Not long ago, an online news piece having nothing to do with maximizing Adsense income caught my attention like the proverbial fly in amber. Scientists had apparently figured out that ants could teach us a lot about traffic control. They work together, the article trumpeted, displaying a photo of numerous ants marching in lockstep from someplace to someplace else. My first thought was that since humans are not, in fact, ants, then trying to get them to drive in accordance with "ant principles" might well be a waste of time.

On the other hand, it seems that traffic control experts are pretty serious about the value of studying at least one species, the leafcutter ant, in managing traffic flow designs and scheduling things like bus traffic. Coming across several articles relating to this topic eventually got me to thinking: If top scientists believe these little critters can teach us how to maximize vehicular traffic, might they not also teach one or two of us Internet writers how to maximize search traffic...just a little clue, perhaps? If so, I thought I knew where to start my study.

Just a few yards behind our camp trailer, a most remarkable colony of red ants had burst into view a few weeks ago. The most remarkable aspect, at least so far as a surface dwelling human could ascertain, involved the entrance. These tiny beings had performed an amazing excavation: In (honestly) a rectangular hole an inch and a half "high" by two inches "wide" entertained a constant flow of workers going in and out. None of the workers measured more than a quarter inch in length. Had this been a human creation built to human scale, that Grand Entrance would have measured 36 feet high by 48 feet wide...if every human happened to be 6 feet tall, that is. However, when I walked out back to start "officially studying" the colony in the hope of gaining mystical traffic insights, it was no longer there.

Now, isn't that just like Internet traffic? One day awesome, next day gone!

Sure, this sounds more like a discussion on traffic than on maximizing income, Adsense or otherwise, but to my mind they're all one topic: High traffic numbers won't guarantee high dollars, but zero traffic will sure as the dickens guarantee zero dollars. When drops like that happen, you want to know why.

Traffic drops might be tougher to pin down, but it didn't take us long to come up with an educated guess about the missing insects. We have a number of desert grassland whiptail lizards around here. They live on ants. Guess they got hungry, feasted for a while. Tough on the little guys, but a food chain is a food chain. At least it doesn't look like we need to buy ant traps any time soon.

Yeah. This really is a slow, tortured route to figuring out The Ant Way to Maximizing Adsense Income. So far, it sounds like all we're doing is taking a look at how to lose all of it. Understood. Sort of felt the same way myself.

Then I met the colony with Little Ant Syndrome.

My time in the U.S. Army was spent (after training) at a base in Germany. In that country, what we Americans know as a freeway is called the autobahn. On the autobahn, vehicles move. At least they did at that time, circa 1964-65. Here in Arizona, just this afternoon, I discovered the existence of an equally fast moving antobahn. The little beasties had adopted several dead bunchgrass blades as their colonial highways. Ants scurried down and sometimes up the blades with incredible speed for their size. Miniscule ants, but busy busy busy. Moving that fast on a larger scale, they had to be scooting along as fast as any Thoroughbred winner of the Preakness ever thought of going.

Good news, bad news. Good news: They were highly entertaining to watch with the naked eye, and they were very much still at it after I retrieved the camera from the camper and returned to take pictures of their frenetic activity. Bad news: Cranking up the telephoto lens to make the little guys (gals? its?) visible also made them blurry, most likely because that sort of shot could really use a tripod to steady the camera.

Since the point is not the clarity of the photos but using ants as an analogy for maximizing adsense income, let's get to it "by the numbers":

1. The larger ants showed great promise. So, now and again, does a major drive to earn Adsense income.

2. The larger ants disappeared overnight and without a trace. That can and does happen with disturbing frequency in the field of online money making--at least in my sometimes grim personal experience.

3. Sometimes an educated guess can be made as to why the ants/traffic disappeared. Sometimes there's no way to be certain.

4. The super-tiny ants (lower paying keywords, shorter but quicker articles) are almost invisible (a few pennies) but they move...and they keep on moving. (Quick rising blurbs in Google results, staying power producing long term residual income even if pennies at a time.)

The analogy reminds me of an old Andy Capp cartoon strip in which a man stares incredulously at another guy who's clearly been thoroughly beaten up. Referring to the fellow's obvious loss to the much smaller Andy, he says,

"He only comes up to your chin!"

"Yeah", comes the reply, "But he came up too often."

I've been a member at HubPages for 17 months, writing a bunch of Hubs early on and then finding little time for the keyboard for nearly a year. Tonight, minutes before midnight on Father's Day (June 21, 2009), I'll be publishing this Hub on Maximizing Adsense Income as part of my effort to prove The Way Of The Ant can really work for a human author. How do I intend to practice this little discipline? By spitting out a bunch of Adsense-topical, single-minded-as-an-ant pages in a hurry and monitoring the results while trying not to fall off the grass blade.

One more thing: This is my 100th Hub. Yay rah for me! (blows New Year's Eve type noise maker)

Thanks for reading,

Fred Baker