I was sure that something was broken. How long do you have to wait for your first Adsense click? I had over 1,000 impressions showing on my Adsense dashboard, but not one single click. Now admittedly my site traffic is just getting going, and that 1,000 impressions was probably inflated by my own visits but I was starting to think that I had missed out on some vital step of the Adsense sign up process and Google were laughing at me behind my back.

The Adsense strategy

Adsense was planned to be the primary future income stream for my Spanish Examples site, as I designed it to offer some useful Spanish study material but nowhere near a complete 'Learn Spanish' course. Hopefully people will click out through a targeted ad, after reading what they were searching for when they arrived at my site.

I have vague ideas about writing some study aids to be distributed as an e-book, but at this early stage in the game I have to concentrate all of my efforts on writing content for the site. In a strange turn of events, I have just started working on the adwords accounts at my day job, so I am learning lots about how that works but unfortunately not too much of this new knowledge is directly applicable to me at the moment. In the future though I can see this experience coming in very handy. It's a beast of an account with around 30 websites each in about 20 languages. The keyword lists run into the millions.

So how much money did my Adsense click make?

Coming back to earth from those heady heights, I can reveal to you all that my first Adsense click made me a fantastic 0.79c. But hey, I'm just happy to finally know that the system is set up correctly and working.

By the way, has anyone else considered dropping Amazon because of their caving to illegal political pressure over Wikileaks? It's a dilema for an new affiliate marketer, especially one who has recently bought a Kindle. But I feel that losing out on a few dollars here and there is a small price to pay for going with my consience.