AdSenseAccelerator revisited

AdSenseAccelerator is one of the few products I've given a testimonial for. I actively use this product for my keyword research and can heartily recommend it to AdSense publishers who are looking for serious and accurate information about keyword pricing, especially bid gaps. You can read my previous review of AdSenseAccelerator (in three parts) for all the details: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

I mention it here because they had closed their memberships for a while. They've added support for new members, so if you were waiting to get it now is the time to do it.

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.

June 30, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Private Label Articles: Part 2 - Pitfalls

Today we continue the series on private label rights (PLR) articles. Please read Part 1 before continuing.

As I mentioned previously, the newfound popularity of private label articles can be directly attributed to the increasing number of AdSense and YPN publishers looking to make money via search engine and social bookmarking traffic. The latter traffic generation method is particularly favored for quick returns via “tag and ping” and PLR articles are a favorite source of content for that.

The popularity of PLR articles brings us directly to the first pitfall of using the articles: content duplication. Unless you get exclusive rights to the content, there's no way for you to know how many other people are using the same articles. With the search engines placing greater emphasis on duplicate content exclusion, this means that your pages can get pushed out of the indexes if too many other sites are republishing the same articles. This is why every PLR seller will advise you to rewrite the articles in some form. And they'll happily sell you tools to help you rewrite the content, too…

Here's a quick way to check if an article you've received has been overused. Go to MSN search and do a phrase search for a few phrases you've pulled out of the article. (The reason we're using MSN here instead of Google is that pages get into MSN more quickly and as such MSN is a favored target for content spammers.) For example, I have on my computer a set of PLR articles I got for free from a mailing list. I choose one at random called “BadCredit.doc”. I look in it and find this phrase at the beginning of the third paragraph:

When you are looking for home loans with bad credit you will probably want to look into what is called a subprime loan.

I place quotes around the phrase and do an MSN search for it: here, try it yourself (opens new window). Hmm. Four results. Try it with Yahoo!. Seven results. And Google. Five results.

Well, that's not as bad as it could have been, but obviously there are other people out there using the same article.

More disturbing, however, is if you look closely at the results, you'll see that most of the articles are posted with someone's name. Look here, for example.

And this is where things get murky. It's another pitfall. Private label rights let you put your own name on articles. So you can submit them to article directories and such as your own work if you want to. (Many directories forbid this from happening, of course, but there's no way for them to tell.) But how do you know that the article was originally written by someone else, stripped of the bio information, and then sold as a PLR article? What's worse, once an article is released in PLR form, like a virus it starts to infect other PLR packages. There are many PLR sites that give you permission to resell the articles you get in your own PLR collections. (Some do, some don't — again, it's a real patchwork of rights trying to figure out what you can do and can't so.) So a PLR vendor who buys work from other PLR vendors may be compounding a copyright infringement. I don't honestly know whether the article I just mentioned was a legitimate PLR article submitted under someone's name or else a copyrighted article stripped of bio information. All I have is the PLR vendor's word for it.

Finally, there are writing issues. PLR articles, like all articles, vary widely in quality. And in size. And in tone. You must take the time to read each and every article and make sure it's up to snuff if you plan on associating your name with it.

Next we'll talk about what I think you should be doing with PLR articles.

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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.

June 29, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

MEMWG loses MarketingSherpa Best Blog on Search Marketing award

Sadly, but not unexpectedly, I must report that Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense didn't win the Best Blog on Search Marketing award, losing out to Search Engine Roundtable. I'm heartened by this statement, though:

Notably, the voting for the entire category as a whole was fairly even (aside from one obvious ballot stuffer).

Thanks to all who voted for me! It was great just to be nominated. Full results on the votes are available here.

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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.

June 29, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

My opinion about Instant AdSense Templates and Private Label Articles

Whoops, looks like my postings about private label articles and Instant AdSense Templates is striking a nerve among my readership. I was actually going to cover some of this later in my private label articles series, but perhaps it's best to talk about it now.

There's no doubt in my mind that the quickest way to get yourself a big fat AdSense paycheque is to create site after site, or blog after blog, on a regular basis. It always goes back to what I say in my free e-book the two words that can make you rich — instead of one high-traffic site, build many lower-traffic niche sites. (Read the e-book for the justification, but it all comes down to basic mathematics.)

