Making Money With AdSense Is Not So Easy Anymore
Four years ago, I was writing a book called Make Easy Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program. While I didn’t come up with the title, it does reflect fairly accurately the general tone of the book. Because when I wrote it, it was easy to make money with AdSense.
But I wouldn’t use that title today. Making money with AdSense — or any advertising or affiliate system — isn’t nearly as easy anymore. Especially in the last year.
Why? Because it’s hard to get ranked in Google. Targeted organic traffic — which is what really works well with AdSense — is so hard to get now that anyone just starting out is going to find it hard to make any significant money.
Content Grows Exponentially
Not too long ago, I created a silly online tool called How Much Of The Web Do You Own?. Type in how many pages of content you have on the Web and it tells your miniscule percentage of the entire Web. Today, for example, it says there are 1,152,913,072,000 pages on the Web, with 12,000 more pages being added every second. See Estimating the total number of web pages for my logic.
There is a fundamental flaw in my logic, though, in that it assumes the growth of the web is linear. And if everyone was interesting in creating content rather than getting that content to rank well, that’s probably what it would be.
But the reality is that many webmasters want their pages pushed up in the rankings. After they’ve chosen good titles for their pages (perhaps the most important on-page SEO factor) and implemented a good site structure, the next thing they need are links from external sites. Lots of links.
You can go and buy links, but there’s only so much money you can spend doing that. You can go and leave comments on blogs and forums, but there’s only so much time you can spend doing that. These techniques also take a long time to have an effect.
What the big boys do is create lots of content in automated or semi-automated fashion. You can read posts like SEO Empire to get an idea of what’s involved. Once these sites are created, their owners can use them to give their “money sites” a big boost in the rankings by linking to them. Whether or not you agree with these tactics, it’s what people are doing. Let’s not debate ethics.
The point is that while regular website owners and bloggers are putting out one or two pages of content per day on their sites, there are others out there creating essentially thousands of pages of content per site per day. And some of those sites in turn end up feeding other sites, which generate even more content (automation is key).
Add to the mix webmasters who decide that they have to go in that direction themselves to succeed and you can see why I say that content is growing exponentially, not linearly.
But Searches Don’t
On the other hand, the number of searches being done — we’re talking search terms here, not search volume — is not growing exponentially. It can’t — there are only so many people in the world and there are only so many things they’ll search for and so many ways they’ll search for it. A lot of searches are influenced by outside events. Others are in response to needs and wants. The number of truly “new” searches done is surely quite small.
If content is growing exponentially but searches are growing linearly, this means that the number of pages that match a given search term will grow quite quickly over a short amount of time. It’ll be exponential in some cases, linear in others, but either way there will be a lot of content to compete against in the search engine rankings, and it only gets worse as time goes on.
Not to mention that there’s a feedback loop built into the whole system: to outrank a competitor, you need more links. So you create more content. The competitor fights back and creates even more content. And so on ad infinitum.
And Then There’s Recency…
One of the things Google’s done to its ranking algorithm in the last year is place a premium on recency. New, fresh content gets a temporary big boost over older content, although after a day or two it falls back down to its “natural” place in the rankings. Giving prominence to up-to-the-minute content makes for more relevant searches in many cases.
Of course, the content creators aren’t fools and they’ve noticed this. Rather than unleash their autogenerated content in big chunks, they “drip feed” it out to the Web via blogs or other feed-based content management systems. A blog that updates itself with new content every couple of hours gets visited often by the Googlebot, and it doesn’t take those pages long to get into Google’s index. Take those feeds and add them to RSS aggregators like Feedage and you’ll get some immediate links to that blog. Bookmark the blog for good measure on as many social bookmarking accounts as you can to get a few more links. (Many will be nofollow, but not all will, and you’ll get some traffic and legitimacy from the links.)
By drip feeding content, webmasters can get their “new” content to rank temporarily way higher than it normally would. And they get the search engines visiting that much more often, which means their content gets indexed that much more quickly. Which means the links in that content can boost the rankings of the sites they link to.
Pity The Poor Website Owner
Making money with AdSense is all about traffic. You can say that about affiliate marketing, too, but the payouts in affiliate marketing can be so much larger than the per-click values you’ll get from AdSense that you can make money with much less traffic. This is why all the big guns in Internet Marketing focus on affiliate marketing these days.
