New blog - popular post - no money!

• It's my first blog, and today one post is getting a lot of attention on digg. 15,000 hits by 9 AM, more to come. But I'm not making any money. Help! I have a new blog (1 week old) with 2 Adsense panels on the left side. I have had 15,000 visitors this morning (it's 8:30 AM here), but only 18 ad clicks. I've made just a couple dollars so far. I must be doing something wrong.... or is this normal? I have another blog post with affiliate links to itunes albums, but that entry is not the one getting the hits. I expect to double or triple my hits today, maybe hit 50,000 this week. Any tips? Are there any other sources of ads or revenue I can put up immediately? (Notes: The blog is on Blogger Beta. I've put the blog up with the sole purpose of hopefully creating additional income. I tried putting adsense ads in the middle of the blog post, but Blogger won't allow the javacript tag).

• Answer:

  Kevin, I started a content-oriented personal finance blog last spring. Several entries have been dugg since I began. I know it sounds terrible, but the traffic is almost worthless. It's ephemeral. I don't think it's because Digg users are "savvy" (I actually think the opposite is true), but because they're just looking for a quick fix an then leaving. From my experience, Digg users:Do not subscribe to feeds.Do not visit other pages on the site except the one they clicked through to.Are only slighly less likely to click on advertising than everyone else.The first two are more frustrating, in my book, and the latter point goes against what you're seeing. Some advice: First, to deal with the immediate problem, put in ads that take up more vertical space. These ads run out almost immediately. People are scrolling down to see your YouTube clips and leave the ads behind immediately. Not too hard to see why there are no click-throughs. Second, if you expect to have a moderately popular site, look into advertising that pays based on pageviews, not on clickthroughs. Finally: trying to start a blog just to make money is a risky proposition. It looks to me as if your site is simply designed as a Digg magnet. You're taking the time to craft list entries of hot-button topics and then posting them to Digg (careful -- this will piss people off). I may be wrong, but this seems like an ill-conceived business model. I'm not trying to be harsh, because your site looks like fun, just straightforward. Digg traffic does not equal cash. Maybe if you weren't posting YouTube videos but Amazon links you could generate some dough, but even then I suspect you wouldn't see much income. Your best bet is to craft quality content that will stand the test of time and try to build a loyal readership. A thousand regular readers are better than a Digg front page post any day. Seriously. Good luck!