The problem, of course, is that it's hard to create new sites from scratch. There are one-time impediments to overcome:

These are not significant barriers, though. A bit of work and you can have a system in place that easily lets you create new sites/blogs. This means hunting down the cheapest place to buy domain names (generally this means 1&1 in my case) or using subdomains. It means finding and learning how to use a reseller hosting account. It means creating your own site templates the hard way (by hand) or grabbing someone else's templates (like the free ones at Open Web Design). Learning how to install and customize WordPress blogs. It means using tools like FMPP to make the creation and management of static sites easier.

Do the above a few times and you'll find setting up a new site/blog can be done in a matter of hours. Maybe minutes!

But what's missing in all of this is… you guessed it, content. That's where people stumble. And that's why private label articles are so popular these days.

Think about it. If you want to build your “AdSense empire” to rake in the big bucks, you need dozens, hundreds, even thousands of sites. You need to be deploying sites on a weekly basis, possibly even daily. How are you going to do this and fill those sites with content? How are you going to post content to the fifty blogs you maintain?

You can hire writers to do it for you, of course. This is what blog networks do. But that costs money. Or you can use scripts/software to scrape content. But the quality of scraped content is pretty iffy. Or you can use someone else's prewritten content.

So you buy a set of private label articles for a given niche and create a site/blog around them. You do some minimal work to get them into the search engines or to drive traffic to them via pay-per-click advertising. Then you move on to the next site/blog.

Churn is the name of the game for the real masters. It doesn't matter if a site gets banned/dropped/whatever, you'll soon have another one set to take its place. Even better, you can take your old sites and sell them as turnkey AdSense sites — so they still make you money.

When I first heard about Joel Comm's Instant AdSense Templates product, my first thought was that it was a great idea, putting together a bunch of optimized AdSense-friendly templates together, along with instructions on how to use them. I wish I had thought of it myself!

It wasn't until I got my sneak peek at the product that I realized it had private label content in it. That disappoints me, I'll be honest. As a writer, I really can't seem myself using someone else's writing — without credit or compensation — to build my site and pass it off as my own work. But I'm picky that way, I know people who feel they can't write (which probably isn't true — if you can send semi-literate emails to your friends, you can write articles) look for other sources of content.

And as I've argued before, I don't think article compilations are bad in and of themselves. The key is whether the compilation adds value to the original material. Compiling material, organizing it, editing it… these things all take time and effort.

When it comes right down to it, I'm a big proponent of the write-your-own-content method of making money with AdSense. Those of you who have read Make Easy Money with Google will know this to be true. I do think AdSense is a great way for individuals to make themselves some money by creating content based on their interests and experiences.

But part of the way I create original content is by talking about the issues and challenges that AdSense publishers face. I get questions from my readers about things like private label articles. Or I see famous Internet marketers jumping on the same bandwagon. These things motivate me to write about the realities of AdSense in today's world. I try to be as objective as I can and avoid moralization. My job is not to tell you what's right and what's wrong. My job is to explain to you how things work and to give you ideas for new ways to approach things. Or what to avoid. Or what to be careful about. I will not get rich doing this, I can assure you, at least not with this site. (Let's face it, AdSense publishers rarely click ads.) But I find it all extremely interesting, and I hope you find it useful.

Please feel free to leave a comment about the job I'm doing. Do you find this blog valuable? Are there topics you'd like to see discussed? I'm always willing to listen to my readers. Realize also that I can't please everyone and that I'm just one guy with one set of opinions. Go easy on me… :-)

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.

June 28, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Instant AdSense Templates

I guess it had to happen: apparently I've developed enough of a following that people are starting to send me stuff unsolicited in the hopes that I'll promote it. It's not like I don't already have a lot of stuff to review and look at, either. There are several e-books and products that I plan to review on GeekAffiliate that aren't strictly AdSense-related, including very shortly a review of The ListFX. At least as soon as the fuss over my bad review of Keyword Niche Power dies down! (Check the comments.)

So: next week, Joel Comm and Eric Holmlund are set to release a new product called Instant AdSense Templates. I mentioned this before briefly, mostly because he's offering a free e-book called Getting Started with Blogging and Google AdSense to those who sign up for their mailing list. (The e-book's a decent intro showing you how to add AdSense ads to Blogger, WordPress and Movable Type blogs, certainly worth a look if you're a newbie and don't know what to do.) Since all I had to go on was the e-book (yes, I joined the list to get it), and not the actual product itself, I really couldn't say anything about Instant AdSense Templates. Now they've sent me some details and since it dovetails nicely with our recent discussions about private label articles and turnkey AdSense sites I thought I'd pass on those details to you.