That said, AdSense is an easy way to monetize a traffic stream when you have lots of content. Google makes a huge profit with the AdSense ads it places on hundreds of thousands of websites.
There are sites out there making good profits from their share of that revenue as well.
But the easy AdSense money is long gone. (It’s like the despair phase of the gold rush.) You can’t just throw up a site and expect it to get organic traffic. You need a “foundation” (like the SEO Empire post mentions) of pages that link to the site to increase its rankings. You need regularly-updated content to keep the crawlers coming back. You have to work hard at getting traffic to your site, because the numbers just don’t add up anymore — too many people are fighting over a pie that just isn’t large enough to feed everyone who wants a bite.
And Your Options Are?
There are things you can do to even things out, of course:
- Build a content network. Don’t settle for one or two sites. Build yourself a network of sites that’ll give you the linking power you need to rank well.
- Build a captive audience. Although controversial, the AdSense Resurrected technique is still valid if you can do it: build a list (pay for it) and get each person in that list to visit your pages in a specific sequence, making money from AdSense ads and affiliate links sprinkled throughout the content. As long as the average income per list member exceeds the cost to obtain those list members, you’ll make money.
- Pay for traffic. You pretty much have to abandon AdSense for this one, as AdSense arbitrage doesn’t work very well. So you have to focus on affiliate marketing, on products that have relatively large payouts in order to pay for the traffic.
None of these are new, of course. And they all take a lot of time and a lot of effort.
Of course, in the “real world” business owners face these issues all the time. How do you get your message out to a widely dispersed and fragmented audience? How do you get people into your place of business? How do you find and reach potential buyers?
The Web has gone mainstream, and so has AdSense. That means it’s no so easy anymore.
I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments on this topic.
Tags: AdSense, Google, Internet marketing, Make Easy Money With Google, SEO, web
Is Obama The Antichrist?
That is the top way to complete the phrase “Is Obama…” according to Google’s search completion feature. For posterity, let’s preserve the list here since it’ll likely change over the coming weeks. According to Google, the most likely search queries about Barack Obama are:
- Is Obama the Antichrist? (not touching that one)
- Is Obama a Muslim? (no — see here)
- Is Obama a US citizen? (if he wasn’t, he couldn’t have run for president… you have to be a natural-born citizen to be president, sorry Arnie…)
- Is Obama a socialist? (also not touching that one)
- Is Obama black? (yes)
- Is Obama a citizen? (see #3)
- Is Obama a Christian? (see #2)
- Is Obama an American citizen? (see #3 again)
- Is Obama a terrorist? (no)
- Is Obama going to win? (yes)
As mentioned in the last post, I had to move my Suggest Explorer tool to another hosting service due to security issues with Servage. Moving a site almost always causes problems and so I’ve been monitoring the site for a few days to make sure everything’s OK — good thing I did, because I screwed a few things up and didn’t notice right away. Anyhow, I’ve been monitoring the top queries page and that’s where I noticed the is obama query suddenly became popular… turns out someone linked to it from Digg in response to a very similar entry there.
There’s not much of a point to this post, I just found the query amusing.
I am preparing a big post for tomorrow, though, that’s going to be very interesting to all AdSense publishers. It revolves around the eternal question of “can you make money with AdSense?” and what I say may surprise you. Stay tuned!
Don’t Host With Servage
Regular readers know that I tell it like it is. Well, I’ve had it with Servage, one of the hosting companies I use, because of the continual security breaches on the sites I host there. One of those sites was the Google Suggest Explorer, which I just moved over to another hosting provider this morning. Every few days the site would get hacked and some script would insert links to dubious sites into various pages, eventually causing the site to be flagged by Google and others as a bad site unless I caught the offending pages in time and removed the bad stuff from them. This happens to the other sites that are still hosted there, which I plan on moving shortly as well. Moving sites is a pain in many cases because of the databases involved, but the short-term pain will be worth the long-term gain of peace of mind and better search engine rankings. There are other downsides to Servage, too, so I really can’t recommend them and in fact really regret using them. (I’ve had no such issues with ResellerZoom and others.)
If you do need to move hosting services, for whatever reason, here are some tips:
- Back everything up before switching. It should be a given, but before you switch your site over make sure you have a recent backup of everything on the site. This includes any MySQL databases you may be using. How you do this depends on the system you’re using, if your system uses cPanel for controlling the site (Servage doesn’t, by the way, which is another complaint I have) then there’s a “Backup” tool that makes things pretty simple.
