The One Answer To All Your AdSense Questions

As an AdSense “expert”, I often get questions from my readers about best practices for AdSense. Everyone wants to know what “the rules” are. How many ad units? Which formats? Which colors? Which keywords? Blog or website?

As it happens, there is a single answer to all of these questions: Test it and see what works for you. It's not the answer they usually want to hear, however.

You've probably heard the saying that “no two snowflakes are identical”, though the accuracy of that statement is up for debate. You can similarly argue that no two sites are identical — even if they look the same, they'll have different traffic patterns, different link graphs, different levels of findability. So what works for me on my site may not work for you on your site, even if our sites appear to be very similar.

Maybe I should setup an autoresponder to answer those questions — it would be trivial to do!

This is not to say that there are no common answers to AdSense questions. For example, I can state quite strongly that horizontal link units placed in the header area of a page work better than vertical link units on most sites. But I can't say that this holds true for all sites. Neither can Google — that's why they never say “doing X will increase your earnings” but instead say “doing X may increase your earnings”.

The problem with testing, of coure, is that it takes time. Time to implement, time to gather meaningful statistics. And it has to be done in small increments — otherwise how do you know which change increased or decreased your earnings?

So watch this space for some useful tips on how to test your AdSense usage to find the right answers for your site.

Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

February 28, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 1 Comment 

All Hail The Horizontal Link Unit

So I see that the latest Inside AdSense posting is a case study showing how an AdSense publisher was able to dramatically increase her earnings by switching a vertical link unit to a horizontal link unit. This isn't news to readers of this blog, I said that over a year ago, and I also devote a chapter to it in Uncommon AdSense. I've never had much luck with vertical link units, but horizontal ones almost always surprise me with their earning power.

Why do horizontal link units work so well? Because they don't look like ads. Yes, there's the “Ads by Google” to the left of the links, but to many viewers that link isn't obviously related to the remaining links.

I have some personal experience with this view. Remember when Invisible Fence, Inc.'s lawyers sent me a cease-and-desist fax about the Invisible Fence Guide Pet Fence Guide? One of the things they wanted was for me to take down the links labeled “invisible fence” that were in my header — that's right, it was actually a horizontal link unit. I had to explain to them that those links weren't mine, they were actually ads generated automatically by Google and that they should go talk to Google about the use of their trademark in advertisements.

Try it yourself. Place a horizontal link unit — there are two sizes — somewhere near the top of your page layout, preferably close to some kind of navigational element. Right under the header is a good spot in most cases. Let it sit there for a couple of weeks and see how well it works. You'll be surprised!

Sponsored Link: For more AdSense advice,
give my book
Uncommon AdSense
a try.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

February 28, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Eric's Quick AdWords Primer

I had a question from someone about using the Google AdWords program to advertise their site. So here's my quick primer on getting started with Google AdWords.

Preliminaries

There is some preliminary information you should gather before starting:

  1. Your advertising goals. Are you advertising a specific product or service? Are you looking to build your brand? Are you trying to make money by promoting other people's products? For the latter, I'd suggest you look at one of the many AdWords books that focus on affiliate selling. This primer is meant for people who are looking to promote their own products and services.
  2. Your landing pages. A landing page is a page on your site that customers “land on” after clicking one of your ads. You can have multiple landing pages. The landing page should ideally be directly related to the advertisements you'll be placing. It might be an existing page — say a sales page for one of your products. But often you want to use separate landing pages, both so you can tweak your copy to better fit the ads and also so that you can more easily track what's working and what's not.
  3. Your desired customers. What language do your customers use? What countries are they in? Or do you want to advertise locally? Do you want to advertise only at certain times of the day?
  4. Your credit card. You'll need a credit card to register for AdWords, and Google will be charging that card automatically at regular intervals based on your ad spending.
  5. Your AdWords email address. You'll be signing in using an email address. If more than one person is going to access the account, you may want to create an “AdWords-only” email address that is used for this purpose that simply forwards any emails it receives to the appropriate parties within your organization.

Whatever you do, don't rush into AdWords advertising without the proper preparation. You might want to go so far as reading a general book about AdWords like Perry Marshall's Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords or Andrew Goodman's Winning Results with Google AdWords.

In particular, spend time on developing your landing pages, for two good reasons. The first is that you need to convert visitors into customers. The second is that landing pages gets analyzed by Google for quality and relevance and directly affect the cost of your advertisements.

Prepare Your First Ad

As part of the signup process you'll be asked to enter an ad, so you might as well prepare the ad ahead of time. Note that we're only talking about text ads here, the ads that Google shows on the right side of a search query results page. You can advertise in other formats, but the four-line text ad is the “classic” ad format and the way most people start.

Each text ad consists of four things:

  1. A title or headline, limited to 25 characters or less.
  2. Two lines of text, each limited to 35 characters or less. This is the body of the ad.
  3. A display URL, which is normally just the domain name of the website that the ad links to. The display URL is what the user sees in the ad, and it's limited to 35 characters. (You can drop the “www” part of the domain name and capitalize the domain name appropriately.)
  4. A destination URL, which is the address of the landing page on your website. The user does not see the destination URL.

Let's pretend that we're Amazon's advertising department and that we want to place an ad promoting one of the cameras Amazon sells. Here's a sample ad:




Title:
Canon PowerShot SD800




Line 1:
7.1MP Digital Elph Camera




Line 2:
Low Price and Free Shipping!




Display URL:
Amazon.com




Destination URL:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000HAOVGM

Expect to spend some time on this, because crafting an appealing text ad that still fits within the character limits is not easy. Note that there are important editorial guidelines to follow. If you don't, your ad will not be approved.

The ad title and/or ad text should directly relate to the landing page if at all possible.

