Diversifying my income

One of the downsides with weekends and bank holiday Mondays is that traffic is down and no-one clicks ads (most people seem to surf from work). Therefore logging into my Adsense to check how things are going is very frustrating.

I have thought perhaps I should diversify my income a little. So far I've tried one money making platform (Hubpages) and two advertising methods (Adsense which works, and Kontera which doesn't). I need to diversify both the platforms I use and the advertising providers.

To that end, I have been reading up on Google Knols. They are like Hubpages, but you keep 100% of the Adsense revenue (because they are owned by Google and Google is already making a profit from Adsense). They can't be used for SEO purposes as their outgoing links are all "no-follow", and they prefer your Knols to be purely informational, so no affiliate links etc. You open your account with your Google account, and you need to publish a good quality knol first before they let you put ads on it.

Anyway, it's worth a go, just to see how it all works out.

I have also thought of creating a finance blog, since I enjoy writing about budgeting and debt and all the rest of it, and perhaps monetising it with some other ad platform, maybe Adbrite, to see how that does.

Update: Well, I joined Google Knol and published a new knol. I then linked the Knol account to my Analytics, and to my Adsense. The procedure is much the same as when you link Hubpages to Analytics and Adsense. However, while they show my Adsense account as "Approved", they require additional approval from Knol, which they say will take up to two weeks.

Then on browsing the site I found that they only put a tiny block of ads right at the bottom of the right side bar, plus at the bottom on the page - where no one would click them. Not certain that this is worth it. So after some thought I deleted my knol (it hadn't yet been indexed) and republished it on Hubpages. Here it is:

Being a buy to let landlord in the recession

Oh well, you live and learn. On Googling further I've yet to find an article where someone has said "I've made some decent money with Knols". So I guess they don't! I guess you only learn these things by trial and error.