Finally, I am starting to see the 'woods from the trees'…

This post is all about online home business income, traffic, and how 'skewed' or 'blinkered' my perception of them have been to date…

As I mentioned in my previous journal entry I started my online experience by building a hobby site. I didn't chose its topic based on anything but my interest in it:  No research on how profitable it was. No research on how competitive it was. I just did it for the love of it. 

Somewhere along the way, when I started getting decent traffic, I thought I might as well make the site pay for itself, so I added a couple of monetization strategies to it. Namely AdSense, and affiliate marketing.

AdSense was my main focus. After all - how easy it is, to slap up some interesting content and insert a little piece of magical code that generates money for you every time a visitor clicks on an ad…

I also became blinkered to any other traffic generating method around me. I somehow had decided that I had to get all my traffic from natural searches from Search Engines. No other way. Free traffic was the way to go.

On the one hand, I thank my lucky stars I did. The way I had been monetizing my site didn't really give me the luxury to afford paying for any extra traffic generating methods if it all went wrong. I had a site with great monetization potential, but just didn't really know how to put it all together and turn it into a 'cash cow'.  I probably would have wasted my money on other traffic generators, and would have been none the better for it…

So it all comes down to my choice of monetization.

You'd have thought that after a couple of years of doing this, I'd have clicked, but it really took me until now to realize…

By putting the majority of my focus on AdSense, I've literally been scrambling over the pounds, to get to the pennies.

This might sound strange. After all, that hobby site earns a nice tidy amount from AdSense these days. And I don't have to lift a finger. Passive income is truly fantastic. But I'm just realizing that part of that traffic could be better monetized. I realize this now.

One of the main aims for me now is to focus on creating my own products to sell online. For now, my focus will be on digital products, since the profit margin seems to be much higher there, and the ease of distribution is fantastic.

I already sell one digital product on my hobby site.

I did far, far, far less work on setting up the sales funnel for my digital product, in comparison to the work I did to add and test AdSense all over the site. Yet that digital product makes over a quarter of what I make with AdSense.  If I actually put more thought into it, tested the sales funnel, the copywriting, the offer… I'm sure it will be worth much more of my time than trying to eek more pennies out of AdSense…

Don't get me wrong - I still love AdSense, and love to see that lump sum land in my bank account each month. And if I had chosen a more profitable niche, I'd probably be earning more per click right now. But I didn't. So I think I can make far, far, far more by focusing on marketing my own products now.

If we are to learn from our mistakes, then these are the lessons I've learned, that I will take with me while I work on creating my new home business income on my new, unrelated site.

My lessons learned:

• AdSense is a great little earner, but producing your own digital  products can be far more profitable.
• Free traffic from Search Engines is great, but it's not the be all and end all. You can start making money straight away by paying for immediate, targeted traffic, so long as you are testing all the way and know what you're doing.

Onwards and upwards!

The Home Business Neophyte