First, let's get one thing straight: they're doing this to get some publicity for their product and hopefully some sales from some of the people reading this. I know this. You know this (I hope!). I don't pull any punches, though, as the Keyword Niche Power and Desktop AdSense Cash Machine reviews should prove. Also, I do not have the full Instant AdSense Templates package, so I can't actually do a full review of the product. All I can do is talk about the information they've sent me and the sample site that was built using their product. With someone like Joel Comm involved, however, I trust that the final product will be decent enough, unlike some of the other things I've seen.

What is Instant AdSense Templates?

Instant AdSense Templates includes three things:

  1. A set of templates for building AdSense-ready sites:
  2. 55 complete websites built with private label articles, one for each of the 55 HTML templates
  3. A website builder called “Your Own Original Content Site Builder”

Also included are some bonuses, including 250 “AdSense ad block enhancers”, which are basically strips (horizontal and vertical) of thumbnail pictures meant to be placed above or beside ad units.

The price for all this is $197, at least for the first 1000 customers. They say they'll raise the price for the remainder (they're only going to sell 2000 copies) but we'll see if that actually happens…

The Turnkey Sites

While this package is being angled as a “template set”, I suspect that many purchasers will buy it strictly for the turkey AdSense sites it comes with. Now, if you remember my analysis in Turnkey AdSense Site Economics, you can actually buy turnkey sites much more cheaply. So do you get more for your money with this package?

While I've not really analyzed the content, it does look like the Instant AdSense Template sites are better designed. For one thing, they don't take a cookie-cutter approach. And they make good use of those filmstrips (the images near ads). And they include seach boxes. And the pages have titles and headings. They're not perfect, though… for example, at least one page is missing its content entirely — presumably the final release will fix it.

The Template Angle

Putting the turnkey sites aside, however, it looks like the templates themselves are easy to use. The plain HTML templates are fairly clean HTML (CSS purists will dislike the use of tables, but let's be fair, even Google uses tables for its ad units). Each template comes with a CSS file to make site-wide style change easier, images, and an easily customizable header.

One thing I don't like about these systems, though, is that you have to do a lot of hand-editing of the pages. I prefer template-based systems that let you use macros and programming scripts to do things like generate lists of links, index pages, sitemaps, etc. But maybe that's what the software builder software that's included with the package is supposed to do — can't tell you for sure until I get my hands on it, though.

Instant AdSense Templates will probably do very well for its creators. I'll do a full review after the release.

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.

June 28, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Private Label Articles (Part 1)

As promised, I'm starting a series on private label articles and related topics. Private label articles are the hot thing being sold by Internet marketers today, so it's worth taking a look at what the fuss is all about. (Be sure, though, to read Understand Your Meta-Market for some perspective on what Internet marketers do.)

Private label articles are articles that are distributed with private label rights, or PLR for short. Simply put, private label rights let you take a product and sell it as if it were your own creation, with you listed as the author/creator/developer. PLR products can normally also be modified as little or as much as the purchaser of the rights wants.

Now, private label rights is not a new phenomenon. Many printed books are written this way — a celebrity or other notable person doesn't have the time or the skill to write a book, so they hire someone else to write it for them and then slap their name on the manuscript. This is called ghostwriting in the publishing industry. The ghostwriter is hired to write, usually gets a flat fee for his or her efforts, and then relinquishes all rights to the material, including the right to being named as the author. (Aside: I've always wondered if the moral rights in some jurisdictions provide a loophole for ghostwriters to claim authorship, despite what the contract they signed says. But that's neither here nor there.)

Internet marketers have sold PLR products for quite some time now, too, with e-books being a favorite product since they're so easily rebranded. (Hey, you can be sure that any e-book that has my name on it was written by me, not someone else.)

Private label articles, though, are fairly new and their popularity can be directly attributed to advertising programs like AdSense and YPN. People who are looking to make a few bucks with those programs need one main ingredient: content. They don't want to write it themselves, so where do they get the content? You got it, private label articles.

More on this shortly.

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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.

June 27, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | 2 Comments 

Advice for sellers of turnkey AdSense sites

This message is for sellers of turnkey AdSense sites (please read Turnkey AdSense Site Economics for more background), though those looking to buy such sites might wish to pay heed as well.

If you're providing demo sites for your potential customers to look at, you better make sure those demo sites aren't showing PSAs. A PSA, of course, is a public service announcement. You see PSAs when Google throws up its hands trying to figure out what a page is about.

