$300 For 30 Minutes Of Your Time

Posted on 26th May 2010

I was reviewing my portfolio last week and found a few sites I had purchased in 2009 which for some reason had gone under the radar. I bought the sites, moved them to my server and then for some reason didn’t touch them. One such site I had purchased was an aged teaching directory built with nothing more than static HTML pages and it instantly caught my attention. I went into analytics and noticed it was getting over 160+ unique visitors per day (almost 5000 per month). That’s decent traffic but oddly enough I hadn’t even embedded any adsense code on it.

What No Adsense !!!

Anyway with no adsense or any other adverts on the site I decided I might as well start adding the code now (better late than never right), and low and behold memories of why I did nothing to the site began to flood back. With over 35 static html pages I couldn’t be bothered to put up my adsense code. It would only have taken me 20-30 minutes to copy and paste the code into the site but at the time for some strange reason it just didn’t happen. Most likely I viewed the site in it’s then condition (I still haven’t done anything to it) to be an unlikely earner, hence not even deserving of 30 minutes of my time. I was going to spend that time elsewhere on one of my better sites! Oh how wrong I was!

I’m Bleeding Money Away

Long story short, I added the code last week and the sites been grabbing a steady $0.75-$1.00 per day. Not much right but over the year not putting my adsense adverts has cost me close to $270-$360. Put it this way if someone said to you give me 30 minutes of your time and I’ll pay you around $300. Would you do it ? Hell yeah, you’d be absolutely silly not too, so why didn’t I view this 30 minutes in the same way!

I’d most likely blame it on a complacent attitude on my part and maybe even an almost over confident type of cockyness towards the smaller site which just didn’t seem to have the gloss and shine of some of my other sites. Whatever it was I lost money and more than that, because I paid $100 for the site in the first place, 1 year on I still haven’t recovered my initial investment even though i should have got it back almost 3 times over.

Tips For The Future

So what did i learn ? Well firstly don’t spread yourself too thin, my inability to add the adsense was most likley because I was busy with other tasks on other sites. Secondly give every site a fair chance and when you buy one or develop one, at the very minimum add some adsense to the site, it doesn’t take long and in my situation could have stopped me from losing money that’s was supposed to be mine for the taking.

Final Words

Hopefully a good reminder for all of you (me included) that sitting on sites which you think are highly unlikely to earn is a big mistake. Get your ads up and see what happens. Don’t leave it to chance and a negative attitude. In fact it’s even worse that someone like me made a mistake like that since I actually have a really keen eye for sites that fall under that category (i.e. websites that are getting traffic but sit unmonetised). Doh! (runs off checking the rest of his unmonetised sites for easy money)