In the first two articles I covered the first two reasons why I have reinstalled AdSense on my Blog. If you haven’t had a chance to check those out yet, you can find them here and here.
Now, moving onto the third reason why I decided to give AdSense another shot on my Blog…
Internet Experience Has a Short Shelf Life
As an Internet entrepreneur, one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is to test quickly, test often, and to test everything.
A lot of Internet entrepreneurs have learned this lesson and are doing this. Whenever they launch a new product or website, or whenever some kind of new tool comes out they’ll give it a test to see if it works out for them. Once they run some tests they make some judgments and make some decisions based on those judgments.
However, what a lot of Internet entrepreneurs fail to do is to go back and re-test things that they previously tested. For example, I’ve spoken to some Bloggers who have tried AdSense back in 2007 or 2008 and had no luck with it, so they don’t want to bother with it right now.
The flaw in their thinking is that the Internet today is the same Internet that was around in 2008. However, that just isn’t true. The Internet is changing so quickly that you have to be willing to go back and re-test things that you previously already tested.
Essentially, we have to accept the fact that any “data” that we’re using to make our decisions which is more than 12 months old is most likely only 50% accurate, and any data that is more than 24 months old is probably only 20% accurate etc. The shelf life on Internet based “experience” is so short that you can’t afford to be constantly making decisions based on “old data”.
How to Tell if You’re Relying on Outdated Data / Experience
As a Blogger, if you look at the major decisions that went into designing your Blog, how many of them were made more than 12 months ago? How about more than 24 months ago?
Look at those decisions and ask yourself – “How do I know this is STILL the best decision for my Blog today?”
For example, how many of the plugins that you are using on your Blog right now were decided upon more than 24 months ago? How do you know if there aren’t any better plugins right now?
When was the last time you ran some split tests on your home page?
When was the last time you looked at your design?
If you decided to ignore Facebook or Twitter two years ago, have you reconsidered them?
If you decided to implement Facebook and Twitter into your business strategy, have they performed as well as you expected? Are they still worth spending your energy on?
These are just a few examples of the types of questions we must ask ourselves, otherwise we end up getting left behind.
My decision to test AdSense again on my blog was based on the fact that when someone asked me why I didn’t have AdSense on my Blog, I was giving them my opinion on why I think AdSense sucks based on old outdated data. Halfway through my conversation with them I realized that what I was sharing with them was “old experience”, and it could be totally wrong. So instead I told them to test and see, instead of making judgments based on my “old experience”.
It’s not easy to question your own experience because as human beings we are always so defensive about our beliefs and what we believe to be true. However, in the fast-paced world we live in today we can’t afford to be stubborn and unwilling to change. We have to always question our old beliefs and adapt to the new world.
One of the most known sayings of self-help guru Tony Robbins is “The Future Does NOT Equal the Past” and there is a lot of truth associated with it. This especially rings true for the distant past, and especially when we are referring to Internet technologies.
If we are to thrive online, we must embrace change and always be willing to test things again and again and again.
So, that’s it in a nutshell. Besides the first two reasons I already mentioned in the first post and second post in this series, the third reason I re-installed AdSense on my Blog to test it out is so that I had new data from to decide from.
If AdSense ends up being ineffective for me, that’s fine but at least I can rest assured knowing that I tried it out in 2010. It doesn’t take too long to do a test and really I have nothing to lose. If the improvements in AdSense don’t help much, then that’s fine but at least I will not be guessing about that using antiquated data. I’ll be making decisions based on current data.
This is a good discipline to have about every aspect of your online business, not just AdSense.