- Get as much of the new site going before switching. You can create a new account on the new hosting provider to host the site and you can do a lot of preparation — such as uploading files — before actually switching the site over to the new provider. Instead of working with domain names, for example, us raw IP addresses when moving things to the new servers.
- If you’ve had security problems, don’t use the backups you made. This may seem contradictory, but in security cases it’s best to work from “fresh” data rather than potentially compromised data. Most people I know have a “local” copy of their websites that they can work with. Start from there, not from the data you’ve downloaded from your working site. WordPress users have to use the data from the site, of course, since all the posts and so on are stored in a MySQL database. But use this as an opportunity to upgrade your “new” site to the latest version of WordPress and then use WordPress’ built-in export capability to export the blog data to an XML file that you can later import into your new blog.
- Give yourself lots of time. Don’t be surprised if it takes you a few hours to move things over, especially the first time you do this kind of thing.
- Stay near your computer for a few hours. Once you switch the nameserver (DNS) entries for your site to the new provider, don’t assume you’re done. You’ll probably have more stuff to do once the new site goes “live” and you’ll want to check every nook and cranny to make sure there are no missing pages and so on.
You’ll find lots of advice online, too, don’t just listen to me. This is a common situation for webmasters. Just give yourself lots of time to do it and expect things to be screwed up for a day or two and you’ll be fine.
Tags: AdSense, Google Suggest, hosting, hosting providers, Servage
Google Search-Based Keyword Tool
So I’ve been somewhat distracted over the last week or so playing with Google’s new search-based keyword tool, now in public beta test. SKT is primarily meant for AdWords advertisers, but it’s open to anyone, just like the older (and still active) AdWords Keyword Tool (AKT).
Where AKT is a generic keyword tool for keyword generation based on “seed” keywords or content, SKT tells you (if you’re an AdWords advertiser) what keywords are missing from your campaigns, based on what Google knows about your site and what people are searching for.
I don’t advertise much, but AdSense publishers will find the tool interesting as yet another source of keyword ideas. At the bottom of the SKT home page there’s a link that lets you browse the top keywords across all categories, showing you the top 800 keywords based on different criteria: number of searches, average bid cost to get into the top 3 positions, and competition level. What’s great is that you can drill down into subcategories (and subsubcategories in many cases) and get up to 800 keywords in each of those. It’s a great way to do theme-based research. (I would take the bid prices with a grain of salt, though, they seem high compared to what the other AdWords tools recommend…)
One trick: you can sort the data in ascending or descending order. Note that the data that the “top 800″ keywords varies depending on what you’re sorting on — it’s not a fixed list of the same 800 keywords. And, yes, you can download the lists in spreadsheet format.
Well, have fun with the tool, it’s another piece of the arsenal. And for my American readers, have a happy thanksgiving!
Tags: AdSense, AdWords, Google, keyword tool, search, search-based keyword tool, skt
Off-Page SEO Case Study
I haven’t done a case study in a while now, so I thought I’d do another one. What I want to do this time is focus on off-page search engine optimization. When you’re trying to influence your search engine rankings, you can group the things you can do into two categories: changes you can make to the page itself (on-page) and changes you can make to other pages (off-page).
Most SEO techniques are on-page techniques: choosing a good title (perhaps the one thing you totally control that most influences where your pages shows up in the search engine results), keyword density, etc. And for AdSense publishers these techniques also lead to better ad targeting, so there’s a double whammy of benefits in doing on-page SEO.
At some point, though, you can’t do anything more to the page itself, which is where the off-page factors come into play. Or maybe you can’t change the page at all, meaning off-page is all you can do anyhow.
To make this case study fair, I’m going to use some pages from a site that I don’t control and don’t directly make me any money. The site is the Sybase site. Sybase is my employer and I think some of its pages could use a boost in the search engine results. So let’s see what I can do to help. Maybe I’ll fail miserably… that’s why these case studies are so exciting 
Choose Your Targets
The first thing I need to do is select the individual pages I want to influence. Search engine results are all about placements of pages, not sites.
If you’re selling things, the first pages you should look at are those that describe your products and services. Sybase has many products, most for enterprises (geektalk for large companies), and I’m going to focus on three of them: SQL Anywhere, RFID Anywhere, and Mobile Office. I’ve worked on all three products and so they’re special to me in that way.
