Free Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool
Looks like Wordtracker is taking advantage of the recent problems with the Overture keyword suggestion tool and have launched their own free keyword suggestion tool that returns the top 100 related results, with search counts, for a given keyword or keyphrase. You can access it at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/.
The search counts shown are Wordtracker's daily search volume estimates. Note that their data comes from a relatively small sample of searches done through some obscure meta search engines, so the data is not going to be as comprehensive as Overture's, which is based on what people are searching for on Yahoo. But it's another source of keyword information. What I would do is use the Google suggestion tool to build a list and then get search volumes for those terms using the Wordtracker tool. (That's if you don't want to buy a professional tool like Keyword Elite, for example, which already does this kind of thing.)
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Isn't Gone, Just Useless
A reader left me a comment (thanks, Ted!) correcting my earlier report about the death of the Overture keyword suggestion tool. Apparently it's not gone, just really really really slow. According to a Yahoo spokesperson:
I wanted to confirm that YSM's public keyword research tool (formerly known as the Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool- KST) continues to exist today and will continue to exist until we replace it with an improved product. Unfortunately, the responsiveness of this free tool is diminished due to the volume of hits it receives each day, therefore browsers may time out and error pages may appear but it doesn’t mean that this tool has been removed.
See WebmasterWorld for more info. Apparently a new tool (paid, presumably) is in the works.
I guess my prescience wasn't straight on… however, with everyone and their dog beating on the tool to mine for keyword data it's no surprise that it's slowed down so much to be basically unusable. Time to find alternate data sources, at least until the new tool is available. Too bad Google doesn't put out a similar tool — I bet SEO types would happily pay for it.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
Review: Landing Page System
Over the last couple of days I've been bombarded with offers for the new Landing Page System product. Oddly enough, I was thinking of coding something similar for my own use, because I was finding that landing page creation was getting too tedious. My solution was just going to be a simple set of PHP functions that would examine the parameters passed from an ad (AdWords can dynamically insert the keyword that triggered the ad into the destination URL so that you know where your traffic is coming from exactly) and/or the referring URL and then change some of the words on the landing page appropriately. But that's basically what the Landing Page System (LPS) is all about, though they use a different way of triggering the keywords. Since time is money, I shelled out the $47 for the product and am in the process of testing it out. Because the price of LPS is increasing in a couple of days, I figured I should put together a mini-review for my readers, in case any of you want to buy the product before the price increase.
One important thing to note about this product: there are no refunds offered. Once you pay your money, that's it. Since you get the complete source code to their system, this kind of policy is somewhat understandable, although to be honest there are other software products out there like Build A Niche Store that still offer refunds despite giving away their source code. Be sure you want LPS before you pay for it!
Landing Page System Contents
Here's what you get when you buy Landing Page System:
- A set of PHP scripts that you install on your web server.
- Installation and configuration instructions.
- Two video tutorials, one on installing LPS and one on using LPS.
- A couple of bonuses:
- Landing Page Brain Dump, a 2.5-hour audio recording (with a PDF transcript, thankfully) about building effective landing pages.
- Site Page Tracker, software to track how well your sites are doing in terms of links, search engine indexing, etc.
(Note that a third advertised bonus, AdWords Rumors Crushed, doesn't seem to be included yet.)
The bonuses look interesting enough, but I haven't looked at them yet and can't comment on their quality. You should buy LPS on the strength of the software itself, not the bonuses. (That's a general rule that applies to any product you're considering buying. If the bonuses are what you want, not the product itself, look elsewhere — those same bonuses are probably available separately, or in combination with a lower-priced product.)
Landing Page System Installation
Before purchasing LPS, make sure you meet the minimum requirements for its use. You need a web hosting service that supports both the PHP programming language and the MySQL database server. Pretty much all hosting services support both these days, but make sure that's the case. Otherwise you'll have to find yourself a hosting service that does (for stingy types, I recommend ResellerZoom, which lets you host up to 50 domains for only $4.95/month, all with PHP and MySQL support and plenty of other standard features). Make sure in particular that you can create a new database (you'll need it as part of the install) and that you know how to upload and run the necessary installation scripts. (The video tutorial walks you through all the necessary steps and will help a lot if you've never done this kind of thing before.) Note that the LPS creators can install the system for you if you're willing to pay an extra fee.
How Landing Page System Works
Once LPS is installed on your server you get access to a web-based administration console that you use to configure and manage the system.
The basic idea behind LPS is that you create a landing page template in HTML with variables in place of keywords. For example, you might define a title like this:
<title>{{keyword_caps}} Information</title>
When the landing page gets loaded, the “{{keyword_caps}}” part of the title is replaced with the appropriate keyword/keyphrase, in this case with the first letter of each word capitalized. The system currently supports four variables:
- {{keyword}} — the keyword as-is
- {{keyword_caps}} — the keyword with first letters capitalized
- {{display_keyword}} — the alternate “display” form of the keyword (useful when using keywords that are misspellings, lets you show the “real” keyword instead of the misspelled keyword)
- {{tracking_no}} — the tracking number for the keyword, usually inserted into affiliate links
It seems to me that there should also be a {{display_keyword_caps}} variable, but maybe that will be added later.
LPS comes with three pre-defined templates that you can use as the starting point for your own landing pages. One for a signup (or “squeeze” page) using the AWeber autoresponder (it's the one I use for my lists) and two for the ClickBank and Commission Junction affiliate programs (if you're promoting products). You're free to build your own pages, of course, all you have to do is insert the variables above as required.
After you've created the template and told LPS about it, you load the keywords into the system, optionally defining alternative display versions for misspelled keywords. All the information gets stored in the database.
Now the system is ready to run. There's an index.php file that gets installed in the root folder — the assumption here is that you're going to have the landing page at the root of a domain or subdomain. (If you're installing it on an existing site, you'll want to install it in a separate subfolder in order to not overwrite your existing index.php!) This is one area where the documentation needs serious improvement.
Let's say your domain is mysillydomain.com. For each keyword you enter into LPS a tracking number gets assigned. When you refer to the landing page in your ad campaigns, you include the tracking number for the keyword you're targeting as a query parameter:
http://www.mysillydomain.com/?t=3
When the browser requests this page, the index.php runs, extracts the value 3 from the URL and looks it up in the database to find the keyword that matches that parameter. It then takes the landing page template you supplied, replaces the variables with the appropriate values, and returns the modified page to the browser. So the user sees the landing page with the keyword that matches the tracking number.
My Opinion of Landing Page System
I was a bit disappointed at first with LPS. I was hoping you could simply pass in the keyword as part of the URL. This would let you create landing pages from AdWords destination URLs that automatically included the appropriate keyword. But that's not what this system was designed for. Their explanation is that you don't want to expose what keywords you're actually using in your campaigns, and so by using a generated tracking number the link between keyword and landing page is harder for observers to figure out.