Make a Keyword List

The ads you run are associated with keywords. When users use those keywords in their Google searches, your ads get triggered. So you need to prepare a list of keywords to go along with the ad.

The easiest way to find keywords is to extract them from your ad. In the ad above, for example, the phrase “canon powershot sd800″ is an obvious keyphrase (you're not limited to single-word keyphrases). So is “7.1MP digital elph”. You can be as specific as you like. In fact, you normally want to use specific keywords over general keywords because the more specific and precise the keyword the more targeted the visitor is going to be and the easier it will be to convert them into customers.

If you're stuck for keyword ideas, use the free AdWords keyword tool, which anyone can use. Click the Site-Related Keywords tab and enter your landing page URL (the destination URL) into the tool to get a list of the keywords that Google thinks are related to that page.

Here's a small sampling of what keywords Google thinks are related to the Canon PowerShot SD800 page in the ad above:

The list is actually very extensive. You might even want to revise your ad and/or landing page text based on what Google shows you.

This is a simple and very effective way to build a set of related keywords for your landing page, which in turn ensures your ad has a good quality score.

After you've come up with a list of related keywords, group the keywords together based on common subphrases. You could, for example, place all keyphrases containing “digital camera” into one group and
all keyphrases containing “digital elph” into another. Once you've done this, choose one of the groups as your “primary” keyword set and make sure that the common subphrase for that group is in your ad text and in the landing page text. Put the remaining keywords aside for now.

Sign Up For AdWords

Next, you'll want to sign up for AdWords. Start the process by clicking this button:




You'll have to choose between the Starter and the Standard editions of AdWords. You can upgrade from the Starter edition at any point, but I recommend you go with the full-blown Standard edition right from the start.

Google will ask you what languages and what countries/regions/cities you want to target, so fill in that info.

Create the Ad

During the signup process you'll be asked for your ad and your keywords, so enter them into the appropriate spots. Use the primary keyword group you created earlier.

Now comes the hard part, determining how much to pay per click. You'll be asked to set a daily budget (which limits how much the ad will cost you per day) as well as a maximum cost-per-click price. AdWords is essentially a big ad auction system. Advertisers bid against each other for placement on search engine query results pages. All other things being equal, the higher you bid, the higher your spot on the results page. But things are never equal. Google factors in how often your ad gets clicked, its relevance to the landing page, and the landing page's quality in order to do the final ranking. So a very relevant ad to a quality site that gets clicked on more often than the other ads for a given keyword can end up in the #1 spot and yet have a maximum bid price that is lower than the other ads beneath it.

Until you have some more experience with AdWords, all you can do at this point is choose a bid price based on how much money you're willing to lose (on the assumption that none of the clicks lead to sales). If you want, Google will give you its recommendations for getting the most clicks, but usually that's way more money than you want to spend. You can use Google's traffic estimator to see how many clicks you're likely to get at a specific bid price, but it's not exact. If you know your landing page converts at a certain rate, factor that into your calculations.

Tweak Some Settings

At this point you will have created an ad campaign consisting of a single ad group. Each campaign can hold multiple groups, and usually each group uses a separate set of keywords. You can go ahead and create an ad group for each keyword group you defined earlier on, or you can just leave things as-is for now until you get the hang of things.

One thing you should do at this point is edit the campaign settings for your new campaign and turn off the serving of ads to the “content network”. The Google content network are third-party sites, primarily AdSense publishers, and when you're just starting you don't want to show your ads there, you want to show them on Google's search pages only. Prices on the search network are generally higher than those on the content network, so if you don't turn it off you'll probably find you're spending more money than you expected because your ads will be getting displayed more often and getting clicked on more often relative to the other advertisers who've either turned off the content network entirely or have placed separate (lower) bids for placement on the content network.

You can also control when your ads are shown. If you think potential customers tend to fall within a certain time range (say between 8am and 10pm) then you can set the campaign to only run within that range.

Watch Your Spending

Once your first campaign is up and running, let it run for a few days and see what happens. Are you getting clicks? Are they turning into sales? Adjust your campaign accordingly.

That's the primer. There are so many things that I've left out that really need discussing, so I'd really recommend you get Perry Marshall's book and read it before doing much more with AdWords. There are various ebooks like Beating AdWords that are also available, but be aware that most of those books focus on using AdWords for affiliate selling, not for selling your own products and services.

Google's AdWords help center also has an extensive store of information that all advertisers can access for free, and it's well worth your time to peruse what's available there as well.

Feel free to ask any questions if I've confused you with anything I've said.

Sponsored Link: I also know a thing or two about AdSense,
so why not give my book
Uncommon AdSense
a try?

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

February 27, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

The only Duvet Dollars worth having are the ones stuffed under your mattress

Veni, vidi, vomi. That's what Julius Caesar would have said about Duvet Dollars if he were alive today. I think the only “duvet dollars” that are worth your time are the ones you stick under your mattress.

I don't feel like doing a detailed review, but this book thoroughly disappointed me because I didn't learn anything new from it. Maybe it's because I've now read all the major ebooks on affiliate selling, but Duvet Dollars strikes me as a rehash of the material covered in Beating AdWords and AdWords Miracle, except that it's more along the lines of Google Wealth Wizard. If you're unsure what that means, read my AdWords book review roundup. (Hint: it doesn't come in first place.)

Duvet Dollars is also nothing at all like the edgier Affiliate “Project X” and Day Job Killer books, which at least entertained me and taught me some new things even if they haven't made me rich (and have probably sold too many copies to make anyone else rich).

Save your money. You could buy 11 reports on 7DollarOffers.com for the same money and probably learn more from them. Like my own link cloaking report, for example. Or a useful software product like ClickBank Ad Box.