The very first thing to do is see how well the product names rank in Google. You want your products to be in the top 10 if possible, ideally in the first one or two spots. Right now, this is what I see:
- SQL Anywhere — ranks #1 for sql anywhere and “sql anywhere”
- RFID Anywhere — ranks #1 for rfid anywhere and “rfid anywhere”
- Mobile Office — ranks #12 for mobile office and #11 for “mobile office”
SQL Anywhere and RFID Anywhere have ideal placements for their product names, but Mobile Office needs some work. The term “mobile office” is much more generic, so it’s not surprising that Mobile Office isn’t in the top ten… yet.
Going Beyond Product Names
Product names are the obvious things to target, but you’ll also want to target other keywords. Finding those keywords can be a challenge, but there are some great free tools you can use to help you along the way.
Take the SQL Anywhere product, for example. It has a 70% share of the mobile database market (it’s database software that can be run on mobile devices like laptops, BlackBerrys, Windows Mobile handhelds, and so on) but it doesn’t even rank in the top ten for the term mobile database, though it does squeek in at #10 for “mobile database”. So there’s one obvious keyphrase to work on.
If you’re not sure which keywords to target, spend an afternoon with the AdWords keyword tool. Start by taking the URL of each page you’re interested in and seeing what the keyword tool thinks of the page. You’ll quickly put together a list of relevant keywords, some of which may surprise you. You can’t do them all, though, so you’ll have to prune the list and find just a few — maybe three or four — to concentrate on.
More about list gathering next time…
Random Acts of SEO Kindness
AdSense publishers (that’s us, folks!) can be a self-centered group…. let’s face it, we’re using AdSense because we want to make money. Maybe not a lot of money (as always, there’s usually a direct link between the amount of money you make doing something and the time and effort you put into the process) but money nonetheless. And that means focusing on the tiny part of the Internet that’s yours by publishing more content and getting more backlinks to that content.
Every once in a while, though, it’s good to step back and look at the wider picture. If you’ve done this for a while now, you’ve surely developed some expertise or understanding of how things work on the Web. Why not use this expertise to benefit someone else for a change, without them knowing about it?
There are all kinds of “random acts of SEO kindness” you can do that will benefit others. Here are a few suggestions:
- Bookmark someone else’s page. We all know that Social Bookmarking Is Today’s Big Thing and so we’re busy bookmarking our own sites… Well, go and bookmark your favorite charity’s site. Or your child’s school site. Or a site you just like. (Side benefit here: your bookmarking account won’t get flagged for just bookmarking your own sites…)
- Submit articles that link to other sites. Do you have access to an article submission service like Article Marketing Automation? Submit an article that benefits someone else.
- Link to other sites. It’s tempting to hoard PageRank by linking as little as you can to other sites… but PR ultimately depends on sites linking to other sites to work. Give a real link to a site you like from one of your own pages and spread the wealth.
That’s just scratching the surface, of course, I’m sure you can come up with your own ideas. How about setting up a Google custom search portal for your favorite local team or charity and making them a few bucks that way? Or teaching what you’ve learned about the Web to others?
Random acts of SEO kindness won’t make you any money, but they’ll make you feel better, and that’s a different kind of reward.
The Only AdWords Guide You’ll Need
Something a little different now… I’ve started writing a short little ebook called The Only AdWords Affiliate Marketing EBook You’ll Ever Need (PDF). Just four pages so far, but if people like it I’ll add in more information. It’s one of the free resources on my AdWords Tips and Resources page. I find that so many AdWords guides fluff themselves out with lengthy explanations about AdWords, affiliate marketing, ClickBank, etc. that I thought a bare bones “just give me the details” report might be of interest. Let me know what you think. You can distribute it for free to anyone you want as long as you don’t charge for it — see the copyright notice at the bottom of the first page for the details.
More details about AdWords can also be found in the AdSense FAQ (frequently asked questions), specifically in the answer to What is AdSense?.
Tags: AdSense, AdSense FAQ, AdWords, affiliate marketing, ClickBank, free, Google, PDF
How To Get AdSense FAQ Updates
Response has been good to the AdSense FAQ I’ve started. I’ll continue to post here when I add an entry to the AdSense FAQ, but if you want to be doubly sure not miss any updates, you now have two options:
- Add the AdSense FAQ RSS feed to your favorite browser/reader, or
- Subscribe to a notification list by sending a blank email to memwg@aweber.com.