Well, there's nothing stopping you from including the actual keyword used in the AdWords campaign along with the tracking number, so a few modifications to the index.php would make that information accessible to the landing page itself. (If the landing page is going to display AdSense ads — say you're doing AdSense arbitrage — then you'll definitely want to include a keyword in the URL in order to further ensure that the ads are properly targeted.) So I think I can address my initial objection with a bit of noodling of the PHP.
I like the fact that tracking information can be passed through quite easily to AWeber, ClickBank and Commission Junction — this lets you see which keywords are actually getting you subscribers and commissions. And the template system is simple enough that anyone with a bit of HTML experience can use it. And if you have PHP experience you can even add other features on top of that.
If you're looking to build keyword-specific landing pages and you don't want to do any programming yourself, I think Landing Page System is a decent and easy-to-use solution, at least at the initial launch price. If you're doing anything at all with landing pages and would like a simple templating system to customize those pages, I'd suggest you buy it now, before the price goes up. If you're adept with PHP, however, you can probably create a similar system (though not as elegant — I doubt you'd build an admin console, for example) without too much trouble.
Sponsored Link: If you're an AdSense publisher, be sure to get a copy of Uncommon AdSense, my book of AdSense tips and techniques to help maximize your AdSense earnings.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Is Gone
I'm feeling a bit prescient today. Just last week, in my review of Google Wealth Wizard, I made this prediction:
It always amazes me how much the Internet marketing niche itself relies on the Overture suggestion tool. It's a mainstay of every ebook discussing niche discovery, including the three mentioned here. It's also used by many keyword tools, including KE. Given that most people seem to be using it to find niches for AdWords ads and AdSense content, not for Yahoo-related purposes, someday Yahoo! is going to pull the plug on that tool and there will be much panic in the streets as Internet marketers and keyword tool makers scramble to find alternate trusted sources of keyword search data.
That day has in fact arrived — the Overture keyword suggestion tool is now official kaput. A new version of Keyword Elite has already been released to account for this and all signs of Overture have been removed from it. They've already found an alternate source of monthly search data, though they haven't us what it is.
Anyhow, this throws a wrench into various processes that depended on the free Overture data. I'm sure the people at WordTracker and other keyword meta-search engines are quite happy, though.
We'll have to see how this affects the AdSense arbitrage experiment. Michael Plante's book relies heavily on Keyword Elite, so the fact that they've updated the software already probably means that the arbitrage method can be continued to be used as-is. We'll see…
Sponsored Link: If you like what I write, consider supporting me by buying Uncommon AdSense and getting some great AdSense advice in the process.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
Another Free AdSense Template
I've put up another free AdSense template, part of my growing collection of templates. I call this AdSense-Heavy because, well, it's heavy on the ads. This template will NOT win you any design awards, let me tell you. It's a bit of a dirty secret in the AdSense community, useful more for arbitrage type situations than normal content. Take it for what it is. As usual, full instructions in the HTML and CSS.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
Using the Google Keyword Tool for Related Keyword Suggestions
Being under the weather this weekend and also participating in an online mailing list promotion that seems to have backfired on me (more on that later) means that the next article in the arbitrage series will have to wait. But this post is semi-related, because we're going to talk about some neat stuff you can do with Google's keyword tool. The idea for today's posting came from a mail I received from the NicheBOT folks, although the idea itself isn't new to me. But I haven't discussed it here before, and so it bears discussion.
The AdWords Keyword Tool
AdWords publishers have had access to a powerful keyword tool for a long time now. About a year ago, Google made the tool available to the general public via this URL. (It's easy to find: if you search for “adwords keyword tool” in Google, it's the first result you get back.)
Google's keyword tool is an easy way to build up lists of relevant keywords. It won't give you exact pricing or volume data on the keywords — though you can get relative rankings — but it's a good way to build a list of related keywords using Google's own search data as its basis. Given that most of us are targeting Google search results to get our traffic and/or to display are ads, anything based on Google data should interest us.
When you load up the keyword tool, you're presented with two options for building your list: keyword variations or site-related keywords, as shown in the image below.
Chances are that you've used the keyword variations tab before to get a list of related keywords. But the two tabs are not mutually exclusive. You can use both tabs to build your list. And the site-related keywords are especially useful for building lists of semantically-related keywords — keywords that aren't directly related but are related in terms of a general theme or topic. All you need to do is find a well-indexed, authoritative site in the same niche as the keywords you're targeting. Plug the site into the keyword tool and then grab all the semantically-related keywords that Google gives you.
And what's the easiest way to find an authoritative site? Use Google's search engine, of course. For example, say I wanted to find keywords related to “dog training”. The #1 page for that keyphrase is Dr. P's Dog Training & Behavior Main Page as of this writing. So I take that and plug it into the site-related keywords tab of the tool:
What you get is a list of keywords that are all grouped by common terms — hey, if you're advertising via AdWords here's an easy way to get keywords for your different ad groups! — based on what Google thinks are related topics. Here's an extract of what'd you get for the dog training page I just mentioned:
Again, what's great about this information is that it tells you what keywords Google thinks are important. You can even see which ones are searched for more often than the others. It's an easy way to focus in one some specialized keywords without having to do a lot of fishing around.
So there you have it, another tool to add to your arsenal. Have fun playing around with it!
Sponsored Link: Looking for solid AdSense advice? My book Uncommon AdSense will help you get the most out of AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
Sift And Sort: New Reader-Built Site
Yes, I still get the occasional letter from a reader of Make Easy Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program telling me what they thought of the book and asking to take advantage of my free listing offer. Here's what reader Philip White has to say:
Your excellent book helped me in many ways. I've worked in IT for many years, and used the web for a long time, but I've never really bothered to find out how the web works till now. Your book was a great introduction to how the web works, and showed me a viable business model. It also gave me the momentum to take the first step, and removed a certain amount of fear.
It gave me a great introduction to the world of Google and AdSense, content, and site design. Maybe most importantly, the mechanics of how to build and host a site (I use Dreamweaver though, which works well most of the time).
I first read the book a couple of months ago, and have read several related books since. I spent much of the time designing and re-designing the site, and am now ready to start driving traffic before putting much more effort into expanding the content. Just this morning, I re-read the section on Google AdSense for search, and quickly wired it up. I'll be carefully following your advice in the “Traffic” section of the book today.