Sponsored Link: This affiliate stuff may be
interesting, but if you're an AdSense publisher looking
to do better with your sites, why not give my book
Uncommon AdSense
a try?

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

February 27, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Amazon aStore Update

One of my readers left a comment asking for an update on The HDTV Shoppe, an Amazon aStore I created last October as an example of integrating AdSense with other embedded content. The premise of the aStore model is that you build a little “store” consisting of Amazon products. Amazon manages most of the store for you, and you can choose to host it on your own site (by embedding it within a page) or to let Amazon host it for you. You send traffic to the store and get credit (through the Amazon Associates affiliate program) for any sales made through the store.

I set the store up both to use as an example and as a way for me to play with the aStore concept, which were in beta at the time. As an ecommerce play, the aStore is fairly limited in what you can do. It's very easy to set up, but if you have any programming experience at all I'd spend some time looking at Amazon Web Services and build a better-integrated storefront using Amazon's E-Commerce Service.

One thing I didn't expect from my aStore was to make money with it. Not a lot, mind you, but since it went “live” I've managed to sell these items through the store:

I also sold a few cables and movies through the store — likely as incidental purchases to the above.

Not being a big seller of Amazon products, I garnered just a 4% commission on the sales, but that made me over $200 for what was essentially a couple of hours of work to setup the store.

Now how did I sell these things given that I've essentially done no promotion of the store? (Remember, it was just a case study.) I haven't really dug into it. Maybe the hdtvshoppe.com domain I purchased was actively in use by someone who let it expire before I purchased it — residual traffic? Or maybe some of my readers happened to be thinking of buying an HDTV and after browsing decided that Amazon's prices were pretty good. (And then one of them changed their mind. In January, the Philips HDTV was returned to Amazon.) Whatever the reason, I'm sure Christmas season was a factor, as there have been no sales through the store this year as of yet.

I guess if I was smart I'd be promoting the store more. But the HDTV market is very competitive. Sure, I rank #1 on Google for “hdtv shoppe”, but ranking for a non-competitive keyword/keyphrase is very easy to do with standard search engine optimization practices. Actually getting it to rank for “hdtv” or “hdtv shopping” — that would require some hard work, and it wouldn't be overnight. Although there are backlinks to the site, most of those are from scraper sites that republish this blog's content. (Now you know why I don't get all worked up about those sites. Since there's no real way to beat the scrapers, might as well make sure my content's full of nice links so that their scraping benefits me somewhat. Not hugely, but it helps.) I can't really say it interests me that much, which is why I haven't pursued it. Plus I generally have too many things on the go already!

Now all the fuss over Day Job Killer may make sense to you. The first money-making method described in DJK, Direct Linking “X”, involves placing ads for consumer electronics and other higher-priced products sold on Amazon. Do it right and you can definitely make money. Well, you could make money. I suspect that at this point that it's much harder to do simply because so many copies of DJK have been sold and so many Amazon affiliates are trying their hand at it. Do a quick Google search for “Canon Powershot SD800″ in the US, for example, and you'll see an Amazon affiliate — “gaw5-20″ — using the direct linking method in the very first ad spot. (Amazon affiliate IDs are easy to spot, for Amazon.com and Amazon.ca the affiliate IDs almost always end in “-20″. Only the older IDs like mine, “ericgiguerecom”, don't follow that rule. The European Amazon sites use affiliate IDs that end in “-21″, BTW.)

Here's a tip for you, though: if you want to try setting up your own Amazon store, don't put any AdSense ads on the pages. I did it on HDTVShoppe.com because I was trying to prove a point: with careful page design you can always get well-targeted ads even on pages that consist primarily of embedded content that the AdSense crawler can't see. But if I was really interested in making money with the site, why would I use AdSense to send my traffic away from the real money-maker, Amazon?

Some people don't get this distinction. AdSense is about monetizing content. If you have something to sell, think long and hard before adding AdSense to any of your pages. It may end up stealing some of your sales.

Sponsored Link: This affiliate stuff may be
interesting, but if you're an AdSense publisher looking
to do better with your sites, why not give my book
Uncommon AdSense
a try?

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

February 26, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

The PLR AdSense Mini-Site (Part 4)

And so the series continues. Be sure to check out Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 first. As always, thanks for reading these irregular postings.

DoublePak1: More PLR AdSense Sites

In previous postings I mentioned the Exclusive PLR Websites (EPW) membership site, which offers easily customized but bare bones PLR AdSense mini-sites. I deployed an AdSense information site as an example of what you get from EPW, which is a simple set of website templates with a few pages of PLR content. An easy way to get started.

I went looking for something on the other end of the spectrum so we could do some comparisons. I wanted to demo a complete PLR site that really wasn't so much about the templates as it was about the content. Luckily (?) all I have to do is turn to my inbox. I spent a few bucks and bought George Pluss' DoublePak1 system.

Oh my, what a sales page for that system. You get the “Exact BLACKHAT Tools To Cheat Search Engines For Cash and Traffic!” and you can “ GRAB Traffic/Money Generating Systems That Never Failed Since The Beginning of The Internet!“. Yeesh.

But there's a point to this. Though it's not obvious until you join his mailing list to “lock in” your price (it's one of those dime sales, where the listed price goes up everytime someone buys one), what you get is a set of fully-populated AdSense mini-sites with PLR content as well as three PLR ebooks.

