The Strategy Behind The AdSense Project

Sounds interesting. I was hoping you would write a post like this.

Hi Caroline,

I recently found your blog and am really enjoying it. I currently work full-time but have been dreaming of staying home with my kids and trying to make some extra money online. I built my own website a few years ago and make a very minor profit (enough to cover costs plus a cheap lunch/month), but it’s more of a personal ministry w/out much income potential. But I enjoy it and would like to apply that experience to some new sites.

I’m glad you talk about Wordpress as that was the platform I thought may be good to use. I have been blogging for a few years but only with blogger, so I need to get up to speed on Wordpress. I have some domains purchased already, but I have stuck to my interests, so I doubt the income potential is much. Your post about CPM (?) was perfect - so obvious and yet I hadn’t thought about it.

Anyway, enough of my boring story. I love what you are doing here and will be following along. Best of luck with your new projects!

Great article, and I too enjoyed Court’s keyword sniping material. I even used those concepts on my main blog. The one thing I’ve found the most helpful is to pick keywords that I think will be profitable, and design content on my main blog to rank well for those keywords. By tracking a site’s ranking for a series of keywords, you can learn what changes to your site will impact the rankings. I’ve found that changes to my home page, header, sidebars and so on can have a MAJOR impact on SEO. Anyway, great article and best of luck.

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“Therefore I will work on three sites at once and rotate which one I work on so every time I create a peice of content it’s for a different site.”

“Low hanging fruit” is a commonly mentioned concept, but it makes senses to think of my sites as an orchard. If you want to have a successful orchard you have to plant new trees every so often, you have to prune the ones you have, periodic fertilizer is needed and sometimes bugs are a problem. You can’t let yourself get to focused on any one thing.

Another nice thing about multiple sites is you can often find ways to give yourself some on theme links from sites that at first glance seem totally unrelated. For example, a leather working site could have an article about the leather used on car seats and link to a car review sites discussion of seat cover options :)

Always enjoy your posts.

@Money Mgmt, to start with I will be sticking with the exact same strategy, blog theme, ad placement etc for every site. Only when they begin to rise in the rankings and get significant traffic will I start to tweak. I’m using the keyword sniping theme that Court produced so I’m hoping he’s already done most of the necessary tweaking :)

@Paul, yeah this whole AdSense project is about building an orchard rather than just one big tree. Also, because it looks like its going to take some time for the sites to rank and really start getting traffic, having other sites to build gives me something to do and stops me from obsessing over stats for the earlier sites.

Caroline,

I have been looking for a strategy to start working with Adsense and this series couldn’t come at a better time.

I would also like to add that the Market Samurai tool from the 30 Day Challenge is excellent for niche research like this.

I know you’re aware of it because you’ve already blogged about how much you love it but I wanted to remind your readers again how powerful that tool is.

Keep up the good work,

Jeff

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Caroline,

I am not sure your strategy is a good one at all.

My website is steadily building traffic - I am adding content steadily and building my standing with Google. Most traffic is organic - referrals are a very small percentage.

Is my adsense income growing in proportion to my traffic? Not really, and certainly not directly. I have very good days and very bad days. The good days are characterised not by high traffic but by a high click through rate. My visitors will only click on adverts that are relevant to what they are interested in.

I have decided that the key objective to maximising my income is to work out how to attract the advertisers that my visitors think are relevant. This doesn’t seem to have featured in your writing on this subject at all.

Any thoughts?

Colins last blog post..Can your diet cure Acne?

@Colin, what specifically are you doing differently with your site? So far I have only given an overview but the whole site will be geared towards getting traffic that clicks on ads. That will start with the keyword research and of course the content will also be written with that end in mine.

It sounds as though you have a traditional blog so you work on it, work on it some more, keep working on it, do some more work on it and so on. Unless every post that you write gets more traffic, that extra work is going to waste. These niche sites are designed to be low maintenance with only the occasional additional post added to maintain or boost rankings. The main work will be in getting backlinks, not adding more content.

As to attracting advertisers, that’s mainly the job of Google but with carefully written content that is highly targetted to the theme of the page, and in this case the whole site, the ads to be highly on-topic.

Courtney Tuttle certainly has a lot of great ideas!

@Carolin - what you are building is effectively a market place. You bring buyers and sellers together. The weakness I can see in your strategy is that you are concentrating on attracting buyers without considering whether you will get any sellers. Okay, you say, that is Google’s job. But what I see on my blog’s stats is that people placing adsense adverts don’t do it in a blanket way. I can go days with hardly any adsense revenue then will get a whole load in a couple of hours. I don’t get most income when I get most traffic. So the most effective strategy would be to see what advertisers are doing and optimise for their needs.