When I look at many sample turnkey sites, all I see are PSAs. And no wonder. Underscores instead of hyphens in the file names. No title tags. No headings. No bolding. Poor keyword density. This guy's selling the sites very cheaply, and well I guess I know why.

But there's no excuse for this. A bit of work — oops, there's a four-letter word — is all that's needed to get these sites to show some ads. It's not rocket science, you know? But it doesn't give me a good feeling. Somehow I don't think that think I'll be buying any sites from him. I'm very doubtful that these are the actual sites that he uses to make money. Maybe I should start selling properly optimized turnkey AdSense sites? What do you think? :-)

Sponsored Link: Please vote for Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense (this blog!) in MarketingSherpa's Reader's Choice Blog & Podcasting Awards 2006 contest. It encourages me to keep posting quality material on this blog!

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.

June 25, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

The Great AdSense Blackout of 2006

Alright, it wasn't that big a deal, but it was certainly odd today to see “0 - $0.00″ on my Firefox windows (thanks to the AdSense Notifier) this afternoon as Google took down the AdSense management console for some maintenance. If you hadn't seen the warning last night on Inside AdSense, you might have been worried to see no earnings… the system was down longer (a few hours) than I expected, but I was happy to see good earnings when it came back up.

It makes me wonder what new features Google is getting ready to unleash on us. A quick trip through the console doesn't show any changes, but I'm sure Jenstar will be the first to tell us otherwise. (For the record, I have no inside info about AdSense and no contacts at Google other than I know a few of the people who work here in Waterloo at Google's new lab.) Keep your eyes peeled…

Sponsored Link: Please vote for Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense (this blog!) in MarketingSherpa's Reader's Choice Blog & Podcasting Awards 2006 contest. It encourages me to keep posting quality material on this blog!

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.

June 24, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Public domain riches for international publishers

When looking for content to use for your site or blog, one of the sources that every AdSense book or e-book (including mine!) mentions is public domain documents. The term “public domain” (short for “in the public domain”) refers to documents and other publications that were never copyrighted, or whose copyright protection has lapsed, or whose authors/creators have voluntarily surrendered all copyright claims. Public domain documents can be used for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, without having to pay anyone any licensing rights. This is why they're so appealing. See the Wikipedia entry for public domain for more detailed information.

Generally speaking, anything published before 1923 is in the public domain. After that date, it gets pretty murky and careful research is required to determine if a document is in the public domain or not. Things like when it was published, whether copyright protection was explicitly sought (these days you don't have to do anything — copyright protection is implicit and automatic — but there were notice and registration requirements in the past), whether the copyright was renewed or not, etc. See Project Gutenberg's Copyright HOWTO for rules on determining if a document published in the United States is in the public domain or not — you'll see it's rather complicated. The rules vary by country, of course — see Project Gutenberg's Australian rules for an example.

The loss of copyright protection is irrevocable, but some documents that you may think are in the public domain may reacquire copyright protection for other reasons. A document based on public domain material may have copyright protection, for example, if someone adds to or alters the public domain material in a significant manner, such as by translating the material into another language. Which brings us to today's topic.

One of the problems with public domain material is that it is for the most part old stuff with little commercial value. There are some interesting documents like Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, but if your primary topic is very modern, there's probably little in the public domain that will help. Or is there?

One of the unusual aspects about United States copyright law is that the works of the United States federal government (not state or local governments) are explicitly NOT protected by copyright. Here's the relevant extract from the copyright act:

Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.

According to this, then, anything created by an employee of the United States government in the course of that employee's normal duties is not covered by coypright. Note, however, that this doesn't necessarily apply to works created by contractors working on behalf of the government or works that the government purchases or licenses from others. So again, you have to be careful and do your research.

Many times, though, the government explicitly notes which documents its publishers are in the public domain. For example, take a look at the PDF document Chronic Disease Notes & Reports, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On the last page of the document you'll find this statement:

Chronic Disease Notes & Reports is published by the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia. The contents are in the public domain. [emphasis added]

Bingo! Immediately we know we can use the information in this document without fear of violating someone's copyright.

Now just republishing public domain US government documents probably won't do you a lot of good due to duplicate content filters in the search engines and the fact that the government sites on which these documents are found are considered authoritative and will easily outrank any sites you create based solely on those documents. The key, of course, is to add value to those documents. Such as by translating them into a different language.

