172 AdSense Sites = $5000 per month
Catching up on my email. A reader sent me an interesting question, asking me how many sites would be required to generate $5000 a month. Well, it's almost impossible to come up with a specific number because it depends entirely on how much traffic each site gets, but let's crunch some numbers just for fun.
Let's assume you want to make $5000/month in profit, before taxes. What are you costs? Domain name registration and hosting. For domain name registration, you can get a .com domain from 1 & 1 for $5.99 a year. Pro-rate it on a monthly basis and that's $0.50 a month for the domain name. Now the web hosting. I can host 50 sites for $4.95 a month from ResellerZoom, which comes out to $0.10 a month per site. So the per-site costs come out to $0.60 a month. Round that up to $1 just for ease of calculation.
So $1 a month is pretty easy to recover with AdSense earnings. In fact, I'd say it should be possible to get $1/day in earnings within two or three months if you've got good content that's attracting traffic. Let's say a month has 30 days. At $1 per month in fixed costs, that leaves $29/month in pure profit from AdSense. So one site makes us $29/month.
So to make $5000/month you just divide 5000 by 29 to get (approximately) 172. So you need 172 sites, each earning $1/day, to make $5000 in AdSense profit.
That's a lot of sites. Of course, if you can get your average per-site earnings up, the numbers go down quite quickly. Average earnings of $2/day requires only 85 sites to reach $5000/month. Get $5/day and you need only 33 sites.
I explain more about these mathematics in a free e-book I wrote at the beginning of the year. It's definitely easier to get small amounts of traffic going to a large number of small sites than it is to get large amounts of traffic going to a small number of large sites.
Think about it. This is why all those pre-built AdSense sites packages sell well. People understand the mathematics and think that deploying 100 or more sites is the way to make money. And it is. But these pre-built sites only get you part of the way there. You still need to get traffic to them, and that takes more than just recycled content.
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?
Bob Munro (1934-2006)
Excuse me, as this has nothing to do with AdSense, but I just wanted to take a moment to commemorate the life of my wife's father, Bob Munro, who passed away today after a long battle with lung cancer. We were there to witness it and it is truly a humbling experience. You can read about Bob here. We're sad, but he's in a better place now, and that ultimately makes us happy.
AdSense Takes Less Work
One of the readers of my mailing list prompted me to read the survey results from The Death of AdSense (and you might want to read Joel Comm's rebuttal). The survey does make for interesting reading. What I found most interesting is how little some of the AdSense publishers knew or understood about AdSense. If you were making several thousands of dollars a month in earnings, wouldn't you take some time to figure out how the system worked? And especially how AdWords — which is where your money actually comes from — works? Apparently not, and so of course these people were all surprised when Google was finally able to finagle things to stop directing traffic to their crappy MFA sites. Bye-bye big earnings, but don't come crying to me.
Here's the real truth about AdSense: it takes less work than other systems to make money. That's what I like about. I'm a lazy guy. I like to write, I like to fool around with building sites. If I have content, all I have to do is slap some JavaScript code on it and move on to something else. Once you understand the AdSense fundamentals — the importance of the URL and the title in targeting the content, section targeting, what formats work best, what colors to use — then it's easy, real easy to make some money from your sites. Providing you have traffic, of course. But you need traffic for any kind of monetization.
There's no doubt you can make more money with affiliate programs. But it takes more work. You have to find a product to sell. You have to build a site to promote it. You have to create a mailing list to capture leads. You have write sales letters to entice those leads to buy. You have to place ads or do joint ventures to get traffic, or create or find something to give away. Work, work, work. I know, because I've done it. Yes, it gets easier each time you do it, because you develop a system. But there's a lot of upfront work involved.
The idea scenario is to make money using several different methods. So the “click flipping” scenario described by Scott Boulch is something to investigate. As is increasing your AdSense income. As is creating your own infoproducts. As is using alternate ad programs like Chitika. Diversification will protect your income stream, as will constant and continued education.
I'm not an AdSense “guru”, just an average guy who knows how to write. That's why I like AdSense, because it's a complementary program for content creation. I've never said you can get rich doing it, though there are definitely people out there who are getting rich. Even after all of Google's changes to AdSense and AdWords. But you don't hear them complaining. Because they've done their homework.
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?
