A year ago, I made a blog post about a particular site which I wanted to re-monetise - it's a good site which has a lot of articles which only my site carries. It's a PR4, and has many, many backlinks.

I thought it might be interesting to show how a site can make money without much work…in the previous post from a year ago, I spoke about monetising the site from $5 a day to $10 a day. I made some subtle changes which increased my Adsense Income (note that this is not a MFA site), as well as got an eBook written to try to monetise that way (product sale).

Well, the eBook was an utter failure - I sold 2 copies all year. Pointless waste of time, and I have lost money into the bargain as I spent £90 ($165 then) to get the book written and sold only 2 for a total of about £20 ($40). Oooops.

The original post also speaks of an increase in Adsense since making a few code changes - that lasted for about 2 weeks after which the site continued to produce about $5 a day. Over the past 6 months or so, traffic has died back to quite a small level, so Adsense Income has decreased proportionately…

Adsense Income for the past year amounts to $1588.74 (daily average $4.35) - now, considering that this site is an info site with Adsense, this is not a bad result. I have not touched the site in almost 12 months. Add to this the 2 eBook sales and the total income is over $1600 (for the rolling 12 months). There are not many ways to earn $1600 for less than an hour or two of tinkering. Of course, I have to deduct the cost of website hosting (say $40 for the year), and the cost of that eBook I had written ($165), but even so I have cleared just about $1400. From this ONE site.

More Stats for this particular site
~ Best earning day; February 15th for $16.15
~ Worst earning days; a few days during July 2006 when there was no traffic and consequently no earnings
~ There were 17 days during the last 12 months with earnings over $10.00
~ There were 16 days with more than 100 page impressions

As you can plainly see, traffic = success with AIS. So, my next big dilemma is what to do with this eBook. I have a number of options;

1. Change it into a bunch of article and place on the site
2. Give it away for free
3. Carry on selling it regardless

My idea would be to start giving it away for free (with appropriate affiliate links sprinkled into the text of the eBook), in order to get some traffic to the site.

I could also submit the site to Text Link Ads for an extra monetisation stream. As well as this I could also add Affiliate Links on each article page as teh site did previously have them (which I removed in favour of Adsense).

But, this one site is the perfect example of AIS, don't you think?