the first 15 days I have had 1596 unique visitors! This is an average of 100 visitors a day! I am very satisfied with this, but to tell you the truth this number is very far from what it will be. All my next efforts will be made in order to get more visitors to FinancialJesus.com and eventually get the average to 1000 unique visitors per day.

My number 1 traffic source?

StumbleUpon.com – I can’t recommend it enough! I spend a lot of time on StumbleUpon to find new interesting stuff, and to tell you the truth I have submitted a few of my more interesting posts to StumbleUpon as well… If you are a user, add me as a friend

Most viewed post

My most viewed post is Top 10 richest countries of the world. I wrote it only 3 days ago, but it has already got 1134 unique visitors and 1253 page views. Nothing compared to big sites, but pretty OK for FinancialJesus.com.
The traffic to Top 10 richest countries of the world has mostly come from StumbleUpon. Guess who adds his own content to StubleUpon? That’s right – ME I only do it for posts I feel are StumbleUpon material, so, to tell you the truth, I don’t feel bad at all.

What have I learned?

Basic things actually.

1. If possible make lists – they are easier to read.
2. Use a lot of titles and highlighting – This make it easier for visitors to read your content as well
3. Use spell check – you always make mistakes!

Ads?

As you have maybe noticed financialjesus.com is ad free. But it is not my intention to keep it ad free forever. In fact just about 2 hours ago I added some Google Adsense ads to my top post – Top 10 richest countries of the world. Since I have almost no experience with ads I have yet no idea on how it will turn out. The reason I decided to post some ads is to make a small case study for myself – that way I’ll get a little experience on whether the ad formats and positioning that I used work or not!

For information on how my next 15 days will go and how the “ad placement project” went, sign up to my full feed RSS or subscribe via email.