Gaining a passive source of income is probably the best thing you can utilize the internet for, apart from all the content out there. Mind you, there is work involved in the beginning to get things flowing. But once you’ve laid the foundation, the only way is UP.

I’ve been working on optimizing a certain ad network, in the beginning it had a few hiccups as the daily intake would just never budge over a couple of cents. Even though the ad serving was laser targeted and I had good enough traffic to monetize. The darn thing just never went over a certain point.

I made a few small changes and that’s when I started consistently hitting $1 a day {small steps people, small steps…}, which got me excited as I saw there was potential. I then went on an optimization binge and tried to optimize the ads for each and every single visitor I got on my sites. Mixing it with a few other ad networks to increase profitability per visitor.

Mixing ads has advantages and disadvantages.

The advantages being -

• You can split test between two networks
• More choices to click, i.e they can click on more than one ad just to see if they find something interesting. Which means more money for you, as your income is based on clicks.
• The content page looks dynamic to a repeat visitor
• You can see if one networks ad format beats the other, under various scenarios.

The disadvantages being -

• If you don’t blend the ads well enough, you lose the click out. Hence you make no money.
• Sometimes both ad networks perform equally, leaving you in a dilemma as to which to preferably use. Which means you end up spending way too much time testing.
• An ad unit can have a high CTR but a low eCPC, which may not be the case with the other ad networks unit {i.e low CTR but high eCPC}. Sometimes this may cause you to abandon research behind scaling your project altogether.

Naturally, results will vary by day, weekend and world social events. Taking those into consideration, I am happy to say that I’m no longer excited about the $1 a day I was making. I’m actually looking at doubling the present $2 - $3 p/d I make within the next two weeks. Which has me even more excited.

Once I’ve optimized my ad units, and find the right balance, I can set and forget about optimizing this particular income stream for at least the next 6 months.

That doesn’t mean I won’t expand it, it just means I won’t be doing anymore testing to see what works and what doesn’t. That’s the real joy of passive income, to know the dough is rolling even in your sleep.

About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.