What I really liked about his letter, though, was this paragraph:
By the way, when I first picked up the book, I thought that the narrative format with Claude, Anita and Stef would drive me mad. Actually, it worked very well, so if you're considering a similar format for other books, then I suggest you use it again. If you ever want a pre-publication reviewer for a new book, I'd be happy to oblige 
The narrative format has always been somewhat controversial. I know a lot of techies poo-pooed it in their reviews. But it works well for a lot of people. I chose the characters with the idea that most of the readers in my target audience (which is not the techie audience, not for that book — Uncommon AdSense is aimed at a different audience) could relate to one of the three main characters. Maybe I'll use the narrative form again for another book, who knows… I'm glad he liked it!
Anyhow, Philip wanted me to mention his new site, Sift and Sort, where he's putting up reviews and advice related to digital video recorders (DVRs). It's the beginning of a quality site with human-generated content, exactly what I recommend people do. I wish Philip well with his new endeavour.
Sponsored Link: Would you like a link back to your site from my PR 5/6 (it varies by datacenter) page? Buy a copy of Uncommon AdSense, apply it to a site you're building/fixing, and I'll be happy to publicize it here. That's a pretty good deal, plus you get a great book to read!
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
AdSense Arbitrage and Leveraging Experiment: Niche Ideas
As promised, we're continuing the new AdSense arbitrage experiment, this time following the techniques described in AdSense Arbitrage and Leveraging. My earnings from this blog are usually lower on Fridays than on any other day of the week, so let's see if we can stir up some excitement
Niche Ideas
The first part of the technique is to generate ideas of niches to explore. Right now all we're looking for are potentially profitable niches, niches we think might lend themselves to arbitrage. Once we have a list of niches we'll do some analysis and figure out which ones we should pursue further and which we can immediately abandon.
There are lots of ways to build niche lists. Some are described in my free Profitable Niche Discovery email course. The method that Michael Plante recommends in his book is to subscribe to the NicheADay service, which is a free service from the Keyword Avalanche folks (though they don't advertise it as such). Every day one new niche idea lands in your mailbox, along with the occasional keyword-related product recommendation.
Here's an example of the email you get from NicheADay:
As promised, each and every day, like clockwork, you will get a simple email like this one, exposing an already tested profitable market that you can build a niche site around. Todays NicheADay niche is: surveillance Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 95956 High PPC Bid Price: $3.00 I have also attached a zip file of the top 1,000 keywords from Keyword Discovery, a database that contains 32 billion keywords.
The ZIP file with the top 1000 keywords from Keyword Discovery is a fairly recent addition to the service. Inside the ZIP file is an Excel spreadsheet with related keywords, sorted by search count. Here's the top 5 from the “surveillance” list that was sent to me yesterday:
| surveillance | 3757691 |
| video surveillance | 709067 |
| surveillance equipment | 673853 |
| surveillance camera | 457963 |
| surveillance cameras | 232984 |
I haven't looked into it too closely to see what the search count represents exactly, that may be a yearly search count as opposed to the monthly search count shown in the email for the master term.
Here are some of the niche ideas that were sent out recently:
- surveillance
- software
- cruises
- wholesale
- vitamin supplements
- probate
- silver
- retirement
As you can see, they vary a lot.
Michael points out that this is just one way to find new niches to explore, and that there are many other ways to come up with interesting niche ideas — such as looking at the junk mail that comes to your door. (Don't bother with the junk email, though, stick to looking at physical junk mail.) He likes the service because it highlights niches that he would never have considered before. I agree, it's an easy way to get some ideas.
Once you've made a list of potential niches, it's time to start analyzing them for suitability.
But that will have to wait until next time.
By the way, even if AdSense arbitrage doesn't interest you, a service like NicheADay might be useful just to get you thinking about new niches for your content…
Sponsored Link: The AdSense leveraging ebook doesn't go much into the details of creating good AdWords campaigns, so you might consider buying an AdWords book for that. But which one? Read my recent AdWords book roundup to find out which one I recommend.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
Writing Articles for Karma
We'll continue the arbitrage discussion later today, but first an aside.
One of my readers (both of this blog and of Uncommon AdSense) contacted me yesterday looking for some SEO (search engine optimization) advice for his friend's travel site. No, it didn't really have to do anything with AdSense per se, because AdSense isn't usually suitable when you're selling products and services — the point, after all, is to convert visitors into buyers, not to send them to a competitor's site. Adding eBay auction listings to your site and mixing in AdSense ads make sense because you're not actually selling anything in either case. But when you're selling your own things, you want visitors to linger as long as possible.
Travel is a very competitive field to be in, so optimization of on-page elements — the things that are completely in your control like page title, page URL, links to other pages, headings, body text, meta tags — isn't enough to rank well in the search engines. You also need links to your site from other, relevant sites, ideally with good keywords in the anchor text of those links.
One of the easiest ways to get quality links back to your site is to write quality articles for distribution via article directories like EZineArticles and SearchWarp. You can also place free ads with links back to your site on places like USFreeAds and Google Base. I devote a chapter of Uncommon AdSense to this and call it “Write Articles for Karma”, because that's what you're doing, essentially. You don't get compensated for those articles. But you can link back to your site(s) in the resource box at the bottom of each article. Write enough articles and you'll start accumulating a critical mass of links.
I'm not the only proponent of article writing. The controversial affiliate marketing book Affiliate “Project X” recommends article writing as an easy to get traffic to an affiliate pre-sell page.
In this reader's particular case it should be easy to write a series of travel-related articles that link back to the site in question. People are always looking for travel advice, so there's a good market for travel articles. Definitely worth the effort.
One of the things I'm going to be doing soon is writing more articles to promote Uncommon AdSense. There's already an article out about high-paying AdSense keywords. I have an old article called The AdSense Formula For Making Money that needs a bit of minor updating. I've even done the odd article promoting some of my other sites, such as one on debt-free living (someone took me to task about that one recently, stating that debt for investment purposes makes a lot of sense tax-wise, but that's not a topic for here). You can even publish different variations of the same article in different directories, such as this one on making money via eBay's affiliate program.
If you're a subject matter expert — which is what you're going to be if you're building quality AdSense sites — writing articles shouldn't bee too difficult. If you've got a blog, for example, go back and re-purpose some of your earlier writings. Don't just copy them as is, rewrite them a bit and then submit them as stand-alone articles to article directories.
Article writing does take work — time, if nothing else — but it can really pay off over the long term. Get started today!
Sponsored Link: Get more great AdSense tips and techniques from Uncommon AdSense, my new ebook about AdSense.
P.S.: I've just used a specific technique I described a couple of days ago right here in this blog. Do you know what it is?