Also, at the bottom of each AdSense FAQ entry there’s a link back to this blog for making comments and suggestions relating to that entry. I didn’t want to retrofit a commenting system on that site, so it seemed simplest to just let the comments flow back to this blog. I also fixed a stupid mistake: there was no link to the AdSense FAQ from any of the other pages on EricGiguere.com! You’d think that with 15 years of site building experience I’d remember to give a new section an internal link or two…
I’m planning on having a new entry out shortly. Keep the ideas coming!
Where To Find Top-Paying AdSense Keywords
The third entry in the AdSense FAQ deals with every AdSense publisher’s favorite topic: where to find lists of high-paying AdSense keywords. After all, if you don’t have such a list handy, how do you know whether you should be writing articles about mortgage refinancing ($33.73 average advertiser CPC) or upside down mortgages ($0.08 average advertiser CPC)?
Of course, as I’ve said before, you have to take the values published in these lists with a large grain of salt. Just because an advertiser is paying $30+ a click for the #1 ad spot on Google for “mortgage refinancing”, that doesn’t mean that you’ll get $30+ per click from the ads on your “mortgage refinancing” blog. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee you won’t see anything near that amount…. let alone how you’ll get traffic to your blog in such a competitive industry.
High-paying keyword lists should come with a disclaimer: “For Amusement Only”
How Much Can You Make With AdSense?
My second entry in the AdSense FAQ discusses the question that everyone asks me, especially press types — how much money can you really earn with AdSense anyhow?
More than you think, but also less than you think… most sites are in the “long tail” of the earnings curve. Forget optimization and keyword selection, in the end it’s all about one thing: traffic.
Tags: AdSense, AdSense FAQ, earnings, Google
Introducing the AdSense FAQ
I’ve been thinking about what to write about for this blog, and I think it’s time to put all my experience with AdSense to use in answering some of the questions I get from readers and that I see asked over and over again on various forums and blogs. That’s why I’ve created the AdSense FAQ. I was going to host it here on this site, but I’ve got some weird WordPress issues going on with static pages and rather than figure out what’s wrong I’ve decided to put the AdSense FAQ on one of my oldest sites. If you’re wondering why the page layout looks so dated, it’s because the site is almost ten years old now.
There’s only one question in the AdSense FAQ so far: What is AdSense?, which is a short explanation of AdSense and AdWords (the two are intertwined). Look for more — I’ll post a note here when I put more content up.
Tags: AdSense, AdSense FAQ, Google
Dino (August 1, 1991 - September 16, 2008)
I don’t talk much about my personal life in this blog, but today is a sad day because I had to put down my dog Dino. He was 17, which is ancient for a dog, and had almost completely lost the function of his back legs, so it was time. If you’re not a pet owner you probably can’t imagine how sad it makes you feel, even if you’re expecting it. I got Dino from the local humane society when he was about 9 months old, which means he was my constant companion for over 16 years. Our remaining dog will miss him almost as much, as will my wife and daughter. He wasn’t a cuddly dog by any means, but he was my friend and I will miss him.
Review: Article Marketing Automation
Article marketing is an easy way to get links and traffic, but it’s also very time-consuming. If you’re serious about article marketing you’ll try to automate parts of the process, especially article distribution.
A few weeks ago I mentioned that PLRPro was expanding its services to include some new features. One of these new features is the Article Marketing Automation service. It’s free to PLRPro members but is also available independently for $47/month, which is substantially less than the $197/month PLRPro is going to be charging soon for its members.
Article Marketing Automation
AMA is actually two things:
- a network of independent sites and blogs that have agreed to distribute AMA articles; and
- a human-controlled content rewriter
Let’s look at the network first.
The Article Site Network
A key characteristic of an article distribution system is how many sites are in its distribution network. The more sites you can get you content to, the more links you’ll get to your own sites. Unlike other systems, though, AMA isn’t limited to established article directories. Rather, it targets blogs and CMS (content management systems) based sites — any site that has a remote publishing API (application programming interface — a way for computer programs to talk to it) can be added to the network. This includes WordPress blogs (both self-hosted and on WordPress.com), Blogger blogs, Drupal sites, Joomla sites, etc.
Note that you don’t have to subscribe to the service to have your site included in the distribution network. Just sign up for a free AMA account and add your sites to the network.
