My previous post 172 AdSense Sites = $5000 per month has elicited a few comments from readers telling me that 172 sites is simply too many sites to manage. The cynics probably think that I'm preparing to sell a system that helps you create and manage dozens or hundreds of sites — well, I don't have such a product. Nor can I recommend one. Most such tools (Traffic Equalizer being the prime example — I actually get the occasional affiliate payout from people buying it through links like that, though interestingly enough most of them end up returning the product shortly thereafter, reducing my affiliate earnings for that product to almost nothing!) fall into the greyhat/blackhat arena. I do have my own homegrown system for managing static sites using the open source FMPP templating system, but I can't see myself developing the nice GUI frontend a commercial product would require, as it's all command-line based right now.
[Aside] Speaking of open source, recently someone's begun selling a modified version of the Camtasia product, which was originally released using an open source license. That version is called CamStudio. The license used, interestingly enough, was the Gnu Public License, or GPL. I say “interestingly enough” because the GPL is one of those “sticky” open source licenses that says that the software is free, that any modifications made to the application are themselves subject to the GPL, and that the source code to those modifications must be made available. If you've bought the modified version of CamStudio (not the commercial product available from TechSmith) then do me a favor and see if the seller will actually give you the source code to the modified version. (I should note that any videos and documentation included with the product would themselves not be subject to the GPL… but the software should be yours for the asking.) [End Aside]
I do not expect people to go out and create 100 or more sites. It's not that it's impossible to do. I think a determined person could build a large set of mini-sites (ideally using the principles I described in Six Degrees of Web Separation), but it would take a number of months to do so if they're built using whitehat techniques — some kind of system would definitely be needed in order to not go insane building them and tracking what you're doing.
But I do think building a smaller set of topically-related mini-sites and then working to get each of those sites up to a certain earnings level is worth the effort. Again, you have to think long-term. AdSense is not going away, Google makes too much money from it. But Google is trying to kill the scraper/non-useful sites, which means the schemes people used before to deploy large numbers of such sites just won't cut it anymore. Develop your sites using whitehat techniques such as:
- CSS-based templates that are SEO-friendly and push the content ahead of the sidebars/navigation
- Registering domain names for 2 or more years
- Writing naturally
- Including about, sitemap, privacy policy, and other pages
- Advertising your sites using AdWords
- Writing and distributing unique articles that link back to your sites
- Linking to related/relevant sites both in and outside of your own network of sites
Again, the hard part is writing the content and promoting the sites. You can develop systems for handling the mechanics of creating and deploying a website. And if you DO want to build a 100 or more sites, you'd be better off to write unique content that requires little or no updating, otherwise you'll go crazy trying to keep track of things. This means that you'll want to develop static sites, not blogs, though you could use one blog (call it your “update blog”) that lists changes/additions to your site network.
If you decide to do this, drop me a line once you've started, I'll be curious to hear how it goes for you.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?