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
AdSense Arbitrage and Leveraging Experiment: Overview
Updated: A sharp-eyed reader noticed I had missed one of the postings in the series, which makes for a total of 12 so far, not including this one…
As promised, today we revisit the AdSense arbitrage topic. If you're not a regular reader, you might want to read the following posts first before proceeding:
- AdSense Arbitrage Explained
- Keyword Elite AdSense Arbitrage Experiment:
- Keyword Elite AdSense Arbitrage Post-Mortem
- Keyword Elite AdSense Arbitrage Post-Mortem, Continued
- Review: AdSense Arbitrage and Leveraging
- The Reality of AdSense Arbitrage
Goodness, that's a lot of material, I didn't quite realize I'd written so extensively about this topic until now. Well, that's what happens when you start a series.
In any case, the point of this experiment is to try our hands at AdSense arbitrage again by following the techniques described in the Michael Plante's book AdSense Arbitrage and Leveraging. (My review of the book is one of the resources listed above.) Will we have more success? Let's hope so. But if you read the last post listed above — my interview of someone experiencing the reality of AdSense arbitrage — you'll know that it takes work to do AdSense arbitrage right, even with the help provided by this book. I certainly can't devote hours per day to this, so that my influence things. But we'll see.
Please note that I don't intend to reveal all the details of the techniques described in the book. This would be unfair to the author and to the existing purchasers of the book. As an e-book author myself I certainly wouldn't appreciate someone giving all my hard work away for free. So I will at times be deliberately vague about certain steps. If you want to replicate exactly what I'm doing you'll have to buy the book.
Let's get started.
The Arbitrage Business Model
One of the first chapters in AdSense Arbitrage and Leveraging summarizes the arbitrage business model by splitting it into 14 separate steps. It's all laid out in black and white. Many of the steps are flexible and can be done differently. Here's the basic outline of the model, condensed into fewer steps:
- Come up with a set of niche keywords.
- Research those niches using Keyword Elite (KE) and select the best niche.
- Build a set of primary keywords for the niche, and then build lists of keywords based on each primary keyword.
- Develop web pages for each of the primary keywords using the template supplied with the book.
- Upload the content pages to a web server, making sure the primary keyword os in the URL of each page.
- Start an AdWords campaign for each primary keyword, running in test mode to limit possible losses.
- Test each campaign for a certain number of clicks.
- Depending on the result of each campaign, either stop it or else let it continue running.
- Go back to the first step and repeat the process for another niche.
Again, I know the model I just described lacks details, but I don't want to give everything away. Note the dependence on Keyword Elite — this model makes extensive use of KE, so if you want to follow the techniques described in the book you'll need to purchase the software before starting. Doing the keyword analysis and list generation by hand is just too time-consuming and mind-numbing. (I know from personal experience…)
So the first thing we're going to do is find us a suitable niche. The book gives one interesting source of possible niches that anyone case use. But we'll get to that tomorrow.
Sponsored Link: If you're doing AdSense arbitrage, don't forget to buy a copy of Uncommon AdSense to help you create better AdSense pages.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
Uncommon AdSense Review in Danish
Update: Apologies to Britt, who is actually a “she”, not a “he”. I don't know my Danish names, it seems. I've adjusted the rest of the post accordingly.
Danish reader Britt Malka of Double Your Reading Speed in Only 16 Minutes (one of his few sites in English) wrote to tell me of her review of Uncommon AdSense. Although she wrote it in Danish, she kindly provided me with her English translation of the review:
Review: Uncommon AdSense - Eric Gigučre
There are books, which leaves you indifferent, there are bad books and books, which are okay. There are books that are good to own and then there are books I would rather not be without. Uncommon AdSense ends up in this last category. The almost 100 pages are bursting with tips, warnings against easily committed errors, and good pieces of advise.
The target reader is a person who know how to make a home page and set up a blog, and who has already created an AdSense account, and now wants to get the most out of it.
The author is Eric Gigučre, a modest young man. Do you know him? Not likely. And yet he is the first person to get a book about AdSense printed and published. Eric Gigučre is the geek who knows how to write in a language, we all understand, but it's clear that he looks at AdSense from another angle than e.g. Joel Comm.
You learn a lot of different things in the book, right from the first bad mistake, you should avoid (putting an empty site online), to why links are important, and how to construct them, through irritations like ads in the wrong language on the homepage, missing ads, wrong ads etc. You learn all about what to do and not to do in those situations.
The author asks you to read through the whole book at first, and only afterwards implement one point at a time.
Besides tips that relate directly to AdSense, you also learn about single pages, other options than AdSense and a bit, but important, SEO.
Only shortcoming with the book is that Eric Gigučre mentions some products but not tells the URL to them. It is though extremely easy to find them through a searc on … e.g. … Google.
I'll give the book four stars out of five for the many good tips, the easy to understand style and for all the relevant subjects it embraces. Actually, it's quite close to five stars.
Buy the book through this link: http://www.netpenge.info/anbefaler/uncommonadsense.html
That's an exceedingly fair review, and I thank Britt for her kind words about the book. The translation is very good for a non-English speaker, and I've left the odd error in as is, since it lends the review a certain charm.
Looks like there's still room for me to improve a few things, though. Rest assured that all my purchasers get free updates to the material so that it's always current.
As always, feel free to send me your questions regarding the book or anything related to AdSense…
Tomorrow: Unless Google comes out with some more earth-shattering AdSense news, we'll revisit the AdSense arbitrage topic. This time we'll follow the detailed techniques presented in AdSense Arbitrage and Leveraging and see where they take us.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
Free and Illegal Online Copy of Make Easy Money with Google
Some enterprising idiot has decided to make the full text of my printed book Make Easy Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program available online. I must admit that I'm of two minds about this:
- The book is almost two years old now, which is ancient in computer terms, and isn't selling much anymore because of this. So it's not going to kill sales of the book and maybe it will send a few more people my way.
- That said, this is copyrighted material and posting it without permission is an infringement of the publisher's rights (the publisher controls the material, not me). It's also in direct violation of the AdSense program policies (since the poster has placed AdSense ads on pages with copyrighted content that he/she is not licensed to use).
If you've been curious about my original AdSense book and want to read it, you can find it here, at least temporarily. You'll have to flip backwards through a lot of posts to find the start, though.
Feel free to let me know if you see more copies of it or (worse) Uncommon AdSense floating around.
Sponsored Link: Any AdSense publisher looking for detailed tips and techniques to increase AdSense earnings should take a look at Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
The Feeder Blog: A Tool For AdSense Publishers
I was having an interesting discussion with one of my readers last night about the whole “virtual real estate” (VRE). The idea behind VRE is simple enough: claim virtual cyberspace “land” by building tightly-focused niche sites that are monetized via AdSense and other programs. Repeat the process continually and eventually you'll make a lot of money. Or so the theory goes. It's an appealing concept and what someone like Joel Comm taps into with his monthly AdSense templates product.
When the reader described his strategy to me, however, I pointed out that he was missing one thing: a blog. Or, more specifically, a feeder blog.
