Hard to believe, but the first anniversary of the publication of Make Easy Money with Google is fast approaching (June 17). This time last year I was (very) busy putting the final touches on the book, madly writing the last few chapters and updating screenshots whenever Google decided to muck with the AdSense console. (Again, my plea to Google: please bring back the old console.) The first entry in this blog, The Make Easy Money with Google blog is up!, was posted on May 30, less than 3 weeks before the book's official release.

Since then, I've written the equivalent of another book about AdSense in this blog! You can understand my reluctance, then, at participating in the AmazonConnect program, which lets books authors like myself create Amazon-managed blogs for promoting their books. For authors without a blog, it's a great idea. For authors with a blog, it's just more work!

Still, I'm not one to pass up a chance to publicize my book, so this morning I created my own AmazonConnect blog for Make Easy Money with Google, which you can now see on the book's Amazon detail page. The best thing about the blog is that it appears before any reader reviews — giving me the chance to set reader expectations a bit better than the publisher's editorial copy does — and that I can direct potential readers to this blog. Amazon's normally pretty stingy about letting visitors off its site — remember our recent discussion about the single-page AdSense site and making exit points profitable? — and the fact that these blogs let you link to external sites at all (albeit via a redirection through a new browser window) is amazing to me.

I really doubt I'll be posting much more to that blog. Hey, I just passed the 100 subscriber mark for this blog on Bloglines (use this link to add your own subscription). That doesn't sound like much, but it's not the only way people read this blog and I've been quite happy to see the numbers grow over time. (Too bad I lost my Technorati ranking due to the address change, but that should fix itself in a few more months.)

Remember, you need to be in it for the long haul to make good money from AdSense. Writing good content — whether it's maintaining a near-daily blog like this or writing new articles for your site — takes time, and your traffic will build slowly over time if your work at it. I talked about this early on in Have you read “26 Steps to 15K a Day” yet? and the advice in Brett Tabke's wonderful posting still applies today. It should be required reading for all AdSense publishers! Print it out and re-read it every week.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

One of the comments to yesterday's posting about making content theft work in your favor didn't like my cavalier attitude to content theft. I certainly don't advocate such theft, and I've written before about using Google Alerts to find stolen content. As someone who makes his living primarily from writing (my definition of writing includes programming) you can be sure that the protection of intellectual property is a great concern of mine.

But let's be realistic. If you put stuff up on the Web for free and provide it in a form that's easily manipulated — those feeds — then you shouldn't be surprised to find someone using your content in ways you didn't intend. Licensing your content under a Creative Commons or similar license won't stop this from occurring. In fact, you lose rights when you release material that way, because you're allowing others to reproduce your material. Without that license, reproduction rights are strictly limited — remember that copyright protection is implicit.

I don't think that embedding digital signatures like Numly numbers helps prevent serious theft. Sure, it'll catch those who blindly copy the material without changing it, but that won't deter the serious thief. If they're altering your content to remove links and such you can bet they'll alter it enough to make those watermarking schemes useless. You can lock your doors all you want, but a determined thief will always find a way to break in.

I do agree with the commenter's final point about finding some middle ground in all of this. The biggest problem I have with policing content theft is that it takes time away from content creation and traffic generation. Put in some basic measures — again, Google Alerts is a great tool for this — but accept that some content theft is bound to occur.

P.S.: A lot of content doesn't get stolen, but it's not due to diligent policing and anti-theft measures. It's because the content's simply not good enough to steal!

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

A quick tip. Syndicated content is ridiculously easy to reuse and repackage, making it perfect for automated content generation schemes. Take a few RSS feeds (from blogs like this one), parse out the individual entries, slap a page template (with ad code, of course) around each entry and then publish the new page to your own site and voila, instant site! Any competent (or semi-competent) programmer can write a program to do this in a weekend, and for those who don't have the skill or inclination to do so there are several software packages available for purchase that do it for you.

So what's a blogger (or anyone syndicating content — bloggers are just the biggest and most obvious group) supposed to do about this? Here are common tactics:

• Don't syndicate any content. Yep, no feeds. Drastic, because it forces people to visit your site to read what you have to say. Few people can get away with this.
• Syndicate summaries. Don't make your full content available from the feed, only a summary. This still forces people to visit your site to read the full content, but at least they can do it from within their feed reader. Of course, your summary (and title) better be compelling enough to make them do this.
• Ban the thieves. Track the people using your content and ban them from getting your feed. Lots of work, and not always possible to do.

Or you could view content theft as an opportunity to spread the word about your blog/site. Make the thieves your unwilling accomplices in this. How? Simple: put a link back to your site in every posting you make. Yes, the feed has a link back to your site in it, but I'm talking about embedding links right in the content. You can do it quite easily via a short “bio” at the bottom of each posting, like I do (see below). Or strategically within the content itself, if appropriate.

This won't catch all the thieves, of course. Some of them strip links from content. There's nothing you can do about that, other than perhaps make sure you entries are peppered with enough links to make them only semi-useful without them. But the thieves that leave the links in place will end up helping you in the long run. Remember, one-way links are valuable and your own rankings can't be hurt by an independent site linking to yours.

My advice is to not worry much about content theft. After all, if what you're writing is so valuable, why aren't you charging for it in the first place? That's when you should worry about content theft. But if you're putting it out free, expect it to be reprinted and plan accordingly. There are more important things to worry about.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.