Mainly because I use Google Adsense and you can’t really control it without some effort (not a lot but some), and blocking them just hasn’t been worth my time. You see the Adsense conversion rate on this site is pretty low, the ads don’t appear in “premium” spots. I’ve even been considering dropping Adsense altogether from this blog.

Anyways, at some point I probably should, but right now I have other tasks I need to complete that have much higher ROI. That’s pretty much the real reason.

I plan to write a follow-up sometime in the next little while going over some of the events and how they affected our revenues (overlaying this graph with some of the interesting events). Some are surprising others quite expected.

We’ve tried a lot of things over the years and its always amazing to me what works and what doesn’t.

I’d love to read the story behind that.

It could be a lot of factors… One my future plans is to overlap this graph with a lot of the marketing we did, not to mention other things that happened within the company.

For example, some of the negatives we experienced during this period which might be responsible for the lower revenues was our hosting provider.

For example we were using Eapps.com which was a disastrous choice for us. They had all kinds of stability issues, sometimes we would be down for hours at a time, even a full day! And we weren’t paying a few dollars a month, we were in the hundreds of dollars a month in hosting. If remember right, we were paying just under $200 a month for a managed solution. Today we pay substantially more than that, but it’s still enough that you wouldn’t expect the kind of service we were getting for the price we were paying. Yes they did send us an explanation email saying how one customer had created an insane amount of traffic in no time which brought down their network, but it still didn’t explain why my particular box was going up and down all the time for reasons unrelated to the box.

We had tried to go for a higher end service but ended up paying a lot more for a less. By late 2005, only months after started there, we became so frustrated with them that we moved to another provider called ServInt.com. This has been one of the best decisions we made in terms of hosting. They’ve great for us since! Approaching on two years now.

Another reason may be our Google Adwords campaign. For a period of several months (around that time) I tried to drastically reduce our spending on Adwords to see if there would be a noticeable difference (as well it was frustrating me to pay for Ads when our server was unstable). Therefore this could also be very related… By the way, we also spend about ten times more per month on Google Adwords than we did just two years ago.

That was not our best summer and I do remember the stress (especially with hosting). The good news is that even with this we were able to squeak a profit. It wasn’t much of a profit, but a profit nonetheless. Although we had lower revenues, we also had lower expenses; I drastically reduced our whole advertising budget until we had the hosting issues resolved because I viewed it as wasted money.

Other things that might have escaped your attention (at least without an insider tip) is that about 30 days after the start of each new year we generally get a small spike in sales. This is because each year around the beginning of the year Multi-Housing News does a review of LandlordMax in their monthly real estate magazine. This generates extra publicity for us and as soon as the 30-day free trials start to expire we see an increase in sales.

There are many other factors that can change our monthly sales: a successful press release, a prominent article on this blog, an Adwords campaign change, etc.

What’s really hard for us is to determine what actually caused the spikes and troughs because of the 30+ day delay from when a person first tries LandlordMax to when they actually purchase it (the majority of our customers purchase it when the trial is over or just about to expire).