Again, I've deployed one of the sites for you to examine, the pet health insurance information site. This is a fully-activated site, all I did was take the original site that came with my purchase, changed some configuration settings (instructions are given — it's pretty easy), and uploaded it to a subdomain I created specifically for the purpose. This particular site is one of George's “power” sites. The top part of the page is pretty conventional: an article (with embedded AdSense ad) on the left and links to other articles on the right, with a good-looking header image at the top. Scroll down to the bottom of the page, though, and you'll see that there's a way for visitors to leave comments (in a blog-like fashion), related books from Amazon (to which you can add your Amazon Associates ID), related videos, and related news items. (You need a Linux web server that runs PHP to run these sites, BTW.)

From an AdSense viewpoint, the pages are “loaded” to the max: there are 3 ad units, 1 link unit, an AdSense for search block, and a couple of referral buttons. I did notice one problem, though: the AdSense publisher ID used in the ad units is also used in the search box and in the referral buttons. But if you go to your AdSense account you'll see that the IDs for those are slightly different than the ID for your ad units. So you'll need to fix that if you deploy any of these sites.

One other feature that these sites offer is automatic translation of content into 7 other languages. The translation is done via an encrypted PHP file, but I decrypted it pretty easily (using this online base 64 decoder) and discovered that they're using Google to do the translation. Pages are translated as needed and held in a cache for 60 seconds, which is good, but I would set the timeout higher. Too many translation requests and Google will probably ban your site from accessing the translation system. As a native French speaker, I can tell you that the translated articles are very obviously translated by machine. Their purpose is mostly to provide more content for the search engines to spider, they're certainly not anything to be proud of as a site owner.

In theory, you could buy the DoublePak1 system, change the configuration files appropriately, and deploy the sites as-is to start making money. At least, that's what the sales page tells you. The reality is that you're going to need to drive traffic to those sites somehow, and if you're not careful you'll find that your sites will get dropped from the big search engines quite quickly unless you change the sites substantially and use a gradual submission strategy. (This is where a feeder blog and careful manipulation of the robots.txt file is necessary.) They might be usable as-is for arbitrage purposes, I'd need to run some tests first to be sure. I'm pretty sure George makes money from these sites, but it may be from selling them, not deploying them!

Anyhow, it's more grist for the mill and some of you might find it better to start with these kinds of fleshed-out sites rather than template sites. Either way, though, you have to do some rewriting, so in the next installment we'll look at something called latent semantic indexing that's all the rage these days when it comes to rewriting content.

Sponsored Link: Have you bought my new ebook, Link Cloaking For The Mystified? It's only $7! Here's what one reader had to say: “even though you warned about this book was written for the non-techie computer user, and I consider myself some techie, I learned a lot! Wow!“. Why not give it a try?

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

February 23, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

The Invisible Fence Guide Needs A Revamp

Long-time readers will remember how I created a simple site called the Invisible Fence Guide (or, more formally, the Guide to Invisible Fence) as an AdSense case study. The case study showed how you could develop a small site in different phases, starting first with the content and then gradually building it up into a nice-looking, navigable site that was monetized with AdSense and also with Chitika eMiniMalls. The site essentially tells the story of how we decided to install an Invisible Fence after one of our dogs escaped from our fenced yard. The site is nothing special, but it's the kind of site anyone can create, which was the point of the case study: start your content monetization efforts based on your own knowledge and experiences.

As it turned out, that site was able to quickly rank for the “invisible fence” term, showing up in the Google top 10 list. In fact, in recent months it even made it up to the #2 position. This high ranking attracted the ire of Invisible Fence, Inc.'s lawyers, who threatened to sue me for using their trademark in my domain name, the site name, and on various pages. It didn't seem to matter to them that I was a happy customer and that their product was featured prominently throughout the site. Because I had ads on the site and because those ads were often for competing products (because of course the competitors bid on the keyphrase “invisible fence”) they didn't like my site. Not being in the mood to fight a lawsuit, no matter how frivolous it might seem, I conceded on most of the points and renamed the guide to the more generic-sounding Pet Fence Guide and changed the domain name and some of the content.

Google recently switched to a much more frequent page ranking cycle and over the past month I've watched the site's ranking for “invisible fence” slide down into the top 11 to 20 range. Not surprisingly, the AdSense income's dropped from about $12/day to $3/day, with a similar drop in the Chitika income. This is why you see people fret in the forums about their own ratings drops — because it has a direct and measurable effect on their site's income.

Now, $3/day from a site that requires no maintenance isn't bad. If you had several such sites you'd be raking in some decent money — remember my posting 172 AdSense sites = $5000/month. But this assumes that you can maintain the same traffic levels to all those sites. If they start slipping, so does your income. It's conceivable that over time the Invisible Fence Guide's rankings will slip so much that the income will dwindle down to nothing. Which will make Invisible Fence's lawyers happy, but not me.

So it's one thing to get ranked, but it's another to stay ranked. When I'm done the PLR series, I'm going to start a series on search engine ranking maintenance. We'll look at the different things you can do to keep your site listed and to keep the traffic flowing to it. And we'll use the Pet Fence Guide as our working example. Should be fun!

Sponsored Link: For no-nonsense AdSense advice, buy Uncommon AdSense today!

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

February 23, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Where's Your 100 kg Gold Coin?

Who says Canada is boring? Today we have the news that the Royal Canadian Mint (the folks who mint the coins in my pocket) is releasing a 100 kg gold coin with a face value of CA$1,000,000. (That's 220 lbs and US$862,366 for you Americans. Note that the real cost is substantially more than the face value.) They claim to have a few orders for it already. Coin dealers think they're nuts.

Maybe. But the gold coin market is very competitive. They're getting a lot of publicity from this. Some buzz and more product awareness is good for them. It's a stunt, absolutely, but it's a good stunt. If you're Larry Ellison or Bill Gates, you could buy one and display it on your coffee table. (I hope the display stand isn't extra.) Heck, you could make it into a coffee table, it's so large.