Take Out the AdSense Channel Details
As you've no doubt seen elsewhere, Google has started to include textual descriptions of the channel tracking IDs in the generated JavaScript for AdSense. This raises a number of privacy concerns for publishers. Since the channel IDs were private before, many publishers have used very descriptive names for the channels, names that all of a sudden they may not want exposed. If you're concerned by this new data exposure, my advice is to simply remove the offending line from the generated code. Yes, technically this would break the AdSense terms and conditions, but I can't see why they'd go after publishers who do this. After all, pre-existing AdSense code without the channel description is perfectly valid. I don't always go to the control panel to generate my code, after all, I often just copy over previously-generated code and make a few alterations by hand — with the end result always being valid, could-be-generated code. This situation is very similar.
Of course, most publishers probably use fairly innocent tracking IDs, so they may not care. There are already some privacy issues surrounding the publisher ID itself that if the search engines ever start searching JavaScript will make it very easy to link sites together that would otherwise be apparently unrelated. And if you use other ad programs like Chitika that expose plain-text tracking IDs then this is all old hat to you already.
Posting lightly for a while
Please don't think I've abandoned you, but my family and I are in New Brunswick, where we are sorely distracted. Waiting for someone to die is not fun, and it's not something you want to wish on anyone.
Not to mention that I'm relegated to a 56K connection, making it hard to do all those simple Internet things I'm used to doing. Right now my mail program is on message 469 out of 2263 waiting to be downloaded… should be done in another hour! So if you sent me mail, don't expect to hear back from me for a while…
The New 200 x 200 Two-Ad AdSense Format
It's been a while since a new ad format's been introduced, but if you login to your console today you'll see a message announcing a new format. Unfortunately, the link they give you doesn't work, and the ad formats page hasn't been updated yet, but look in the drop-down list of formats and you'll see the new “200 x 200 Small Square” format. If you manually change your AdSense code, this is what you change:
google_ad_width = 200; google_ad_height = 200; google_ad_format = "200x200_as";
The small square format supports images and videos or shows two text ads (and hopefully always two text ads). To see what it looks like, visit this page — it's half-way down the page. I like the look of this new ad unit because it's just the right width, it reminds me of the 234 x 60 half-banner that way.
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?
The Death of AdSense: Ingenious Affiliate Signup Ploy
Before I respond to Shane 's post that email is dead as a distribution mechanism, I wanted to post a followup to the The Death of AdSense post I made a few days ago, because — oddly enough — it's related to what Shane's saying.
As you recall, “The Death of AdSense” was a free report by Scott Boulch saying that nobody was making any real money from AdSense anymore and that there was a better way to make money, soon to be revealed by him in Part II of his report. Well, the report's available today, so I downloaded it and took a look. I knew there had to be something in the report to make Scott money. After all, he was paying a $0.50 commission for each referral to his site and thanks to the controversy his reports have generated he's gotten thousands of people to sign up… which is a big chunk of change even at $0.50 per referral. It's one thing to offer a free document in order to build up a mailing list, but to actively pay people to build that mailing list you want to have some way to, well, make money from all those people signing up…
Here's how he's going to make money. Part II of the report is titled “Life After AdSense” and it basically explains how to use cost-per-action (CPA) advertising networks to make money by buying traffic via AdWords ads and directing that traffic to the CPA networks and making money off the percentage of the traffic that actually converts. It's nothing really new, and most of the document is about explaining how CPA is better that pay-per-click (PPC) and how to use tracking IDs to fine-tune your PPC campaigns in order to find the profitable keyword sequences.
Oh, and at the end he provides helpful links to two CPA networks and urges you to sign up with them right now. Of course, those are referral links, so if anyone does sign up he'll be paid a commission from those CPA networks. If enough people do sign up, presumably that'll be enough money to pay off the referral commissions he owes. So in the end he'll have built himself a very large mailing list for next-to-nothing. And he'll be able to make money from that list for quite some time, I'm sure. Very clever scheme, and again reminiscent of the methods used to promote the controversial e-book The Rich Jerk. Really, we should all tip our hats to Scott's ingenuity.
Alright, show's over, folks. Nothing here to see… Move on, move on…
Sponsored Link: Use professional software like Keyword Elite to do serious keyword research.
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?
If AdSense Is Dead, Who Do We Blame?
