[jasonkester]

Indeed. Every adsense test I've done on the site has pulled in about a dollar a day. More fun, it's always been $1/day even as the site grew to 10x and 50x the original traffic. It seems our growth was inversely matching people's decline in tendency to click on ads.

[icey]

Have you considered trying affiliate sales? Pick something that you like, mention it with an affiliate link. Blogs with some kind of focus seem to do pretty well with this approach.

[jasonkester]

Yes. For a while we tried Amazon links to Lonely Planet guidebooks and Affiliate links to hostels. That made maybe ten dollars after 6 months, and dropped the site into Google's "Hotel Affiliate Site" black hole for the next year. Bad move.

The problem with monetizing the Travel side of a site like this is that there are dozens of big money sites devoted to doing exactly that. Blogabond's whole appeal is that we don't surround your blog with banner ads and we don't try to help you book flights and rental cars.

So yeah, we could do that sort of stuff and maybe make a few dollars, but it would just turn us into another TripAdvisor instead of a cool place to host your blog.

[icey]

Oh, I see how you're set up now. I thought you were the sole blogger, not a blog host. That makes a little more sense as those sorts of sites do seem to be tougher to monetize without doing things like offering premium features to your bloggers (and even then, you need a pretty huge author base to make it worthwhile).

[seunosewa]

I think you need to do more research on adsense optimization.