So where's your 100 kg gold coin? What's the stunt you can pull that will get you noticed? It's not easy, and I certainly haven't figured out what mine is. But if you want to make your mark on the Web with so many others clamoring for the same attention, you have to think up stunts like this.

Sponsored Link: For no-nonsense AdSense advice, buy Uncommon AdSense today!

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

February 22, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

The Profit Monster and Duvet Dollars

This is a bit of an aside. Today I get emails for two new money-making systems. One is The Profit Monster and the other is Duvet Dollars. I give them both a “10″ for creativity, though they take different approaches.

The Profit Monster describes its “3 easy steps” program. Let me quote the salespage:

  1. You will sit back and relax as you watch our detailed online step-by-step video training course
  2. Type in a few catchy sentences together with a special link that bears your id nickname (the exact guidelines will be provided to make it extremely easy for you)!
  3. Enter specific words that are related to your 'work' (don't worry, I reveal exactly how to do this in the videos). Then Submit your 'work' online by clicking a single button, and then sit back & watch the money roll in on autopilot!

Sounds pretty neat, doesn't it? Let me translate it for you:

  1. Well, we have to give you something to watch or read so you don't think you've wasted all your money.
  2. Write some AdWords ads that use direct linking with your ClickBank ID.
  3. Bid on keywords for those ads.

I like how they say “Fill out easy forms like this” right near the top of the page. And, yes, that's an AdWords ad entry page in the screenshot underneath.

As for Duvet Dollars, the “Victoria has a secret” angle is clever indeed. Imagine the disappointment when we discover that the “secret” is that her name is really “Victor”.

Pffff. Getting cranky in my old age.

Sponsored Link: Have you bought my new ebook, Link Cloaking For The Mystified? It's only $7! Here's what one reader had to say: “even though you warned about this book was written for the non-techie computer user, and I consider myself some techie, I learned a lot! Wow!“. Why not give it a try?

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

February 21, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

The PLR AdSense Mini-Site (Part 3)

Today we continue our series on private label rights AdSense mini-sites. Please refer to Part 1 and Part 2 before continuing.

Free Private Label Articles

It occurred to me after I started this series that it would help if my readers could actually follow along more closely with what I'm doing. What I'm going to do is take the AdSense mini-site from Exclusive PLR Websites and modify it using additional PLR content. Fortunately, PLR content is pretty easy to find, and just the other day an email landed in my inbox promoting the LoudMouse Article Marketing Guide, a short and inexpensive ebook describing how article writing and distribution can (indirectly) make you money. (This is not news to my readers, of course, see my article writing overview.) The report's OK for the price ($6), but what caught my eye was the bonus of more than 2000 PLR articles. I purchased the report and looked through everything that was included and lo-and-behold I found that one of the packages included some PLR articles about AdSense, which is just what I wanted. Although I'm pretty sure I could give away the entire bundle of 2000 articles (see my essay The Fundamental Flaw In Selling Resale Rights for why), I'm just going to give away a subset of the bundle. Just right click here to download the PLR articles — no registration or purchase required.

What you get is a ZIP file containing over 400 PLR articles, including 10 articles about AdSense. Unzip the file and look for the “plr article pack - google adsense 10″ folder to find the articles. Actually, if all you're interested are the AdSense articles themselves, you can download those from here. Either of these two packages will give you a good idea of what kind of content you get with PLR packages. (Again, if you want the full 2000+ articles then you need to buy the aforementioned article marketing guide.)

PLR Editing Tip

Note that sometimes PLR articles come as simple text files, sometimes they come as Microsoft Word files. Either way, they'll need some serious editing before you'd want to use them on your own sites, either to fix spelling and grammar mistakes (not uncommon) or to completely rewrite them in order to avoid duplicate content penalties (for organic search engine traffic — this doesn't matter if you're sending traffic to the pages via pay-per-click or other methods). My suggestion to you is that you download the free OpenOffice package and use the Writer application to edit those documents. After you're done editing you can simply save the document as HTML and incorporate it quite easily with your website. Do NOT do this with Microsoft Word, as the HTML that Word generates is simply a mess that will make your hair stand on end.

Anyhow, enjoy the PLR articles and stay tuned for the next episode in this series…

Sponsored Link: Have you bought my new ebook, Link Cloaking For The Mystified? It's only $7! Here's what one reader had to say: “even though you warned about this book was written for the non-techie computer user, and I consider myself some techie, I learned a lot! Wow!“. Why not give it a try?

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

February 21, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Review: Exclusive PLR Websites

As promised, we're getting back to the PLR AdSense mini-site discussion. Rather than continue the discussion directly, however, we're going to take a little detour with a review of a PLR membership site that I actually like.

Exclusive PLR Websites

The membership site is Exclusive PLR Websites, which I'll refer to as EPW for most of this review. For $37/month EPW members get access to 8 new niche PLR websites each month. You can make any changes you want to the PLR websites, the only restriction is that you can't resell the sites. (There is a reseller program available for those who are interested in selling sites — what's good about the reseller program is that the sites given to the resellers are different from the sites given to the non-resellers.)

When you join EPR, you're placed into a “group”. Each group gets a separate set of 8 websites and membership is limited to 50 people per group. This ensures that there aren't too many versions of the same websites floating around on the Internet.

Now, what I like about EPR is the quality of the websites. I've deployed a sample site about AdSense for your perusal. I only made a few modifications to it: I changed “Adsense” to “AdSense” (OK, I'm picky, but so many marketers get the capitalization of AdSense wrong and it just drives me nuts…), inserted my AdSense publisher ID, and changed the footer slightly. But other than that, the site is au naturel.