Sites get added into specific categories on the network, and site owners have the option of seeing and manually approving any and all articles before they get added to their sites. This is a great way to ensure that only quality content makes it onto a site. The only restriction is that site owners are not allowed to modify the links in the articles.
When you submit an article to the network, the article is not broadcast to all sites on the network. Rather, it is “drip-fed” to a few random sites at a time over several days or weeks, and only to sites that match the article’s category. So links build slowly over time, which is a great feature.
Note that unlike every other system I’ve seen, AMA doesn’t restrict you to using links in the “bio box” of an article. In fact, you don’t even need a “bio box” if you don’t want one. You can embed up to 3 links anywhere within the article content. That’s a big plus in my book! You can even vary the links using the article rewriting feature.
The Article Rewriter
The article network is the most important feature of Article Marketing Automation, but close behind is the article rewriting system. Now let me point out that this feature is completely optional: you can submit articles directly to the network with no rewriting and they’ll get distributed with no changes.
Content rewriting is all about generating “unique” (or at least “semi-unique”) content. You do this by replacing words, phrases, and paragraphs with alternate versions that have the same meaning. AMA builds a “unique” article from the alternate text you’ve submitted.
Here’s a simple example:
When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the {red~blue~green~brown~yellow} ones last?
This would generate any of these phrases:
- When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the red ones last?
- When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the blue ones last?
- When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the green ones last?
- When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the brown ones last?
- When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the yellow ones last?
The replacements can include HTML and can even happen inside links. So you can vary anchor text quite easily:
The <a href=”http://www.memwg.com”>{best~most fantabulous~super} AdSense blog</a>
You can even vary the link destinations if you want. You can also nest alternatives within other alternatives.
This is not the first content rewriting system I’ve used, but it’s more powerful than the ones I’ve seen so far because of its flexibility — it’s implemented the way I would’ve done it myself.
Note that article rewriting is non-trivial if you’re doing more than simple synonym substitutions. But if you’re concerned about creating unique content, it’s worth the effort and this system is quite flexible. (There’s also a more traditional wizard-style interface that lets you do rewriting if you’re not comfortable with inserting the special syntax into the content yourself.)
Conclusion
So far I only have a few articles in the system, but the results are encouraging, I’m seeing a bit of traffic already. I can track how many copies of each article have been submitted and published and over time I expect to have lots of links going back to my sites. This system is great for getting backlinks and traffic, and it’s all very whitehat stuff. If you’re looking for an article distribution system, this is the one I now recommend.
And I’m Back…
Actually, I’ve been back for a few days, but I’ve been busy. Some things to note:
- Had a great time in Paris. The waiters are as cranky as usual (they can afford to be — it’s hard to fire anyone and the tips are automatically added to the bills) and I still don’t know how people afford to live there, but it was a nice vacation.
- I didn’t actually publish anything while I was gone, oh well… watch this space shortly for some new stuff, though.
- I may keep this blog on moderated comments for a while, we’ll see.
- PayPal helpfully unsubscribed me from all my services (again!) when I changed the primary credit card for my account. Moral of the story: don’t change the primary credit card, ever!.
- Google changed the HTML used for its search results pages, which basically broke any software that scraped those results. I’ll be releasing an updated to my Article Gatherer shortly because of this. If you’re an AG customer and not on either the PLRSiteBuilder or Article Gatherer mailing lists, contact me off the list to get your update.
- It looks like Google is putting more emphasis on newer content in determining rankings. For example, the Invisible Fence Guide has recently dropped a couple of notches with no real reason. Adding fresh content is the simplest way to keep your site’s rankings ups, but that can be challenging.
- Canadian AdSense publishers using EFT (electronic funds transfer) for their payments might be seeing some bizarre things in their account right now. The August payment was sent using a 1:1 ratio for Canadian to US dollars, which was wrong — we got underpaid. So they’re doing some bookkeeping magic to correct the problem. You’ll eventually see the amount transferred deducted and then readded to your earnings, with an additional payment being sent to offset the underpayment. You may also see a message stating that your account is on hold because of a failed EFT — don’t panic, that’s how they’re doing the bookkeeping magic. Everything should be corrected in a couple of days.
Back to the real world…
Gone Fishing
In a few hours I’ll be leaving on a vacation to Paris. I won’t be bringing my laptop or my BlackBerry, so I’m going to shortly switch the blog to moderate all comments until I return. So don’t expect much activity for a couple of weeks, though there will be a few posts that will pop up now and then, if I can get them done in time… See you in September!