Think about it: if you're an international publisher whose native language is not English, the public domain works of the United States government are fertile grounds for content development. The US government produces all kinds of interesting documents on almost any topic imaginable. Your own government probably has similar documents, but they're almost always subject to copyright. But there's nothing stopping you from translating the US government's documents and using that translation as content. You can provide great value just by doing the translation. (You might want to check first to see if the US government hasn't already done a translation — many documents are available in Spanish, for example.)

English-language publishers can also use these public domain documents, but must add value in different ways: rewording/rewriting the document; writing analyses/summaries/commentaries; linking related material together; etc. etc.

Or you can just use the public domain document as a basis for writing your own information about the topic.

You can definitely make money with public domain material, but it generally takes some work to make a lot of money with it.

Sponsored Link: Please vote for Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense in MarketingSherpa's Reader's Choice Blog & Podcasting Awards 2006 contest. It encourages me to keep posting quality material on this blog!

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.

June 23, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Please Vote: MEMWG Nominated for MarketingSherpa Award

A reader just noticed that this blog, Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense, has been nominated for the MarketingSherpa Reader's Choice Blog & Podcasting Awards 2006, in the Search Marketing category. Wow, it's great to be listed in the same category as Aaron Wall and Search Engine Roundtable!

Please take a minute to vote for me (here's the link again), you only need cast your vote in one category if you want. It's very simple:

That's it! Easy as pie… thanks in advance to everyone who votes for me. And thanks in general for having nominated me, it means a lot!

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.

June 21, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Keyword Niche Power Review

While I get GeekAffiliate off the ground, I'll occasionally cross-pollinate. Please take a couple of minutes to read my review of Keyword Niche Power, an overpriced software package that was quite a disappointment. You can do the same thing with free tools, the only benefit KNP has is the convenient way it lets you scrape keyword suggestions from Yahoo! in bulk. I'll have to find something else to recommend to students taking my free Profitable Keyword Discovery course, it seems. I've got all the free tools covered, but if you have recommendations for paid ones (like Keyword Elite) then drop me a line.

Sponsored Link: Joel Comm is getting set to release a new product called Instant AdSense Templates. I've not seen it, so I can't comment on it as of yet, although I expect it'll be of much higher quality than the software I reviewed above. To get you to signup for his mailing list, Joel is offering a free 30-page e-book called Getting Started with Blogging and Google AdSense, which I have read. It's a decent intro to adding AdSense to a blog, convering the three major blogging platforms: Blogger, WordPress, and Movable Type. The information is fairly detailed. It even recommends the AdSense Deluxe plugin that I use on GeekAffiliate, so it's definitely current. Then there's some generic information about ad layout and what to blog about… nothing earth-shattering, but beginning bloggers might find the information about adding AdSense to a blog useful. Ultimately, of course, he's trying to sell you on one or more of his products, but the e-book's legit and worth a look if you're just starting out.

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.

June 20, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Subdomains and Single-Page AdSense Sites

There's a real brouhaha going on right now about a clever exploit by an entrepreneurial webmaster of Google's fondness for quickly indexing the main page of any new site it sees. You can read about it here and here if you want all the details, but the gist of the technique involves creating thousands of keyword-based subdomains and getting Google to index them and then displaying ads on those pages. It's the single-page AdSense site applied to the max. While it sounds like a lot of work, in reality it's not because all you need is to have control over the DNS mappings for a domain and to map requests for any subdomain of that domain to the same page on the main domain. In other words, whenever a request for something like “foo.mydomain.com” comes along, internally change it to “www.mydomain.com?subdomain=foo” and have a script running on “www.mydomain.com” that generates a keyword-rich page of content based on the requested subdomain. Geeky stuff, to be sure, but not rocket science.

But it certainly does present a nice opportunity to revisit the single-page AdSense site concept and to apply what we talked about before to subdomains.

What is a subdomain?

First, though, let's make sure we're all on the same page. If you know what a subdomain is, just skip to the next section.

A subdomain is a subdivision of a domain. A period separates a subdomain from its parent domain in a fully-qualified domain name. Thus “www” is actually a subdomain of “memwg.com” and “memwg” is a subdomain of “com”.

Subdomains are usually assigned to different machines. For example, “mail.mydomain.com” and “www.mydomain.com” might be different machines. Or they may in fact be the same machine. Subdomains are controlled by the entity that controls the parent entity. So while “memwg.com” is controlled by the “com” top-level domain, “www.memwg.com” is actually controlled by “memwg.com” (me). Mapping multiple domains to the same machine is in fact very common, most of the time a domain and its “www” subdomain are mapped to the same web server, a fact which can actually cause some issues with search engines if other sites link to your site inconsistently (some using the “www” form of the domain name, some using the non-”www” form — but that's a separate discussion).