Each site comes with five pages of PLR content, which is not a lot of content, I admit. But this isn't a PLR content membership site, it's a PLR website membership site — different focus. You are expected to customize and improve the sites you get — they're starting points for new AdSense sites. You're free to use the content as you wish, including creating articles and ebooks out of it. My suggestion is to rewrite the content to make it your own, of course.

Now, EPW may not seem very exceptional at this point, but here's where the quality really shines through. Unlike most pre-built sites or templates I've come across, all EPW sites are built using clean HTML (search engine optimized, too) with CSS stylesheets. What's even better, the pages are modularized using PHP includes. The AdSense ad blocks, for example, are separate PHP files. So inserting your publisher ID into the AdSense ad block is a matter of hitting one or two files. Look-and-feel changes are made by editing the CSS stylesheet and/or the header and footer files.

Let me show you what I mean. When you download a site to your computer, this is what a typical site looks like unzipped:


As you can see, each page of content is a PHP file. Common elements, like the ad blocks, are found in separate files in the inc folder:


This is nothing new to a web geek, of course, but it's surprising how many of the pre-built sites go out of their way to make it hard for you to change things.

Now if you don't know PHP from alphabet soup, don't worry, full instructions are given as to how to modify the appropriate files. Trust me, you can do this.

There are also some great resources included with your membership. Here's what you see when you login to your EPW account:

As you can see, the site is well-organized and complete. There's a “How To Use Your Sites” guide (in HTML and PDF) that walks your through all the steps necessary to use the niche sites you get with your membership. There's a comprehensive set of webmaster resources. A pile of free ebooks on all sorts of online marketing topics. I think someone just starting out will find that there's a lot of useful material here to learn from.

I actually sent a recommendation for Exclusive PLR Websites to my mailing list a few days ago, and at least one reader has subscribed to the site and although I can't quote him exactly because I misplaced the email, he told me that he was able to take one of the sites and change it quite easily even though he knows nothing about PHP.

I'm not saying that EPW is perfect or that it's for everyone. If you're a geek, you should able to create your own templating system to crank out the sites, in which case you should be looking for raw content sources. And if you don't have the time necessary to customize and improve the sites you get, don't bother joining this or any similar site — you'll just be wasting your money.

That does it for the review, drop me a line if you have more questions. I'm going to continue the PLR series, using one or two of the EPW sites for example purposes.

Sponsored Link: Have you bought my new ebook, Link Cloaking For The Mystified? It's only $7! Here's what one reader had to say: “even though you warned about this book was written for the non-techie computer user, and I consider myself some techie, I learned a lot! Wow!“. Why not give it a try?

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

February 20, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Top 16 Web Revenue Blogs

Pat McCarthy over at Conversion Rater has compiled a list of the Top 16 Web Revenue Blogs and I'm happy to say that Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense (yes, this blog) made the list. His definition of a “web revenue blog” is a blog that helps others make money using blogs and websites. He used a comprehensive set of different ratings to come up with an overall score for each blog.

Looking at my ratings, it looks like I need to work on some link-building, because I was pretty much last in Technorati ranking and in the number of Yahoo backlinks to this site. Well, I've told you about my problems with Technorati before, and they still haven't subsided — Technorati decides to update itself once in a blue moon, despite my pinging and despite the fact that I post on nearly a daily basis. Ah well, not much I can do there. For the Yahoo backlinks, though, I can submit some more articles to various article directories and start building more backlinks that way.

Anyhow, it's always nice to be recognized. Humbling, too, when you look at the top blogs in that list.

Watch this space later today for that PLR site review I've been promising.

Sponsored Link: For no-nonsense AdSense advice, buy Uncommon AdSense today!

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

February 20, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

New $7 eBook: "Link Cloaking For The Mystified"

You my remember my recent discussion of the $7 Secrets report that describes (and includes scripts) how to make money by selling short reports for only $7. Well, if you've been wondering why I've been so quiet on this blog for the past week or so, it's because I was hard at work at creating my first “$7 report”.

I'd like to introduce you to Link Cloaking For The Mystified, a 35-page report on how to cloak links. A “cloaked” link is a friendly-looking link that ends up redirecting you to another link, typically an affiliate link. I use them all the time. For example, this link:

www.memwg.com/go/keyword-elite.html

is a cloaked link for:

egiguere.bryxen4.hop.clickbank.net

which is the affiliate link for Keyword Elite. Creating these links is really quite simple to do once you understand the underlying concepts. Most online marketers know how to do this, although they may not exactly understand what's happening, but I occasionally get a question from a reader on how to do it. So I've included full instructions in this ebook for five different ways of creating cloaked links, including one that's just for WordPress users. Plus I've included an example of a more advanced framing technique that affiliate marketers use to get their ads into AdWords without invoking the duplicate URL rule.

Oh, and a way to easily (and for free) “decloak” these kinds of links.

This book was written for the non-techie computer user. If that's you, I'm pretty sure you'll learn a lot from it.

I know there are a lot of $5 and $7 reports flooding the net right now thanks to $7 Secrets. There will be even more activity now that $7 Offers is up and running. But I think you'll find that my book is of exceptional quality and well worth the $7. Plus you get free updates.

Please note that I haven't yet enabled the affiliate program. If I end up submitting the book to $7 Offers I definitely will. Purchasers will be the first to know when the affiliate program is enabled.

So here's the (uncloaked) link again for you: Link Cloaking For The Mystified. If this works well, it'll be the first in a series, so send me some topic ideas if you've got some burning questions that you'd like answered about Internet marketing or computer technology.

Sponsored Link: For no-nonsense AdSense advice, buy Uncommon AdSense today!

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

February 18, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

The PLR AdSense Mini-Site (Part 2)

You might have noticed that I'm not posting as frequently over the last week. I'm busy writing something that should be ready shortly for your consideration. Stay tuned. But that doesn't mean we can't continue the discussion of pre-built AdSense sites we started in Part 1.