Tags: AdSense
How Much Of The Web Do You Own?
A recent post by Google stated that they now have over a trillion unique pages in the Google search index. That made me wonder — how much of the Web do I own, exactly? A quick calculation showed me the answer: not enough!
Anyhow, I put together a silly little online tool called How Much Of The Web Do You Own? that you can use to determine your own percentage. First calculate how many pages you have on all your sites — use the Yahoo! Site Explorer to get the numbers, it’s more accurate than Google’s site: command — and plug that number into the tool. Then bash your head against the desk…
Think of it from the AdSense publisher’s perspective. If each page you own (and “own” can be defined pretty loosely to mean any page which you can monetize via AdSense) makes you an average of 1 cent per day (I’m just pulling that number from a hat), then 100 pages doesn’t make you much — a whole $1/day. You need to get up to 10,000 pages to start seeing a significant amount of $100/day. Just think of what you could make with a million or so pages…
PLRPro Backdoor Special
PLRPro is the PLR (private label rights) content service I recommend for serious Internet marketing. They closed their doors recently to new members ahead of implementing a whole slew of new services for members, due out next month. For a few days, however, there’s a PLRPro backdoor special being run that lets you into PLRPro at $127/month. The regular price for the upgraded PLRPro service will be $197/month, so if you’ve been wavering on the fence about this one then you might want to grab the backdoor special before it’s gone.
Yes, I am a member. All existing members will get grandfathered into the upgraded service and won’t have to pay the newer monthly rate, which is essentially double the old rate of $97/month.
Note that you don’t get access to the new PLRPro services until next month. You do get access to the PLRPro content, though, for the current month and all subsequent months until you cancel. You also get access to some members-only blogs and article directories for getting backlinks to your sites and various books and forum postings on how to do things, including a nice little book on setting up your own VRE (virtual real estate) network of sites. Just remember my tip on profitable AdSense article marketing if you’re going to rewrite some of the articles for submission to article directories in order to drive traffic to your AdSense sites.
If any PLRPro subscribers are reading this, feel free to leave a comment detailing your experiences with the service. On the whole I’ve heard nothing but good things. It’s not the only program out there, but it seems to be one of the best.
P.S.: I should also mention that PLRPro also has an ebook service which is quite good. Each month you get 3 ebooks complete with (and this is what I really like) an audio version of the book, 4 different websites for selling it, an autoresponder sequence, a teaser ebook for giveaways (to encourage people to subscribe to your autoresponder), a custom WordPress blog theme and a bunch of articles for traffic purposes. If you join PLRPro you get access to the ebook service for $42/month more.
Tags: AdSense, PLR, PLRPro, private label rights
How To Squeeze Out More Keywords From The AdWords Keyword Tool
A very short tip about the AdWords keyword tool — which is free to use, as I keep mentioning, no AdWords account needed. (If you do have an AdWords account, though, might as well log into the account and use it from there, you won’t have to prove you’re human.)
Normally, the AdWords keyword tool gives you at most 200 keyword ideas. What most people don’t know is that the list of keywords can vary on each request. So by running the tool multiple times on the same keyword you can generate a slightly larger set of keywords.
Here are the steps:
- Search for a keyword (or analyze a site)
- Scroll through the results and click all the Add all links so all the keywords end up in the list on the righthand side of the browser window
- Go back to the top and hit the Get keyword ideas button again.
- Scroll through the results. Any new keywords not already in the list will be obvious, since they’re in blue and the other ones are in grey.
- Repeat this process until you don’t get any more keywords. Try checking or unchecking the Use synonyms option while doing this to get even more keywords.
The only downside with this approach is that when you move the keywords over into the righthand side you lose all the search and competition data. If you plan on analyzing the data, you’ll want to download the spreadsheet format for the keyword data after each press of the Get keyword ideas. You’ll then have to merge the data into one big spreadsheet.
Tags: AdSense, AdWords, Google, keyword tool, tip
Profitable AdSense Article Marketing
As promised, here’s a tip on how to do effective article marketing with the help of the free free AdWords keyword tool. As I’ve mentioned before, article writing and submission is a simple and cost-effective way to get links and traffic to your AdSense pages. But you can profit more from the traffic if you do it right.