The Feeder Blog
Again, this idea is simple and it's not rocket science. When you're building a series of mini-sites — and that's what VRE is all about — a feeder blog is an easy way to get those sites into the search engines. Feeder blogs are blogs that link to pages on your network of sites.
You may have noticed that many of the top-rated bloggers have secondary blogs where they do nothing but post links to things they find interesting but not worthy enough for a full blog posting. Such a blog is commonly called a link blog and you can see examples of them for Jeremy Zawodny and Robert Scoble. A link blog can be a type of feeder blog.
But not everyone uses link blogs. People like Darren Rowse and Steve Rubel make occasional short posts consisting of nothing but links. (Darren calls it “speedlinking”.) Such blogs can also be feeder blogs. The very blog you're reading is a feeder blog, for example, because I'll occasionally link out to sites I own like Uncommon AdSense, GeekAffiliate, No Debt Is Good, or BlackBerry Developers At Work! to send them additional traffic and to give them the benefit of this blog's high PageRank. (The trick, of course, is to keep the links relevant to the topic at hand, which is not always easy to do. If you can't insert links naturally into the text of a regular blog, either create a link blog to do it or else put the links in something like a “Sponsored Link” section. Either way, don't overdo it.)
The Mini-Site Feeder Blog
The purpose of the feeder blog in the mini-site VRE strategy is to have the blog act as a gateway to the content on those sites. You don't even have to monetize the blog — in fact, not monetizing the blog will make it easier to get it listed in various directories.
Ideally, the blog exists and is active before any of the sites you're going to build. The feeder blog should not link exclusively to your own sites. It should link out to other sites that are related to the topics you're going to be persuing. Each link should include a small text blurb/summary describing the page being linked to and why it's interesting. Make your feeder blog a credible source of information, a compilation of interesting things. Post once or twice on a daily basis — make sure the blog stays active. Use social bookmarking tags (i.e. Technorati) within each post. Make it easy for others to bookmark the posts as well.
Once the blog's been established, start linking out to the sites you develop. Don't stop linking to other relevant sites. Don't vary the pace of your posting, either. Search engines don't like to see hundreds of pages of content show up all at once. Pace yourself. Add content to your sites on a regular basis and then link to those pages as they get added.
The feeder blog is only one part of a good VRE strategy, of course. You should create and submit sitemaps for each mini-site, for example, and update them whenever you add content. You'll want to do the usual SEO tricks on the content. You'll want to get links from other sites to your own, so link building is still important.
The Downside
The downside to this is that it takes some work to run a blog, as any blogger will tell you. However, a simple link blog used as a feeder blog doesn't take too much work. After all, you're probably surfing the web all the time looking for information related to the sites you're building, so it should be easy to find relevant links. You just have to be disciplined about it. Most blogging systems, however, let you create posts and publish them later in the future, so you could always create multiple posts in a single session and then space them out so you don't have to actually do it on a daily basis.
The underlying presumption to all of this is that you're building quality sites. The feeder blog is a way to get search engines to quickly find your content, but if you're publishing crap it won't be long before your feeder blog loses its credibility. This is why I'd stay away from completely automated solutions. (It's perfectly fine to use something like Google Alerts to be notified whenever a new page related to your topic shows up, but you should still look at the page and then decide whether or not to link to it.)
Not all AdSense publishers need feeder blogs, but if you're trying the multiple mini-site VRE strategy it's a good thing to have.
Sponsored Link: If you're looking for ways to optimize those VRE sites for AdSense, Uncommon AdSense is the book that'll show you how.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and
Make Easy Money with Google. His award-nominated AdSense blog is a lot of work to write, but also a lot of fun…
ProBlogger Reviews Uncommon AdSense
Darren Rowse of ProBlogger fame has done a short review of Uncommon AdSense. To quote:
What I like about Eric's style is that he's not into hype.
His resources have a much more humble and realistic presentation of what can (and can’t) be achieved with AdSense than many others writing on the topic. In fact at times he could probably do with a little more hype. I know he’s planning a revamp for his sales page - and I agree it needs a bit of a work over
It's nice to read these comments from such a respected and highly-read blogger. Hopefully he'll take the time to do a longer review at some point. It should be noted that Darren bought the book with his own money, even though I would have gladly sent him a free copy. And I think his reputation speaks for itself when it comes to his product reviews.
It's a good thing that I'm not too attached to the Uncommon AdSense sales page. Yes, it's going to change — I've started working on it already. Two of my readers have also sent me — completely spontaneously, I might add, and much to my surprise — two different renditions of an ebook cover for the book. So I guess I'll have to choose which one I like better! Maybe I'll showcase them both here, I think both designers are wonderful people for doing this.
Hype is hard for some of us. It just doesn't come naturally. The reviews I just did of those three AdWords books are probably not going to cause any of them to shoot up the bestseller list. Plus the one I recommended is the one that pays the lowest commission — am I stupid or what?
Don't forget to subscribe to Darren's blog if you haven't already and you're a blogger yourself. My focus is AdSense, which sometimes encompasses blogging, his focus is blogging, which sometimes encompasses AdSense. There's really not much overlap between us.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and
Make Easy Money with Google. His award-nominated AdSense blog is a lot of work to write, but also a lot of fun…
Review: Google Wealth Wizard
What a weekend… the furnace stopped working sometime Saturday (we were out for most of the day when this happened, of course) and the house was too cold to stay in (it stabilized at 8 degrees Celsius, that's about 46 degrees Fahrenheit for you Americans — cold no matter what scale you use) and the part needed to fix the furnace didn't arrive until early Sunday evening… needless to say, we didn't do much of anything over the weekend, and I've got a backlog of email to go through. If you emailed me, please be patient, I'll get back to you today or tomorrow…
Anyhow, as I mentioned in my AdWords Miracle versus Beating AdWords comparison series, I have a third make-money-via-affiliate-selling-using-AdWords book to review, a book called Google Wealth Wizard.
Google Wealth Wizard Review
Let's go over the basics first. Google Wealth Wizard is an ebook sold via ClickBank for $77. (By comparison, Beating AdWords costs $67 and AdWords Miracle is $97.) The book is 114 pages long, but like AdWords Miracle uses a pretty big font and healthy margins, so take that page count with a grain of salt.
Although the term “AdWords” doesn't appear in the title, this is essentially a book about placing AdWords ads to sell products as a ClickBank affiliate, just like the other two books. As such, the first 40 pages of the book are devoted to explaing what affiliate marketing is, why ClickBank is so great, and what AdWords is. Nothing special here.