Questions To Ask

When you're considering joining a membership site offering pre-built AdSense sites (sometimes they advertise them as “AdSense templates”), you would do well to ask the following questions:

But here's perhaps the most important question to ask: Are you willing to put in the time and effort to make the sites profitable? If you're joining a membership site that gives you 10 sites per month, how many of those are you going to be able to customize — remember, you don't want to put them out as-is — and deploy? If you don't do anything with the sites, you're just wasting your money. (Aside: in his ebook, the Rich Jerk points out that most Internet marketing products depend on this fact. Instead of going out and making money, a lot of people just read about making money, which makes them easy targets for savvy marketers. If you've never read his book, you might want to check it out, it's an entertaining read and it's only $10.)

Next time, I'll take a look at a membership site that I think is doing all the right things.

Sponsored Link: Don't buy Uncommon AdSense unless you're serious about doing better with AdSense.

P.S.: I've gotten several requests to finish my Day Job Killer review, even after my rant on the subject. Maybe I should take a vote. Do you want to see it finished?

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

February 16, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

The PLR AdSense Mini-Site (Part 1)

As promised, I'm going to start talking about private label rights (PLR) again, this time with the focus on AdSense mini-sites built with PLR content. Over the weekend I was approached, quite unsolicited, by someone who runs a PLR membership site. The site — I'm not going to identify it yet in this posting, I'll leave that for a proper review — offers a set of niche mini-sites to its members each month. This is not a new concept, of course, and to be honest I'm always very skeptical of these membership sites, because the sites they offer are typically very poorly designed, not unique, and hard to change. There's software out there that can crank these sites out pretty quickly, after all, so it really doesn't take much effort to start selling them to others.

Now some people think pre-built AdSense sites are the bane of the Web. And in some ways they're right. But like most things, pre-built sites aren't inherently evil in and of themselves. Despite what the vendors of those sites may tell you, you won't get rich just deploying pre-built sites. Not without some effort to get traffic to those sites.

In my opinion, the best use for a pre-built site is to use it as the basis for a custom site of your own creation. It's a starting point for people who lack the skills and/or time to create their own sites from scratch.

The problem is that most pre-built sites aren't designed to be customized and extended. Not easily, in any case. Normally, you have to change each page individually. The HTML tends to be very unclean, full of unnecessary <font> and <table> tags. The pages are often unoptimized — no heading tags, no natural keyword use. In the end they end up being more work than if you'd started from scratch yourself.

Tomorrow we'll look at the kinds of questions you should be asking yourself about these kind of membership sites.

Sponsored Link: If you're taking the quality approach, my book Uncommon AdSense has lots of advice to help you build better and more profitable sites.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

February 14, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

No, Not All Affiliate Marketers Are Liars…

After I posted Are All Affiliate Marketers Liars? I realized I hadn't really answered the question I'd posed. I'm a bit frazzled this weekend. Both are cars went in the shop on Friday afternoon, what are the chances of that happening — my wife called me up to say her car wouldn't start, so I headed over to give her a boost and when I got there the brake fluid in my car gushed out courtesy of a ruptured brake line. Then today I checked my AdWords account only to discover that I'd missed the decimal point in one of my bids and was actually bidding $47 instead of $0.47. Ooops. (Note to self: check those decimal points!) So much for the profit on that ad campaign…

But back to the topic at hand. No, I don't think all affiliate marketers are liars. But more than a few fabricate stories and/or stretch the truth in order to get sales. This happens in the brick-and-mortar world, too, so it's nothing new — most sales techniques are very old school, after all. But I don't like to have my name associated with fake stories like the one I showed you.

Anyhow, let's get back to AdSense. Tomorrow or the next day I'll have a review of a PLR membership site and some more discussion of the whole private label rights phenomenon.

Sponsored Link: If you're taking the quality approach, my book Uncommon AdSense has lots of advice to help you build better and more profitable sites.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

February 11, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 1 Comment 

Are All Affiliate Marketers Liars?

There's a dark side to marketing your wares using affiliate programs. As most of you know, I decided to go the ClickBank route for Uncommon AdSense. This means that I give up 50% of the net price (after ClickBank fees) for each copy sold by an affiliate. (You set the percentage, but it's customary to give 50% or more to the affiliate.) This gives the affiliate incentive to promote your book — any affiliate who sells a copy of Uncommon AdSense makes about $21, for example.

When I first released my book, I contacted a fairly well-known Internet marketer and asked him if he'd like to promote it to his list. Now, unfortunately, there are more and more products being sold and hyped via affiliate marketing, so it took him a while to tell his list about UA. He also sent it out in an email with two or three other products he was pushing, so it didn't get a lot of exposure. But what really got to me was the sales page he cooked up for the book.

Now, I know my sales page isn't great. I've been trying to think of how to fix that without having it turn into a cookie cutter long-copy super-hyped sales page like you see everywhere these days. I think I've finally figured out what to do, and I'll have more on that in a later posting, but in the meantime the page is what the page is. Kind of like everything I write, I guess.

Anyhow, he didn't like the fact that I was linking to other sites from my sales page. A proper sales page should only link to the order page, after all, and maybe a privacy policy and a disclaimer — or so the traditional Internet marketing gurus would tell you. So this marketer said he's get one of his staff members to put together a different sales page for promoting the book.

Well, here's what he came up with. I don't actually want to identify this person, so I copied the page over to my site, changed his affiliate link to mine and added a disclaimer at the top of the page. Other than that, though, it's all his.