Alright, let's pretend for a moment that The Death of AdSense is right that AdSense is dead. Or at least that it's in a coma. I've been thinking about this on and off over the weekend and the question that comes to my mind is — who's to blame? Is it really Google's fault, as the report states? Or are other reasons?
The answer, of course, is that it's we (the AdSense publishers) who are ultimately to blame for putting AdSense on life support. We (in the general sense) are the ones who built “made for AdSense” (MFA) sites that polluted the Web with duplicated junky content. We put out books and blogs (ahem) about making more money with AdSense. We referred everyone we knew to AdSense, giving us all smaller pieces of the overall pie.
But you know what, this is no different than what happens with any new way to make money, online or offline. There's always a great deal of money to be made at first by the smart operators who learn how to work the system. Then there's the second wave of money to be made by teaching others those techniques (which either won't work anymore or are much less effective). Then there's the third phase of stability where people make money but work much harder to make it.
You see, AdSense is entering the third phase. This is the Internet we're talking about, after all, and so things happen on Internet time.
It's hard to make significant money with junky sites now. So now you have to work at it with a longer term goal in mind. And ultimately it comes down to two things: quality content and decent traffic. Work on those and you'll make money with AdSense, even after the “gurus” of AdSense have moved on to promote other things — looks like the hot topic these days is how to build lists.
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?
The Death of AdSense?
So there's a free document being promoted called The Death of AdSense that tells us that AdSense is, well, dead. As your ever-faithful reporter, I decided to obtain the document (you have to register) and look at what they're saying.
First, this document is Part 1 of a two-part document. The second part hasn't been released yet. The second document will include links to some kind of “solution” to this “death”. Hmm.
Anyhow, the document is only 18 pages long. Its fundamental premise is that AdSense stopped being a cash cow for people when Google changes AdWords (remember, that's where the ads come from) and allowed advertisers to exclude the “content network” (AdSense) from their bids, letting them place ads only on Google's own sites (mostly on the search engine results pages or SERPs). The document could have also mentioned site-targeted advertising for good measure, but it doesn't.
There's certainly some truth to the assertion that things changed rapidly for big-time AdSense publishers after this change was made. It didn't take long for advertisers to start excluding their ads from the content network, especially for pricey things. But it's kind of like crying wolf — after all, many (most) of the big-time publishers were making their money using MFA (made for AdSense) sites that really didn't profit the advertisers when compared to the ads that were shown on the SERPs. So the smart advertisers use split campaigns now, paying less for ads shown on the content network than those shown on Google's sites. Why not? It's what I'd do (and in fact what I do do) as an advertiser.
AdSense isn't dead by any means, of course. It contributes too much to Google's bottom line. Gone are the days of making a quick buck by deploying reams of generally-useless sites. That's the document's real complaint. We'll see what Part 2 brings, but I suspect it's about making money via affiliate sales. They're taking the shock-the-reader-into-wanting-more approach, kind of like the Rich Jerk used to take. At least you don't have to pay for this one…
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?
Integrating AdSense with your blog: Introducing "BlackBerry Developers At Work!"
Yesterday I finally unveiled a new blog I'll post to occasionally, BlackBerry Developers At Work!. It's a techie-oriented site devoted to BlackBerry programming and related topics. The first post, about the new BlackBerry Pearl smartphone, will probably interest some of you reading this. However, I'd like all of you reading this to open the site in a new window (just click here to do that) and look carefully at my use of AdSense.
When I first envisioned this blog, I knew that the posts would be long and infrequent. I wanted it to be very readable and to have enough width to include programming examples. So my first task was to look for a WordPress template that fit the bill. Luckily, I came across the Simplr theme, a minimalist theme that took the one-post-per-page approach. It was perfect for what I wanted, although it needed some minor tweaking.
Now, link units are easy to place on most pages, so it was no big deal to stick them at the top of the page. (Remember that horizontal link units generally out-perform vertical link units.) Ad units, however, are trickier to place, because readability and clickability are often at odds. I deliberately chose not to place a big ad right under the blog title — I want people to start reading the posting. Instead, I placed a large rectangle ad in the middle of the content, but between paragraphs, where it really doesn't interfere with the flow of the text. These are the kinds of decisions you have to make when you design your blog or site.