Amazingly enough, Google Wealth Wizard (GWW) starts off by focusing on market research — in other words, trying to find a potentially profitable market to enter with affiliate products. Many marketers argue that this is exactly where you should begin any kind of venture: find out what a niche wants and market something to satisfy those wants. If someone is looking for sand, don't sell them water. It seems obvious when you put it that way, but not everyone does it…
OK, enough marketing 101. GWW's marketing analysis is pretty much limited to using the Overture keyword suggestion tool to find keywords that have high monthly search values. This isn't exactly detailed analysis, and you might want to give some further thought to the research by seeing how many AdWords campaigns are running for a given keyword and how many organic search pages focus on the term — in other words, how much competition you'll be facing. (Do this enough and you'll want to invest in a good keyword tool like Keyword Elite, trust me on that… it's boringly repetitive and time-consuming otherwise.)
Aside: It always amazes me how much the Internet marketing niche itself relies on the Overture suggestion tool. It's a mainstay of every ebook discussing niche discovery, including the three mentioned here. It's also used by many keyword tools, including KE. Given that most people seem to be using it to find niches for AdWords ads and AdSense content, not for Yahoo-related purposes, someday Yahoo! is going to pull the plug on that tool and there will be much panic in the streets as Internet marketers and keyword tool makers scramble to find alternate trusted sources of keyword search data. But I digress…
Next comes a section on finding ClickBank products that will fulfill your niche's desires. Start by searching through the ClickBank Marketplace looking for related products that have a decent commission. Then look closely at the sales page for each product to see if the product vendor is doing a good sales job. Does it use a benefits-based headline? Is the page attractive? Are there subheadings? Are the paragraphs and sentences short? Are there customer testimonials? Is there a money-back guarantee? Put yourself into the shoes of a potential customer (this may be harder than you think — I'd personally find it quite hard to promote How to Find and Marry a Girl Like Me… there's a good reason why my wife is nothing like me in many respects. And Calling Men - Know When and How to Call the Man In Your Life would also be hard, for different reasons…) and see if the sales page convinces you.
After you've chosen your product, this book recommends buying a domain related to the product and using domain forwarding (via your domain registrar) to forward the domain to your ClickBank hoplink. Anyone entering the domain into their browser gets sent to the product vendor's site after being cookied through ClickBank. The books says to use this domain in your ads.
I should note that this method of affiliate selling is often called the “Google Cash” method because there was an ebook released a few years ago that popularized this very notion: place AdWords ads and send them directly to the product vendor's site via your affiliate link. It worked quite well for a while, but Google tightened up the rules and this “direct linking” method just doesn't work as well anymore. Note that if you place ads using direct linking there's a good chance your ad will be disapproved by Google. Why? Because the display URL (the URL shown in the ad) is different from the URL of the final destination site (where a user ends up when the ad is clicked). This is a no-no according to current AdWords policies. Some people get away with it, just don't be surprised if your ads get disallowed because of that. (There are ways to get around this, though.)
Next comes a section on placing AdWords ads to promote the products you've chosen. I must admit I think the author loses a lot of credibility here. Why? Because he uses ad examples that can't be used with AdWords because the individual lines exceed the AdWords length limits. For example, here's one ad he uses:
Train Your Dog in 7 Days
Amazingly Easy Tricks To Make Your Dog Obey Your
Every Command. See Results In The First 24 Hours.
Alright, I'll bite (pun intended). Try putting this into AdWords and this is what you'll actually see:
Train Your Dog in 7 Days
Amazingly Easy Tricks To Make Your
Every Command. See Results In The
I can just imagine how confused and disappointed first-time AdWords users will be when they try to follow his examples. The fact is, writing AdWords text ads is very challenging. The character length restrictions (25 characters for the headline, 35 characters each for the next two lines) force you to get right to the point. It's a little like writing a haiku:
Snow Sticks To Mittens:
Calvin Sighing Frustration;
Squarely Hit By Hobbes
OK, that's a silly little example of an AdWords haiku to promote The Complete Calvin and Hobbes but you get my point: writing a good, short ad isn't easy. So the author is doing a disservice to his readers by using ads that are too long to work with AdWords.
The final part of the book discusses the author's “dirty little secrets” about affiliate marketing via AdWords. There are twelve of them, to be exact, and they include things like capitalizing words in domain names, using negative keywords to avoid clicks from people looking for free stuff, don't forget to use “my” and “I” in keyword phrases, and so on. Some of the advice here contradicts what's in Beating AdWords, such as building very large keyword lists (150 or more) for each ad group, although the author still advises you to keep each ad group tightly focused on one keyword or keyphrase. The book concludes with a “bonus” set of tips, including the top 10 kinds of products that you can make money with as an affiliate.
The book's focus on direct linking means there's no discussion of the “Google slap”, or creating review sites, or promoting products in other ways (such as via opt-in mailing lists).
There's not much in the way of bonuses with this product, just an affiliate report that repeats the information in GWW about finding an affiliate product with profit potential. You also get access to a set of ads and keyword lists (again, the ads don't all work with AdWords due to length problems, how stupid is that?) that you can use to promote GWW as an affiliate.
On the whole, I have trouble recommending this book over the other two. I would buy AdWords Miracle over Google Wealth Wizard, despite its higher price, and Beating AdWords ahead of the other two:
For completeness, and if you're serious about making money via affiliate selling, I would pair up either Beating AdWords or AdWords Miracle with Affiliate “Project X”.
So that ends the reviews. I hope you've found them useful. This was a bit of a diversion from AdSense, really, although I do think it's useful for AdSense publishers in many ways to understand the mindset of an AdWords advertiser. If you want to explore the AdWords side, be prepared to do some experimentation until you find a system that works for you.
Sponsored Link: Hey, did you know that Uncommon AdSense costs less than any of those books and is entirely focused on your needs as an AdSense publisher? Check it out today!
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and
Make Easy Money with Google. His award-nominated AdSense blog is a lot of work to write, but also a lot of fun…
Chitika Users: Contextual Ad Programs Now Allowed to Co-Exist With AdSense
Well, apparently Google is now allowing competing contextual ads on AdSense pages as long as the non-AdSense ads can't be confused (they don't look like) with the AdSense ad and link units. Of course, this doesn't give you carte blanche to sprinkle competing ad programs together, you have to follow the terms of all the programs — which means no YPN and AdSense ads together because Yahoo's policies still forbid competing ads.
If you're a Chitika eMiniMalls user, however, you may want to take this opportunity to switch you eMiniMalls units from non-contextual to contextual mode. Until now, Chitika publishers have been restricted in using the non-contextual mode (where you specify a list of keywords for Chitika to use in serving ad content) on pages with AdSense. Now you can just let the Chitika crawler analyze the page for you and figure out the right set of products to display.