How to get a single page indexed in Google

Google generally treats each subdomain as a separate site. Whenever Google encounters a new site, it always indexes the root page of the site. That may in fact be all it indexes: generally you need links to your site, particularly deep links (links to specific pages within the site) to get more of your pages indexed. That, of course, takes time, and so it can be weeks or months before you start seeing your other pages show up in Google's search results.

That's why the single-page AdSense site can be effective. You build a single page of good content built around a specific keyword phrase hosted on a relevant domain. It gets indexed fairly quickly and then you wait to see if you make any money from that topic before deciding to expand the site or not. Look at NoDebtIsGood.com (or its opposite, DebtIsGreat.com) to see what I mean.

Harnessing the power of subdomains

One problem with the single-page AdSense site strategy is that it can be expensive and time-consuming to acquire the domains you need to host those individual pages. Using subdomains is a way around this problem, because all you need is one domain and the ability to host multiple sites as subdomains (this depends on the hosting service you use). Finding the domain for this kind of scenario is actually easier, because you don't actually want a keyword-rich domain unless all the sites on that domain are related to the same keyword.

The nice thing about subdomains is that it's easy to create a keyword-rich subdomain because you control the parent domain. Any hot generic term is available to you as a subdomain. (Well, watch out for trademarks…)

So if you want to give the single-page AdSense site strategy a go, use subdomains, but do it quickly. The webmaster who's been causing all this fuss over Google's treatment of subdomains may force them to rethink their quick-root-page-indexing algorithm.

Sponsored Link: Visit Mr. OverDeliver for free books and courses.

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.

June 19, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

AdSense Book Celebrates Its First Anniversary

Note: Since I'm travelling, my posting schedule is light. I thought today I'd just post a press release that went out today.

Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense Celebrates Its First Anniversary

The book and blog that shows consumers how to build money-making blogs and websites using Google's AdSense program celebrates its first anniversary. Author and contextual advertising expert Eric Giguere builds a loyal following with his practical, no-hype approach to making money online.

Waterloo, Ontario (PRWEB) June 17, 2006 — A year has passed since the publication of "Make Easy Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program" (Peachpit Press, 2005, ISBN 0321321146) and its author thinks things could hardly have gone better.

"I wrote this book for the average consumer, not the techies," says Eric Giguere, "and the enthusiastic comments I've received back from my readers prove that it was the right time to publish that kind of a book."

Make Easy Money with Google was the first printed book devoted exclusively to the topic of monetizing blogs and websites using Google's AdSense program, which allows third parties to share in Google's advertising revenue stream by providing new venues for advertisers to display their online advertisements.

Eric Giguere's blog "Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense" (http://www.memwg.com/blog/adsense/) keeps his readers up-to-date with the latest developments and news relating to AdSense. The blog has a wider audience than the book and has become one of the "must-read" AdSense blogs. He also runs a free newsletter about AdSense (http://www.memwg.com/newsletter.html).

A sampling of reader comments about Eric's writings:

Many readers expressed a desire for more advanced material, so Eric Giguere is shortly releasing a new AdSense book called "Uncommon AdSense" (http://www.UncommonAdSense.com), this time as an e-book. "The new book will discuss tips, techniques and strategies for maximizing your AdSense income," says Giguere, "and will be a great resource for both beginners and seasoned AdSense pros."

Eric Giguere wishes to thank his readers for a wonderful year and looks forward to hearing more about their own online success.

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.

June 18, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Let the AdSense bot in!

Google's just put together a great little help page called How do I block the Googlebot? which could also be titled How do I let in the AdSense bot?. The first part lists the user agents that Google uses for its various crawlers:

The rest of the page shows how to use your robots.txt file to allow or disallow the various crawlers to crawl parts of your site.

If you don't let the AdSense crawler see your pages, you won't get optimally-targeted ads. This is because the crawler is what fetches the page so that Google can analyze its content. If it can't fetch the page, ads will probably still show, but the ads will be based solely on the URL of the page (including query parameters), the content of pages linking to that page (if the crawler knows about them) and the content of the other pages on the same site. (Yes, this is all covered in the AdSense patent.) The ads may be relevant in this case, or they may not — it really depends on your site.

With apologies to John and Paul:

When I find my ads are all off target,
Mother Google comes to me,
Speaking words of wisdom:
“Let me in.”
etc. etc.

Sheesh. Enough of that crap.

