I was planning on continuing with my AdSense-friendly WordPress blog series, but Saturday a new product called HyperVRE came out. Since it looked to be a competitor to Desktop AdSense Cash Machine (see my review) I thought I'd try to be one of the first out with an objective review of this “exciting” new product. (The “VRE” stands for “virtual real estate”, BTW, which is a code name used by Internet marketers for “niche content site”.) It's free, so you can't really beat the price. But, not to get ahead of myself, you do get what you pay for. Before I start the review, however, some thoughts about the whole business of building AdSense sites.
The Ethics of AdSense Site Builders
I've had some readers of this blog react with dismay when I talk about AdSense site builders, private label content, templates, and the like. While I can understand their reaction, my mission with this blog is to inform my readers about all parts of the AdSense ecosystem, good and bad. Because you need to know what you're up against.
I don't think me talking about these things is going to suddenly cause a huge rush of people going over to the “dark side” of AdSense.
One conclusion I've come to with these site builders is that putting together a decent site still takes work on your part, despite what the promotional materials say. If you really want less work, you're better off buying and deploying one of the many sets of pre-built sites, which you can easily find by doing a search for adsense sites in Google to find this, this or this among others.
And now, the review.
HypreVRE
HyperVRE is a free Windows-based tool for building “virtual real estate” sites that embed AdSense ads (or YPN or Chitika ads — it's really not specific to AdSense) and affiliate links into keyword-based content (articles and RSS feeds).
Now you might be wondering why HyperVRE is free. It's because there are actually two versions of the application available, the regular HyperVRE and the paid HyperVRE Gold. The latter offers more functionality. In particular, the affiliate links (to Amazon, ClickBank and
PayDotCom) generated by the free version are branded with the affiliate ID of the HyperVRE Gold member who referred you to the HyperVRE site (or, failing that, of the Hyper VRE creator). You see, this is one of those viral marketing schemes that entices you to upgrade so that you can make money from getting others to download a copy of HyperVRE — you either make money from them through affiliate links on the sites they create (if they use the free version) or you get a commission (from HyperVRE) if they themselves upgrade to HyperVRE Gold.
With that in mind, let's get started. Installation is simple and painless. A manual in PDF form is included, but it mostly consists of screenshots with a few explanations. I decided to just run the application without reading the manual, there's context-sensitive help available from the application itself.
The application is a wizard consisting of a number of steps. The first step is to create a new project: [These screenshots are large, so I've shrunk them a bit. Click an image to see it in its full glory in a new browser window.]
Now you enter the main keyword for the site you're about to create:
You can enter keywords manually, from a list, or have the application suggest them. Let's do the latter:
If you're wondering where the suggested keywords come from, I ran a few tests and determined that they came from the free Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool, which is pretty much what everyone uses (see my review of Keyword Niche Power, for example).
After selecting all the keywords we want and removing duplicates and long phrases we enter in the locations of the templates to use when generating the pages:
Although HyperVRE itself doesn't come with any templates, there's a “bonus” set of templates available on the HyperVRE membership site that you can download, so I just used one of those templates.
As an aside, there's an extensive set of placeholders documented in the HyperVRE manual for articles, feeds, PPC codes, etc. You would paste these into the templates you create and then HyperVRE will replace them with the appropriate bits when it generates the site.
Next you choose what kind of content to place on the generated pages:
Well, lots of options to choose from, too bad there's no real documentation on these things. Where do the articles come from? Where do the definitions and descriptions come from? Notice also that some features are only available if you upgrade to HyperVRE Gold.
Next you select the RSS feeds you want to use:
I couldn't find any feeds related to “AdSense” (what, they don't use this blog as a feed like so many other scrapers do?) so I had to settle for “online marketing”.
Now some more customization of the generated pages:
Next, enter in the AdSense code. I was really flying blind here because I hadn't looked at the template I selected, so I had no clue what formats to use for my ads, so I just chose some at random:
If I was a Gold member I'd be able to fill in my own affiliate information here:
And only Gold members can use this page:
This page confused me enough to make me look at the manual. What it lets you do is change the affiliate links so that they display small popups when the user hovers over one of the links. Seems like a neat feature, too bad I can't try it! (But that's the point, isn't it, to entice you to upgrade…)
Now we're ready to generate the site:
And that's pretty much it, the final page just tells you to upload your site:
Since the site I had chosen to build had some dynamic elements to it (the RSS feeds — they have to be inserted by code on the server to be any use for SEO purposes) the pages that were generated had some PHP code, so to see the site in action I uploaded everything to a subdomain I created on one of my existing sites. You can see the pages yourself at adsensesite.synclastic.com (the link opens in a new window).
As you can see, the site it built for me has a number of problems. Some of them are my own fault because I didn't look at the template I was using to figure out what size ad units I should be using, and I didn't specify any header and footer images to use (those take time to create).
Other problems, though, are not of my own doing. Most of the links don't work — they use backslash ('\') characters instead of forward slash ('/') characters in the URLs. As for the article on the home page, I don't know where it came from, but in the resource box for the article it specifically stipulates that all links in the article must be live… and they're not. And generally the page just looks bad.
And here's the point I wanted to make again: tools like this will save you time in some ways, yes, but you still have to spend some time in learning the tool and creating and fine-tuning the templates it uses, otherwise the sites it generates aren't very good. If you're looking to crank out site after site, though, then that initial learning curve will probably be worth it — but only if you upgrade to HyperVRE Gold. Desktop AdSense Cash Machine is definitely simpler to use, though of course it's not as flexible.
The nice thing about HyperVRE is that it IS free, so it doesn't cost you anything to try it out. If I had the time, I'd work with the templates a bit and figure out how to generate a better-looking (and better-working) site, but I'm just too busy right now. I can't say I'm a big fan of having other people's affiliate links inserted into my own sites — if I were you I'd use search-and-replace tools to run through the generated code and insert your own affiliate IDs instead.
But that would take work.
(If anyone reading this builds some sites with HyperVRE, I'd love to hear your own comments on it. Perhaps I'm too cynical about these applications…)
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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.