My AdSense - on the rise

I have no idea how (I have some guesses)... but I had a $7.07 on August 16th getting a lot more clicks than in previous days. Then it averaged about $1 per day for the next four days... then up to $3 to $4 for the next five days... and then a $8.29 day... my highest yet, followed by a $4.64 and so far today with a couple of hours remaining, $6.11

So... while I can hardly retire even on $8 per day... I'm obviously doing something right... the question is WHAT???

Since I STILL haven't figured out how to set up "channels" and track each of my Blogs with AdSense separately (all of my sites - about 10 blogs - roll up into one account). So I can't break it out until I figure out how to set up AdSense correctly for better tracking. Now I KNOW tracking is critical... after all, how do you improve when you don't know what you're doing wrong... or in this case... right? But, only three of my 10 blogs generate any "real" traffic (between 100 and 500 impressions a day... not a ton... but yes, I'm a newbie).

Since I've only got 3 "meaningful" sites, it seems to me that only a couple of things could have caused the "big" jump.

First... I posted articles about "hot button" issues for two different groups... the groups are two different Network Marketing companies, or MLM's. I didn't necessarily do this on purpose... meaning, I post everything hoping that it's valuable enough to get a lot of traffic... so I wasn't trying to find "hot buttons", but in hindsight this is OBVIOUSLY a very effective technique and it's teaching me a lot of lessons... lessons that I'll be posting more about after this post.

One lesson is that MLM's are very controversial in so many ways... controversy means there can be a LOT of hot button issues. A hot button could be positive, and one of the two MLM's I wrote about had an incredibly positive story (it happens to be the MLM I'm involved in) and I just happened to be one of the first Bloggers to refer to the article... and I did it on all three of my most trafficked blogs. One of the three got a P1 ranking on Google (position 1, page 1) for several key words... so not surprisingly I got a lot of traffic from that ranking... well, a lot for me... the key words are not one that anyone else other than those in that MLM would bother to put together. But with over 500,000 distributors in the company... that's a lot of people who might Google it.

The other "controversial" or "hot button" post was about an MLM with some bad news. Actually - now that I think of it, I wrote "bad news" articles about two different MLM's. For these two I actually had to go out of my way and post at a couple of "forums" with links back to my blogs. So this is another lesson... forums practically invite you to insert your link... not in a spamming kind of way... but within your signature, or if you can post in a way that doesn't look like spam... saying "gee, did you all see this post? Do you think it's true?" or something that gets others to look at it... and more importantly start a discussion about your article.

This leads me to my final lesson... FORUMS are something I HAVE to look into. Forums have AdSense and other ads all over them... and I must assume that the owner of the Forum is collecting all of that revenue. And when a Forum has a lot of controversial conversation going on it gets a lot of traffic.

Oh, and yes, I've been trying to experiment with ad placement... but I can't tell what's working and what's not... so I'll repeat the lesson I haven't learned apparently... the importance of tracking.