Adsense always serves up some ads - but my users ignore most of them.

As regards my blog, yes I think it is a traditional blog. I put up topical posts which lose their relevance fairly quickly - but c’est la vie. I also put up posts that have continueing relevance and it is these that are steadily building up my traffic. I am still getting hits on stuff I wrote 4 years ago. As I am writing about stuff I need to think about anyway I don’t really have to sweat it so it works for me - and in any case I would probably do my blog if it didn’t make any money.

I think your keyword sniping approach might work, but I suspect it is much more of a lottery than you seem to be suggesting. You might just hit on a combination of keywords that appeals to buyers and sellers and nets a steady income. But it does seem like a real longshot. I think that a site like that would be very obvious if you came across it. I surf the web a lot and I can’t remember coming across a single one that looked like it had been set up put up by someone purely to net adsense income.

Colins last blog post..Can your diet cure Acne?

@Colin, well going for high paying AdSense keywords means that the sellers are there, otherwise they wouldnt be high paying. I’m only picking keywords that have an average CPC for the advertiser of several dollars. If users ignore the ads it means that the content isn’t well targetted, which is something that would need to be tracked and tweaked on a per-site basis, which is something I intend to do once the sites get traffic.

And yes the sites probably would look ‘obvious’ to an internet markerter or another blogger but the markets that tend to do well are where the audiences are not tech savvy in that way because those audiences do not click ads.

Hi Caroline, reading my posts back they read a lot more negatively than I meant them too. Please don’t take them that way. I have been following your blog for ages and I would love you to have some real success.

Picking high value key words doesn’t necessarily mean that the ads those keywords would serve up would generate high click throughs. I imagine that luxury yacht is a pretty valuable keyword for instance, but not many people will want to click on a buy a luxury yacht here advert. And imagine the level of traffic you would need to get the one person in 100,000 say who would.

As to the sites looking obvious - it doesn’t matter if it is obvious. If you are looking for something you want you will happily click on the link whatever you think of the site. I am reasonably web savvy and I have no problem using sites that are put up purely to make money. The point I was making was that you don’t see many sites that are simply adsense bait. I suggest that that because they don’t do very well. If you can prove me wrong and make yours work I will be very pleased for you - and may even give them a try myself!

colins last blog post..Can your diet cure Acne?

I’m enjoying your blog Caroline.

I have over 500 pages indexed on one site and the niche has over 70 million competing pages. Now for the surprising part. I make a living at it only with Adsense. So it can be done.

It’s not ‘huge’ at a couple thousand/month but it pays the bills to where I don’t need an outside job.

I’ve gone for 6 months during past 4 years without doing anything at all with it and income is steady.

But I hate the fact that I have all of these eggs in one basket.

With Adsense you can be shut down for click fraud even though you had nothing to do with it.

You can get smart priced if one of your sites doesn’t do as well and make less across your entire account from what I understand.

These are very serious issues that make me want to never put Adsense on any other site I have.

I’m seriously looking for another way where I could see *some* sort of return in under 3 months.

I’ve done bum marketing where my ezine articles rank on page one in Google- outranking my website!

I know that my article is being read and then people are clicking ezinearticle’s Adsense ads and not even getting to my resource box. They are getting paid though I am not.

I wish you would go into more detail on your thoughts and results with bum marketing… =)

Adwords is out. Too much risk when you’re not making that much per click.

So guess it may be time to build blog around niche and actually put keyword rich content on it…not expect any income for 6 months and then try to make money charging for advertising…building email list and doing reviews….?

and hope it doesn’t bomb. =)

Pat

Caroline,

Would using a subdomain on an existing, high-ranking, theme related site work instead of registering a new URL?

i.e. keyword.yourdomain.com?

@Colin, well like with everything online, it just comes down to trying stuff out, tracking, testing and tweaking.

@Pat, you have all your eggs in one basket in two ways there - firstly all your income is from AdSense and secondly, it’s all on one site. Mind you, everybody has to start somewhere. There’s no point worrying about diversifying income if you don’t even have one good source. Now that you have one, you can branch out. I’m sure with a site as large as yours you could find a whole bunch of ways to monetize it.

