gabo's ramblings down south

I've been running AdSense for about one and a half year now, on my precious from uruguay blog. I made nothing for the first couple of months, zero, nada. Nevertheless, I wasn't blogging for money, and (to some extent) I still don't, I guess I blog, for blogging's sake.

But after the first couple of months something happened, and I started making from 15 to 25 bucks a month, on a regular basis. The amount would change from month to month but the visits were growing slow and steady. Well, until last march.

Last March, I started to run TextLink Ads on from-uruguay's blog, and also Review Me ads, in a campaign to diversify my income channels, trying to put my eggs in different baskets.

The results is the page views of my blog seem to have dropped at least by half. I used to have about 60% of income traffic coming from google searches, while now I have only 10%. I've noticed the links added by TextLinkAds are without the nofollow attribute, but I had never thought it would be affect the blog like this. Has anyone experienced something similar?

In a month and a half, I've sold two links, earning 10 bucks a month from them, and I had one review ordered, which I turned down (it was a splog). I'm still not sure the cost benefit ratio of introducing more advertising channels is profitable. I think it's still to early to say.