The idea is very simple: buy low, sell high. You write two sets of content for a given topic/niche: one set (the traffic set) is for distribution on other sites, the other set (the money set) is for publication on your own site. The traffic set targets low-paying (but often high-traffic) keywords, the money set targets the higher-paying keywords.
Let’s use the broad topic of cooking as an example. Type cooking into the AdWords keyword tool and sort the results by search volume and you’ll get something like this:
Many cooking terms aren’t going to pay you much per-click — remember, the values you see here are what AdWords advertisers pay to have their ads shown on Google, the earnings AdSense publishers make from ads will be much lower. What we’re looking for are relative values, however. Here’s how I’d group the keywords shown above:
| Traffic Set | Money Set |
| cooking turkey | cooking schools |
| cooking recipes | cooking school |
| home cooking | cooking classes |
| cooking online | cooking class |
| cooking | cooking com |
I’ve arbitrarily chosen the $2 mark as the cutoff between the two sets: keywords in the traffic set have values less than $2, those in the money set have values more than $2. Notice how the traffic keywords are generally about “do-it-yourself” cooking and the money keywords are about formal cooking instruction.
For traffic, then, write articles about recipes and cooking techniques and distribute them using EzineArticles, iSnare, and other article directories and submission services. For example, “How To Cook A Turkey” would target the “cooking turkey” keyword. On the other hand, for your own site/blog you’d want to write an article like “Cooking Classes Are For Everyone” to target the “cooking classes” and “cooking class” keywords.
The trick that makes this all work is to link the traffic article to the money article with a carefully-worded resource box:
To wow your company next Thanksgiving, take a cooking class and learn how to cook a turkey with all the trimmings. Find cooking classes near you with our national listing of cooking schools.
Notice the use of “cooking class” and “cooking schools” in the link anchor text. While the body of the article focuses on turkey cooking, the resource box focuses on the cooking classes. The two links should go directly to a page (or pages) relating to formal cooking instruction. Thus you get SEO benefits from the article (links to your pages with the all-important money keywords) and very targeted traffic (anyone who clicks the links to visit your site).
If you’ve chosen good money keywords, your per-click earnings should be much higher than they’d be if you’d just blindly targeted high-traffic keywords. (Don’t feel sad for the article directory: the directory will also make money, of course, because some of the readers will click ads on the directory site, but not as much as your pages will… although they’ll probably make more in terms of sheer volume.)
That, my friends, is the key to profitable AdSense article marketing.
Tags: AdSense, AdWords, article directories, article writing, content, Google, keyword tool, traffic
What Does Google Think Your Page Is About?
In my previous post, How To Find Profitable Niches, I showed how to use the free AdWords keyword tool to find new topic ideas using high-traffic news and general interest sites. But the tool has other uses.
The most interesting use from an AdSense publisher’s perspective is to see what Google thinks your site is about. Actually, it can be more specific than that — you can use the keyword tool to determine what Google thinks of an individual page.
Take All About CRM, a demo site I created with PLRSiteBuilder. If I run its homepage through the keyword tool, I end up with an extensive list of keywords grouped under the following primary keywords:
- customer service
- crm software
- small business
- customer relation
- crm
- customer
- software
Some miscellaneous keywords are also in the list. Most of the keywords are in the CRM category (CRM = customer relationship management), which is what I want. But not all of the keywords it lists are ones I want to target — customer service is too broad a topic, for example. This tool makes it easy to discover if your site is properly targeted or not.
It’s also a good way to determine if your topics are search-worthy or not. Plug in the URL for the Alaska Ferry Travel site and you see keywords like this:
As you can see, the site is right on target keyword-wise, but many of those keywords don’t get a lot of searches.
But so what? If those keywords are super targeted and you can get ranked for them, the small stream of traffic they generate is probably worth more than any other traffic stream.
Contrast those stats to those for the DUI Attorney Finder:
The search numbers here aren’t that hot, either — how many people other than search marketers are really looking for help with drunk driving charges? But look at the competition numbers — way higher. Just from this fact alone you can deduce that per-click revenues for “DUI attorney” type content is going to be much higher than “Alaska ferry” — and much harder to break into.
The ideal is to find keywords that have high search numbers and low competition numbers… while still being profitable. That’s really tricky, because those keywords are far and few between. It requires legwork.
Next we’ll take a look at how to use the keyword tool for effective article marketing.
Tags: AdSense, AdWords, Google, keyword tool, keywords