There's an ad unit integrated into the page header, too, so it shows up on every page. It's a subtle integration, I think. Notice how the two images at the top of the page draw the eye to the ad and link units.
I've placed a third ad unit on the permalink pages for each posting. See if you can find it…
It took me a few hours to play around with the theme to get the blog looking the way I like, and I'll probably continue to tweak it here and there. The point I want to make is that good AdSense integration, especially integration that doesn't interfere with the readability of your pages, takes time. Expect to have to do a bit of work, even when you buy a package of pre-made AdSense templates. Every site is different, so you should adapt your AdSense usage accordingly.
P.S.: I'm glad I wrote down those WordPress installation instructions, they sure come in handy when I forget what to do!
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?
Free Private Label Rights Products — No Charge, No Signup Required
Yesterday I downloaded a bunch of private label rights (PLR) products. These products have no restrictions on them, you can sell them, give them away, change them, etc. PLR is the latest hot craze in Internet marketing (see Resale rights are the curries of Internet marketing) along with one-time offers. A lot of AdSense publishers use PLR content for beefing up their sites.
Because these are true PLR products — they come with unrestricted rights — I've decided to just give them away to my faithful readers. For those of you not on my mailing list, you can download the products from a folder on one of my sites. No registration and no charge. Have fun with them! Remember, you get what you pay for 
My recommendation for using PLR content (most of these products are e-books or article collections) is to use the two-window method. Load an article/e-book in one window and a blank document in another. Rewrite the PLR content from the first window in you own words in the second window. Then use the rewritten content on your own site, newsletter, etc. Yeah, it takes work, but it makes your content different.
Sponsored Link: For more free stuff, visit Mr. OverDeliver. There are some decent products available for free there, too. (But you have to register.)
Christmas Pre-Shopping
Now that summer's past, you're probably thinking of the next major holiday, which in the US would be Halloween (here in Canada it would actually be Thanksgiving Day, which falls before Halloween). But skip those holidays — it's probably too late to worry about them now anyhow — and focus on the real biggie: Christmas.
Christmas used to be primarily a religious holiday. Now it's an orgy of spending. Well, that can only benefit you as an AdSense publisher and/or affiliate marketer. This is particularly true if you have one or more sites that focus on products or services that are often given as gifts. A lot of shopping now happens online. So if you can direct people via affiliate links to buy those products, all the power to you. But what if you're just an AdSense publisher?
AdSense publishers can make money from the pre-shopping phase. This is the phase when people look around and try to decide what it is they want to buy, how much it's going to cost, and who they're going to buy it from. So here's my recipe for benefiting from this:
- Find a suitable product niche. There are lots of techniques to use here, some of which are discussed in my free niche discovery course.
- Collect information about that niche and build a site around that information. The information should help visitors in the pre-shopping phase. Don't forget that negative reviews and comments are very powerful — helping people decide what not to buy is just as useful.
- Write a series of articles based on that information but slanted towards Christmas gift-giving. Submit the articles to various directories using tools like Article Post Robot. Be sure to link back to your site in the bio part of the article as a place to find more detailed info about the topic.
Now's the time to get started on this kind of endeavour. You've got enough time to do it and build some traffic for this year.
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?
The August of my Discontent: AdSense on Autopilot
Regular readers may wonder where I've been for the past month. Let me say that my wife and I are glad August is over. Between a sibling diagnosed with a rare hormonal disease, a parent dying of lung cancer and moved to palliative care, a dog (one of the two featured here) diagnosed with lymphoma (yes, we're going to treat her), and an interrupted vacation where our luggage was lost, we've had more than enough stress and I really haven't felt like doing any kind of writing, including posting here. But life continues, one way or another, and you can expect new postings from me here and elsewhere on a regular basis. So I'm back.
It's at times like this when you really appreciate the “autopilot” nature of content monetization with AdSense. I'd check my stats occasionally and make sure the sites were up and running, but I didn't really do anything to promote or otherwise change my sites, and I was still making the same money I was making before all this happened. Even my affiliate programs were up and running and making me money. It's great, because that money will help offset all those unexpected expenses that have suddenly cropped up.
It'll take me a while to catch up on all my mail and all my blog readings. If you've tried to contact me and I haven't responded, you might want to resend your mail to make sure I don't overlook it. I'm coming up with a list of topics now for future postings, but suggestions are always appreciated.
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?