Pay careful attention to Google's “Allow” extension of the robots.txt standard. The standard only defines a “Disallow” command, but Google's crawlers understand the “Allow” command as well, which gives you more flexibility. Other search engines don't use “Allow”, but if all you want to do is allow the AdSense crawler into pages that you don't want showing up in the main index then that won't matter.

Of course, we'll defer the discussion of why you wouldn't want your AdSense pages showing up in Google's search index to another time…

Most importantly, don't forget that the robots.txt is a voluntary exclusion method. Not every crawler that comes to your site respects it. And don't expose details about specific files you're looking to protect.

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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.

June 14, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

The REAL AdSense Code

All hype aside (I'm not Dan Brown and this is nothing to do with The Da Vinci Code, though I'd love to sell the same number of books as Mr. Brown), the real AdSense code is found buried in Google's patent application for the AdSense system. My special report The Real AdSense Code: Understanding the AdSense Patent describes the patent in extensive detail and is recommended reading for any AdSense publisher looking to better understand how AdSense works. If you want to see what the report looks like, I've prepared a free preview edition that extracts a few of the pages so you can get a feel for what the full report is like. You can also read Graywolf's review of the report.

On sale now, only $14.95, 34-page PDF. (What a steal!) Instant delivery through Payloadz!

Sponsored Link: None. This whole posting is a blatant ad, dude!

Coming soon: dicussion about private label rights (PLR) articles. Stay tuned!

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.

June 14, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Understanding how Google ranks pages

Although I try to resist posting entries that are nothing but links to other sites, I think all AdSense publishers who depend on high rankings in Google to drive traffic to their site should go ahead and read Aaron Wall's seminal article on search engine relevancy. Aaron is a professional search engine marketing consultant that I've mentioned here many times before who spends a lot of time writing quality material about SEO and related topics.

Pay particular attention to Aaron's section about Google and how Google thinks a site is spongeworthy. Lots of good advice about building content that Google will (eventually) trust and rank.

You know, I argued in my book (coming up on its first anniversary this weekend!) that writing good content was a lot like being back in school:

One of the things you learned in school was how to write essays and reports. You had to research (find, read, and analyze) source documents. You had to form your own thoughts on the topic and put them on paper in logical sequences. You had to check your spelling and use good grammar. You had to reference other people's ideas.

  — From Chapter 3, “Finding Something to Say”, which can be downloaded here for free

Good writers implicitly write varietally. They don't repeat words or phrases unnecessarily and work hard at using synonyms, idioms and rephrasings to add variety to the writing. This is not the SEO-friendly way to write content. Remember how last week I argued that writing for search engines is like writing your own Dick and Jane reader? I gave an example in my article on human search engine optimization about how an “optimized” paragraph would read when rewritten for a human reader who'd made it past grade school. What Aaron and others are pointing out is that Google in particular is starting to lean more towards the write-for-the-humans angle and not the write-for-the-search-engines method that so many sites employ in order to rank well in the search engines. (Of course, the other search engines aren't nearly as sophisticated, so if you're looking to rank highly in Yahoo or MSN then you don't have to worry so much about writing varietally. For now, at least.)

Print out and study Aaron's article. Lots of insight there.

Sponsored Link: OK, this one makes me laugh, although it's oddly relevant to the topic at hand. I'm talking about Secret Article Converter, which automates the “tedious process of rewriting” content. Seems doubtful to me. Perhaps something I should review for GeekAffiliate? Still seems like there's work involved. Actually, the whole topic of private label rights is something I need to discuss here in the near future. (This paragraph's not much of an advertisement, is it?)

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.

June 13, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

US News AdSense makeover

On rare occasions I do some AdSense consulting. (Rare because I don't have a lot of spare time, hence I charge a lot for it.) But today I'll do some for free for U.S. News & World Report just to show you what anyone can do if they're willing to spend a bit of time.

Recently I landed on this page about peptic ulcers on the US News site. I can't remember how I got there, but I was immediately struck by the presence of a Google PSA (public service announcement) on the page.

Now, there's no reason for PSAs to appear on any site! You can easily define an alternate URL or an alternate color to make that ugly PSA disappear. Or you can try to figure out why the PSA is there in the first place.

There doesn't appear to be anything obviously wrong with the page. You're probably surprised to see a PSA on it. After all, it has a lot of content. And a lot of references to “ulcer” and related keywords. So you'd expect some ulcer-related ads. If you run a keyword analyzer on the page, such as this one, it confirms that “ulcer” is prominent, even though the page itself could use some work (there are no headings, for example). So what's wrong?

