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:

• Domain names
• Hosting
• Templates

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.

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:
   • 55 plain HTML templates
   • 20 XSitePro templates (with plain HTML versions as well)
   • 15 WordPress themes
   • 8 Blogger themes
   • 2 phpBB skins
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.

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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some for free at Mr. OverDeliver. They're also running a contest to win a fairly expensive traffic marketing package.

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.