I’m almost too embarrassed to write this post. At the risk of self-humiliation I’m willing to share my bonehead move with my readers because somewhere out there on the internet, there has to be another person as bone headed as I am, but too embarrassed to admit it. So, for all of the boneheads in the world…this one is for you too.

A Little Background

My regular readers know that I have a few blogs and websites. I monetize each of them with Google AdSense and a couple of other revenue generating methods. One of my sites does pretty well with Google (sometimes)

One of my blogs, however, had me perplexed. While the traffic was steady and clicks on the Google ads were constant, the income generated from the clicks was nil! I ran a report and after 180 clicks I earned a whopping doughnut! Yep, big fat Zero!

Here’s How I Rationalized It

I had originally created the blog on Blogger.com. Over time I transferred the blog to its own domain using a WordPress template. Not being able to delete the original blog from the blogspot domain, I thought Google was penalizing the reincarnation of my blog because of duplicate content. I won’t mention that I went through each post on the blogspot.com domain and encouraged readers to visit the new blog location.

My Bright Idea

After a period of frustration noticing that the clicks were mounting and the money was not, I decided to remove all Google AdSense code from the blog. I substituted Google with Chitika and Amazon and whoever else seemed to fit with the theme of the blog.

Bringing You Up to Date

Fast-forward a few months to some time in early January (a day or so ago). I started yet another project which is in the form of a blog/website. Since it’s still in the experimental stages, I won’t go into detail now. A few months from now I’ll let you know how it’s going.

Anyway, as a result of creating this new blog/website, I added Google AdSense to monetize the project. While generating the AdSense code for the new site, I got sidetracked on the Google site and noticed the “Allowed Sites” function under the “AdSense Setup” tab. Guess what I realized…(This is the embarrassing part)… I realized that I had enabled the site-specific feature in Google AdSense some time ago.

What this does is it forces you to approve the web domain that hosts your AdSense ads. The reason I enabled it a long time ago was because I heard horror stories of people having their Google accounts canceled for unknown reasons. I thought that maybe someone might have gotten a hold of the AdSense code and maliciously placed it on a spam site thus causing the account to be suspended. I know, sounds far fetched, but that’s how my brain thinks.

Duh Moment

Anyway, after looking at this I realized that I had not included m own sites in the “Allowed Sites.” That’s why I didn’t earn a dime on the AdSense clicks on my blog (all 180 of them). My low revenue was all self inflicted. How embarrassing!

The Moral of the Story

If you’re going to add Google AdSense to your website or blog, make sure you list your own site as an “Allowed Site” in order to receive income from Google AdSense.

Gotta run… I’ve got to put the code back on my “allowed” blog.

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