Well, you see, there's some JavaScript magic happening here that's not immediately obvious. So it's not the text that's the problem, it's how the ads are being served. That's the funny thing with these consulting gigs — the real problem is often not what you think. I could go and rewrite the text all I want and it wouldn't fix the problem.

As it turns out, US News is doing ad serving via JavaScript code instead of server-side scripting. Instead of inserting the Google AdSense code directly into the HTML (which you can do conditionally on the server side using PHP and similar technologies), they've got some JavaScript code that lets them insert the AdSense code from within the browser. Besides the fact that this is a definite no-no — they're modifing the AdSense code and it's unclear to me if they have Google's permission to do this — the fact that it's not working should cause them to look for a better way to do this…

If this were my consulting gig, I'd look into it more deeply, but mostly I was curious to know why the PSAs were showing on such an obviously well-targeted page.

Sponsored Link: Don't forget to add GeekAffiliate to your reading list.

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.

June 13, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

eBay AdContext thoughts

If you haven't heard, eBay is developing an advertising system called eBay AdContext that is being touted as a possible competitor to Google's AdSense program. Like AdSense, AdContext will analyze page content in order to serve contextually-sensitive ads. Two important points:

I'm curious to see how this will play out. Truth be told, I think eBay auction pages are sucky landing pages, so direct links back to eBay surely won't be as effective as linking to a dedicated page for the products being sold. But if the point is to get traffic to eBay that may not matter.

Speculation abounds that eBay will eventually expand the program to be a full-fledged AdSense competitor. I see problems with this:

If eBay were smart, they'd do like Chitika does with its eMiniMalls and provide a non-contextual mode for AdContext so that AdSense/YPN publishers could use the two programs simultaneously on a page. But let's see what happens, details are still kind of vague.

Or, better yet, white-label the AdWords and/or AdSense programs and stay on Google's good side. Mind you, with Google creating services like Google Base that directly compete with eBay, it's not hard to see why they want to develop their own stuff. They do see to have a stormy relationship.

Sponsored Link: Read my Desktop AdSense Cash Machine review.

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.

June 12, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Introducing GeekAffiliate, Eric Giguere's new blog about affiliate selling and internet marketing for geeks

I hinted at this a couple of weeks ago, and I finally got around to doing it. GeekAffiliate is now live. It's my new blog devoted to affiliate selling and Internet marketing, aimed specifically at geeks. It's not going to appeal to everyone reading Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense, but I think it's going to fill a need for some hype-less information for the more techie-oriented folks. The initial post on the blog describes it all in more detail.

One thing to note is that the blog isn't very optimized yet in terms of its layout, I've only made a few changes to the default WordPress plugin. This will change, so don't be surprised if look radically different soon. In any case, it's the content that's important.

Sponsored Link: Buy my special report Understanding the AdSense Patent to get an in-depth understanding of AdSense.

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.

June 12, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Google loves ShoeMoney

It's the weekend, so let's relax a bit and talk about what ShowMoney's been up to lately. The AdSense forums have all been abuzz with the picture he posted recently of an AdSense cheque he received from Google last September. Here's the picture in question, click it to enlarge it and view the cheque in all its glory:

Yes, that's right, the cheque is for $132,994.97. Big bucks. Way, way out of my league. Now, there's been debate over how much Shoe actually spent to make that money, because those kinds of sums often involve a bit of creative AdSense arbitrage. I think I read somewhere that Shoe bought $40K in pay-per-click ads to generate that $132K in AdSense revenue. (And that doesn't count any other money he's making from other advertising and affiliate programs, which is surely just as substantial.)

This kind of cheque shows you why Google loves the big AdSense publishers so much and why Google's revenues are so high in general. Think about it… assuming Shoe spent $40K on AdWords (which is not a given, he also uses other ad programs, but let's do it for the sake of argument) to generate traffic to his sites, the fact that he make $132K in AdSense earnings means that Google actually made (assuming they're paying Shoe 60% of the actual AdSense revenues) $40K + $80K = $120K in revenue. In one month. AdSense arbitreurs must be a favorite publisher sub-type since Google gets to double-dip in the revenue-stream.

Shoe's a nice guy. Check out his blog, he happily shares much of his hard-earned knowledge with anyone who wants to listen. Behind that fat cheque is a guy who's worked hard to be where he is today. We can all learn from the master!

Sponsored Link: The ClickBank marketplace is a great source of e-books and software that help you make money.

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.

June 11, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

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