@Johnn, I am not an SEO expert but understanding is that keyword.com is better than keyword.domain.com but sometimes we just have to work with what we can get. If your reason for not getting keyword.com is because you don’t want to fork out the $10 for the registration fee then reconsider that decision but if its because you just can’t find a domain with your keywords in it, then try out the subdomain and see how it works.

lol, whenever I read a post as well written as this about making money from adsense, I start to believe I could do it! From experience though, I don’t earn much from adsense because I’m too short-attention-spanned to make a site about just one thing!

great article, thanks!

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Interesting stuff as usual, but this lead me to a question that maybe you or some of your readers could help me with, how do you find out how your site is ranked in the serp? Is there a special website or a program to find that out?

@Andy, that is one of the keys to making money from AdSense - being on target. The more targetted the site is, the better ads that get served to you. Google has a whole bunch of ads and some perform better than others but the good ones only get served to the best performing sites so if you have a site about a dozen topics you’re not likely to get the best paying ads.

@Sven, yeah there are tools that allow you to check it on a regular basis and I’ll have a closer look at those later in the project but for now I just do a manual check. Once a week I type in my key phrase (it helps that I only have one per site, I would need a tool if I was trying to rank for hundreds of keywords!) and then do a search for the domain name in the results. I have set Google to return 100 results at a time so I just see what page it is on to get a rough idea to the nearest 100. Until it starts to rank in the top 20 or so results, it really doesn’t matter where it ranks - it may as well not be there :)

Sven

Google the term ‘Google rankings’…’Yahoo rankings’..etc..and you’ll get field where you can fill in your URL and keywords to find if you rank in top 1000 or so

Pat

Caroline- thanks for the reply =)

Yes you’re right I am in dire need of diversifying. I’ve hesitated in doing niche type sites cause I was always convinced that they couldn’t really rank with less than 50 pages or so….

Guess if you’re down far enough in the niches- that would be the key to ranking. Time to get back into Keyword research no doubt!

Still wondering with all of the articles you wrote and submitted in your bum marketing project…did you have any return at all…?

This really seemed an ideal way to really bang out some good content…and not get bored with one topic too, which is something I always contend with.

@Pat, I cancelled the bum marketing project. I originally started that when I was doing my first niche site - that’s the only that still makes a little bit of money but now that I have new tools to use I can see that its a bad niche so I don’t want to spend time in it. Article marketing will feature in this project though. This project is going to be quite big and cover a lot of areas rather than do lots of little projects for individual topics.

Cool- I really look forward to hearing about your experiences..I hope you make a million!

I think this is a good strategy, but it’s also easy to slip into producing really spammy sites (not in your case, I’m sure ;) ) where quality and content are totally sacrificed in favour of monetization. John Chow calls them “Google whores”, and I tend to agree. However, if one can produce a genuinely useful site that also achieves the monetization goal…now that would be something worth doing.

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Thanks for the strategy on keyword sniping. I think its one of those things that I scratch my head about when I read it on the web.

Now why didn’t I think of that.

great tip, taking away the dates, and writing timeless posts. that way, even when posts aren’t being made regularly, the site doesn’t look all that dated.

and you also make a great point about how it’s usually audiences that aren’t as into tech, who will actually more often consider clicking on ads.

some great advice here. i look forward to following along. hope your strategies here work out into the medium term.

Great article, I was wondering how you would go about doing this. I find that getting SEO rankings on smaller niche sites takes too much time. I use PPC ads to drive traffic to my niche sites but I make sure to be spending less on PPC then I get from adsense clicks. Basically, I set up channels in adsense to track each niche site then look at my PPC campaign to see if its making me money.

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@Tutorials, I already explained why PPC won’t work for an AdSense site. Yes SEO is slow but if you keep building sites then after 6 months or so you’ll have a solid suite of sites getting traffic and income then the speed wont matter anymore.

Therefore I will work on three sites at once and rotate which one I work on so every time I create a peice of content it’s for a different site.”

“Low hanging fruit” is a commonly mentioned concept, but it makes senses to think of my sites as an orchard. If you want to have a successful orchard you have to plant new trees every so often, you have to prune the ones you have, periodic fertilizer is needed and sometimes bugs are a problem. You can’t let yourself get to focused on any one thing.

Another nice thing about multiple sites is you can often find ways to give yourself some on theme links from sites that at first glance seem totally unrelated. For example, a leather working site could have an article about the leather used on car seats and link to a car review sites discussion of seat cover options :)

Always enjoy your posts.

Really great information.
Hopefuly i will soon be able to take some of these ideas and put them into action with my own sites.
Thanks for sharing, keep up the great work.