Only recently (about 3 days back), we saw Steve Pavlina reveal his traffic and Adsense revenue growth over the past year. Darren Rowse has covered quite a bit of this at Problogger – highlighting the similarities of Steve’s Adsense growth chart with his own. More importantly, Darren notes that Pavlina’s high growth is an exception rather than the norm with bloggers, especially given the single blog Pavlina’s operates.

I posted a while back on the benefits of single-blogging over multi-blogging (partially as a reponse to Chris Garett’s post on how the more blogs you have the better), and I see Steve’s post as an excellent example of how a focus on a single blog – in a topic that you are interested in and are good at – can truly pay off. But as Darren states, the Adsense earnings growth you see from StevePavlina.com is rather phenomenal – with earnings growing from just $53 a month to $4700 a month in just one year. Compare this with Blog Herald – the recent ‘mystery’ blog that went on sale – that has almost similar traffic, yet makes only $2K in monthly revenue. I know this isn’t a very useful or relevant comparison (given the different niches and monetization), but it does show how much growth in earnings and traffic StevePavlina.com (SP) achieved in just 1 year.

Look at pages indexed by Google and we see around 9300 pages for SP. That’s a lot, but not as much as some blogs (e.g. Blog Herald again at 57000+ pages, 50000+ for ProBlogger). As Steve states himself, there’s only about 300 articles and 9 podcasts on his blog/site. What made the difference for SP?

For one, there’s the exceptional writing pointed out at ProBlogger. If we were to look at just length, yesterday’s article on Branching Out clocked at 1671 words – quite a bit more than the usual blog post. His writing is on topic – i.e. solely on personal development – and being a reader of 1 week, I’ve seen solid and clear articles – lent authencity by personal experiences. But not being an expert on the topic, I won’t elaborate on this. Steve also acknowledges that viral word of mouth brought substantial traffic. We already know that personal referals bring the most permanent traffic, especially for blogs in more personal niches. Success with social bookmarking is another. Most bloggers can only dream about experiencing a traffic spike as a result of being tagged by 3 top social bookmarking sites, i.e. digg, del.icio.us and shoutwire.

Monetization wise, we have a two wide skyscrapers on the left-sidebar – one Adsense, the other a Chitika ad. We also have the somewhat industry-standard 728×15 Adsense links on top. One interesting point to note is that SP doesn’t use Large Rectangle (336×180) ads for Adsense that experiments constantly show to have high CTRs. Instead, there is consistent reliance on 250×250 Squares for inline ads. Overall, I can see 7 network ads (3 Adsense, 4 Chitika), 1 affliate ad, 2 referal buttons and 1 text link bar on the SP blog’s index page. That’s 11; quite a bit I’d say, but they’re positioned well enough that you don’t feel overwhelmed. I’m pretty ad-blind by now, so that could be one reason. Another factor I would attribute this to would be the placement of the 250×250 ads – all of which are placed in-post.

On post, we have 4 network ads (2 Adsense, 2 Chitika), 2 affiliate ads, 2 referal buttons and the text link bar. My only complaint with the SP adverts is that the Chitika ads all tend to be unrelated to personal development, e.g. notebooks, DVD players, etc. Compared to ProBlogger (another non-product blog), where the Chitika ads advertise related books and the like, adverts for fruit mixers are a little distasteful. Normally, I’d attribute this to a lack of keyword targeting, but the page source seems to show that the keywords used are all tech-related. Perhaps this is an experiment in ad variety?

In any case, I’ll definitely be one of those eagerly waiting for Steve’s next progress report. He omitted Chitika and affiliate earnings in the charts this time. Next time, we might also see how well SP does on Chitika.

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