I haven't switched my eMiniMalls over to contextual mode yet, so I can't say how well it works versus the non-contextual mode. Instead of completely removing the non-contextual parts of the JavaScript, I would just comment it out and seeing what happens. If the ads aren't as well targeted, switch back to non-contextual mode.
I don't use Chitika a whole lot, but it's on my guide to electronic fences for pet containment and does reasonably well there. I may look into Chitika more now that contextual mode is available, it was always a pain to generate a good keyword list…
P.S.: After over a year, my pet fence guide, an AdSense case study I did here on this blog, now ranks #2 on Google for “invisible fence”, #3 for “electronic fence” and #7 for “pet fence”. Cool! Hey, I also rank #3 for “adsense case study”, just behind Google's two entries… Hmm, how can I capitalize on that? Funny how these things can sneak up on you…
Sponsored Link: Buy my new ebook, Uncommon AdSense, for lots of great tips on how to maximize your AdSense earnings.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and
Make Easy Money with Google. His award-nominated AdSense blog is a lot of work to write, but also a lot of fun…
AdWords Miracle vs. Beating AdWords, Part Trois
Sorry for interrupting the review like that, but yesterday I felt the recent AdSense changes with respect to similar-looking ads were important enough to mention here. Plus I wanted to update Uncommon AdSense accordingly and send the purchasers a new copy of the book (purchasers — if you aren't receiving my update emails, drop me a note). Anyhow, on with the review.
Beating AdWords Review
Today's focus is the Beating AdWords book. Like AdWords Miracle (AM), its focus is on making money by promoting affiliate products via AdWords. So how does Beating AdWords (BA) stack up?
Version 4 of BA, the one I just read, comes in at around 105 pages. There's a reasonable amount of text on each page, with screenshots as appropriate. Its price is only $67. (Remember, AdWords Miracle is $97.) The bonuses include two templates for creating review sites (see later in the review) and an extensive guide to promoting Beating AdWords itself as an affiliate.
The first dozen pages or so are general intros to affiliate marketing and AdWords, nothing unique here. The fun starts with the section on choosing affiliate products to promote. The standard techniques of actually purchasing the product (so you can see what's really in it — kind of like what I'm doing here!), browsing through forums, watching what other affiliates promote and checking a product site's Alexa ranking are all mentioned. But the authors then go into a more detailed explanation of how ClickBank ranks products, an in particular how to calculate the refund rate for a given product. This is one approach I didn't see in AM — the idea being that you don't want to promote products with high refund rates, even if they're popular. Then they give advice on finding good keywords to advertise with: they advocate some simple manual techniques along with the use of keyword tools like Keyword Elite.
Then the book discusses AdWords campaigns and ad groups. The standard advice about turning off the content network is very prominent, but it's then followed by some interesting — and very aggressive — advice on how to set your daily budget to maximize traffic (clicks). The ad group advice is to not use more than 25 keywords per ad group and to make sure that the keywords all have a word or phrase in common. This is followed by tips on writing good adcopy that will give you a high quality score and that will encourage potential buyers to click your ad. There's an extensive discussion of all the parameters that affect the quality score.
Next comes a section on determining your maximum bid price and when you should stop an ad campaign for further tuning, and how to manage your overall budget. Lots of sound advice here — it's evident the authors know what they're talking about. Then there's a discussion of direct-linking (sending clicks directly to an advertiser's landing page) vs. creating your own web pages to promote the product. The approach they recommend is the latter, and they especially recommend creating review pages that compare and contrast 3-7 products. They give you guidelines for writing such pages and two HTML templates that they say have worked well for them (I can't vouch for that yet, as I haven't tried them).
Then there's a good discussion of the “Google slap” and how to work around it. If an existing domain you're using has been “slapped”, for example, the only real workaround is to redo the ad campaign on a completely new domain, making sure to do all the right things to avoid getting slapped on that domain as well.
Finally, the book ends with tips on analyzing your campaigns (including figuring out what your competitors are doing right and emulating them) and a bunch of useful (but pretty standard) tips on how to get free or low-cost traffic to your sites, i.e. to your review pages.
Which is Better?
Now that I've reviewed both products for you, which do I think is the better deal: AdWords Miracle or Beating AdWords? Personally, I like Beating AdWords better, for the following reasons:
- Less hype — it's written in a more straightforward manner
- Lower price
- Emphasis on whitehat techniques — AdWords Miracle pushes the edges somewhat
- Specific tips on how to setup your campaigns to minimize losses and to track what's working and what's not
Also, as I mentioned before there's some overlap between AdWords Miracle and Affiliate “Project X” (APX), enough that I think you'd be better off to buy the Beating AdWords + APX combo if you're looking for both a solid grounding in AdWords and a set of edgier techniques to affiliate selling. Or just start with BA and work your way up to APX.
But wait, I said there was another book review coming! Well, I can tell you right now it's more like AdWords Miracle than Beating AdWords, so you can probably guess which one I'm going to recommend. Still, it'll be interesting to see how it compares to the other two. Stay tuned! (After that, we'll go back to some AdSense arbitrage discussions…)
Deal of the Day: Buy any of Beating AdWords, AdWords Miracle or Affiliate “Project X” through my affiliate link and I'll send you a free copy of Uncommon AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and
Make Easy Money with Google. His award-nominated AdSense blog is a lot of work to write, but also a lot of fun…
Why Did Google Ban Similar-Looking Ads?
Someone in the Digital Point AdSense forum asked me why I thought Google has banned AdSense publishers from displaying similar-looking ads on their sites. I have no special knowledge why, but I can think of two good reasons:
- Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) must be coming out of beta soon. YPN is perhaps the only contextual advertising network that could give Google a run for its money. By banning similar-looking ads (YPN ads look a lot like Google ads — let's face it, there are only so many ways you can lay out small text ads) it will make AdSense publishers think twice about signing up with YPN (which is currently only open to US-based publishers) and make it much harder to rotate ads to see which ad network works better on a given site. (It's not that you can't do it, but you can't display AdSense ads on any page on the site if YPN is displayed on any page… so you have to rotate based on time of day and make the rotation work across the entire site.)
- It's a small step in the ongoing war against low-quality sites. Ads-that-are-not-ads are often found on the so-called “Made for AdSense” (MFA) sites. This change and the recent ban on images next to ads can both be considered small strikes against such sites. You might wonder why Google is doing it in small steps: I think it has to do with revenue protection. So much of Google's income is tied to AdSense that they have to make changes slowly, so as to not cause a big drop in income as publishers abandon AdSense for something else (not YPN — it seems to be pickier than AdSense about many things).
As an aside to the new rules, what does AdSense consider a “site” — is a subdomain a separate site from its parent domain? There is no formal definition of this, but the general practice seems to be to consider subdomains separate from parent domains. So it should be OK to try out YPN and AdSense on different subdomains at the same time.
Sponsored Link: For help with AdSense, Uncommon AdSense is a great resource.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and
Make Easy Money with Google. His award-nominated AdSense blog is a lot of work to write, but also a lot of fun…
Important Google policy change: No competing (or similar-looking) ads can be used with AdSense
I'm not normally a parrot, but this one's important enough that I need to talk about it. You can get all the details from JenSense, but as of today the AdSense program policies “… do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with“.
In other words, if it looks like a Google ad you're currently serving anywhere on your site, you either have to remove it or else make it look substantially different from the Google ads. You can make it look different by changing the colors used, for example, or by putting a border around it if your AdSense ads don't have borders. Or use different fonts.
This is already annoying a lot of AdSense publishers. I've changed this site to be in compliance, but I imagine it's a long process for some sites, especially those that use AdSense-like alternate ads. It used to be fine to display an AdSense-like as an alternative to no ad or a public service announcement. Now the alternate ad you serve has to look very different. If you're building the ads yourself, you might want to switch over to an image-based ad promoting some kind of affiliate product.
Despite the grumbling, remember that Google calls all the shots here — that's what you agreed to when you joined the AdSense program. Like I've said before: if Google asks you to jump, you say “How high?”, or else go find an alternate content monetization solution.
Sponsored Link: An updated version of my AdSense book, Uncommon AdSense, will be making its way to purchasers shortly to reflect these changes. Why haven't you bought your copy already?
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and
Make Easy Money with Google. His award-nominated AdSense blog is a lot of work to write, but also a lot of fun…
AdWords Miracle vs. Beating AdWords, Continued
Yesterday I left off midway through my review of AdWords Miracle. A reader
made this comment:
I just wanted to say that you
are definitely a master of “keep 'em coming back for more”
The fact is, I don't always do it deliberately… Sometimes I do plan to write
a series, sometimes it just happens that way. I mostly write this stuff early in
the morning, even though I publish it later in the day (after some
experimentation, I determined that's what worked best for this particular blog)
and so how much I get done depends partly on how early I get up.
Also, a good review takes time, especially when you're comparing two or more
products. I suspect this particular review won't end here, especially if I throw a
third book into the mix, like I'm thinking about doing. But let's continue with
AdWords Miracle and see where we go from there.
AdWords Miracle, Part 2
When I left off yesterday, I was about to look at the bonuses that come bundled with AdWords Miracle. I don't think the core book alone is worth $97, so it's a good thing the bonuses are included.
The first bonus, Building an Opt-In List with AdWords is pretty standard fare. There's actually very little AdWords involved here, it's mostly about building a “squeeze page” (like this one) to get visitors to subscribe to your mailing list for a free course where you also try selling them related products. Nothing spectacular here, except for the willingness to pay money (via AdWords clicks) to get your leads — most list-building programs concentrate on “free” and “viral” methods to build the list. But if you're expecting to make money from a list (note that Affiliate “Project X” also covers this, but with a different slant on the process) then paying money for well-targeted leads shouldn't be a deterrant.
The second bonus, Promoting the Right ClickBank Product, is all about finding the right products to promote as an affiliate. The method he uses involves looking through the stats on ClickBank Marketplace, looking at the vendor's sales letter, etc.
At this point I feel I should make a recommendation: if you already own Affiliate “Project X” (APX), don't buy AdWords Miracle. There's too much overlap to justify the total price of the two packages combined if bought at retail. If you buy AdWords Miracle first, though, take the upsell to get APX at a lower cost. If you can't afford both, skip AdWords Miracle in favor of APX.
Whoops, there go my commissions…
The third bonus is the Advanced Themes Supplement. Again, some of the material here gets repeated in APX, although I think it's better explained here than in APX. There's discussion of link cloaking to get around AdWords restrictions on multiple ads going to the same domain. For example, check out this cloaked link that brings up the APX sales page on one of my own sites. That's the kind of technique you can use so that you don't end up promoting the vendor's site directly and losing out on ad placement because someone else is doing the same thing and is willing to pay more for their clicks. There's also a method called “2 Minute Ads” that lets you quickly create ads that work in most situations. Information about the AdWords dynamic keyword insertion facility. How to choose good keyword-based destination URLs. A list of niches that can be profitably sold into again and again (affiliate marketing is one of them!). And then a big section on dealing with the “Google slap”.
Another aside here: what Internet marketers casually refer to as the “Google slap” is the inclusion of landing page quality in the AdWords quality score (QS). The QS is a secret value that Google calculates that takes into account how well an advertiser's ads have performed in the past, the clickthrough ratio of an ad, and various other factors. The QS ultimately determines how much you as an advertiser pays per click. Advertisers with high QS get favored: their ads get placed higher for a lower cost. And low QS advertisers get hammered: their minimum bid prices (the minimum they have to bid for their ads to even show) get jacked up, sometimes incredibly high. By including the landing page quality in the QS, Google effectively “slapped” affiliate marketers who either sent traffic directly to the vendor's site (providing no value add) or who had poorly-designed single-page sites that were not relevant to their AdWords ads. I've discussed this issue before in previous posting on GeekAffiliate titled Landing Pages and Pay-Per-Click: A New Content Outlet which I suggest you read for more information. The workaround I suggest (adding more content to the site) is a lot of work. The Advanced Themes Supplement gives a different workaround which is a lot less work, and probably leads to a better conversion ratio than my workaround. Remember, ultimately you're trying to sell something to someone. Providing reams of free information is usually not the best approach for that.
Now the video bonuses. The product selection video is basically a video version of the Promoting the Right ClickBank Product bonus. The longest video shows you the three recommended methods of promoting ClickBank products via AdWords. The third video shows you the author's method for writing good (AdWords) ad copy for niches that he knows nothing about.
The videos are typical of what you get these days from affiliate marketers, basically a screen capture done with Camtasia or its equivalent, with someone talking and occasionally bringing up different websites and so on. Gripping, it's not. And you may find it kind of awkward to bring the laptop with you into the washroom. But some people really benefit from this kind of training, so they're a good way to reinforce what the main text says.
So that's the AdWords Miracle review. Did I learn something from reading it? Yes. Is it a product I recommend? Maybe. Let's wait and see how it fares against Beating AdWords and a third (mystery for now — hey, I want you to come back!) product…
Sponsored Link:
If you end up buying either AdWords Miracle or Affiliate “Project X” through my affiliate link, I'll ease the pain for you and send you a free copy of Uncommon AdSense. There, how's that for a good bonus?
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and
Make Easy Money with Google. His award-nominated AdSense blog is a lot of work to write, but also a lot of fun…
Update: Sorry for the broken links, all fixed now…