Now go and compare it to the real page. If you've been a longtime reader of mine, you'll probably notice a difference in the writing style. Most of the page is devoted to some story he made up about me and a “friend” that I've apparently helped make a rich AdSense publisher.

In the industry lingo, these are “pre-sell” pages. You want a good headline, yes, but you need a good story to go along with it. Even if it's made up, I guess.

So does the fake story work for you?

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

February 11, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

SEO Hotline Reviews Uncommon AdSense

Ahmed Bilal of SEO Hotline has just posted his review of Uncommon AdSense, which he liked very much. He starts by focusing on one of my bonuses, the Understanding the AdSense Patent ebook:

This is a real goldmine if you have the time and patience to go through the text (and Eric’s clear and concise explanations) of what each claim in the patent is about. If you’re pushed for time you can just read the summary, but for an in-depth understanding of how Google AdSense works, you need to roll up your sleeves and dig in deep. Luckily, Eric’s done the hard work for you so it’s simply a matter of printing out the document, sitting back and reading it through.

This is what he says about Uncommon AdSense itself:

It’s devoid of hype (like Chris Garrett’s Killer Flagship Content) and reads more like a reference book than the usual serving of ‘this will make you rich’ ebooks.

Ahmed also gave me a list of suggestions, which is always nice to get — and I'll be sure to follow through on most of them as I update the book. Read the full review to see what he suggests. More information about the book can be found at UncommonAdSense.com.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

February 10, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Get $15 Off Uncommon AdSense From PayPal

In case you haven't heard, PayPal is offering a one-time $15 rebate off any purchase of $30 or more made with PayPal between now and March 31 for residents of the United States and Canada. If you've been thinking about buying my ebook Uncommon AdSense: Tips, Techniques and Strategies to Maximize Your AdSense Earnings then now is the best time to do it! It retails for $47, so with the $15 rebate you'll get it for just $32!

Getting your rebate is very easy to do, just follow the instructions on the PayPal special offer page. The book is still bought via ClickBank, just make sure you use your PayPal account to pay for it.

Note that the rebate doesn't occur immediately, it will be deposited into your PayPal account by May 28. The details are all on the special offer page.

Thank you, PayPal!

Sponsored Link: Although it doesn't qualify for the offer, $7 Secrets is also a great deal considering what you get for only $7. See my review for the details.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

February 9, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

How AdSense Publishers Make Money With Duplicate Content

Darren Rowse (aka ProBlogger) left this comment about my tutorial on using Keyword Elite's AdSense page generation facility. Let me republish it here because it makes for an interesting discussion:


I really wonder what the point of this type of thing is. Republishing what other people have said and what others are publishing over and over and over again on other sites seems quite pointless to me.


Search engines are getting better and better at filtering such content out and in the end they don't really add value to anyone's lives from what I can see.


If people actually put the same sort of effort that they put into setting up sites like this into creating a few interesting, useful, unique and valuable articles of their own I think they'd build a site that was much more valuable over the long term.

What Darren espouses — and what I've always said — is the “quality” approach to content monetization: write good, focused and unique/different content to attract both the search engines and a persistent readership. That's exactly what he does, of course. It's not the only approach, however.

The other main approach to content monetization is the “quantity” approach, and that's where the page generators — especially dedicated programs like Traffic Equalizer — come into play. I've alluded to this before in postings like 172 AdSense Sites = $5000 per month but it bears further explanation.

In the quantity approach you make money by deploying as many sites as possible across as many money-making niches as possible. It's strictly a numbers game. Each site (and I use the term loosely here, because the “site” may exist on a subdomain or just as a folder on a larger site) may only make 50 cents a day in AdSense earnings. But multiply that by (say) 200 and suddenly you're making $100 per day.

What does it take for an individual site to make 50 cents in earnings? Let's say the average per-click payout is low, only 5 cents. Then each site needs only 10 clicks. Remember, that's across the entire site, not per page. You don't need a lot of traffic to generate 10 clicks. Assuming a very modest and easily achievable 5% clickthrough ratio, you only need 200 visitors per day to make it work. That's just 2 visits per page.

But where do you get those 100 pages for each of those 200 sites? Very few people are going to sit down and write 20,000 pages of content. What they're going to do is fill the sites with content from other sources: Wikipedia, private label rights articles and books (rewritten or not), EZineArticles, etc. etc. Creating these content-rich sites is quite easy. You can even buy pre-made AdSense site packages like this one, this one, or this one.

So creating the sites is easy, even if it takes you a few weeks to get everything in place. The traffic is key, and the most profitable traffic is the “natural” or “organic” search engine traffic. But it's not the only way. Right now there's a free report going around the Net showing how someone makes large AdSense cheques each month strictly using pay-per-click traffic to get visitors. That can be a tricky game to play — you're doing arbitrage, after all — but it's definitely doable if you've got the right niches.

But even organic traffic is doable. Yes, the search engines work hard to week out duplicate content. But they won't necessarily weed out all the content, and the different search engines all handle duplicate content differently. All it takes is for a few pages on each site to rank high — think “long tail” rankings — and you're set. You may not keep those rankings for long, but adding content regularly to your sites will ensure that some of your pages are always getting traffic.

Also, you can drive traffic back to your sites by writing (or, more likely, rewriting) articles with bio boxes that link back to your sites. Submit enough articles to various article directories and you're bound to get traffic and improved rankings.

So that's the quantity approach. Search engines and users generally don't like them, this is true, because most such places provide no added value to the content. Duplicate content or not, you can definitely make money with these techniques.

Oh, and when you have a site that's no longer raking in the bucks from AdSense, you can just package it up and sell it as a ready-built AdSense site to squeeze even more money out of it.

And that, my friends, is how AdSense publishers make money with duplicate content.

Sponsored Link: If you're taking the quality approach, my book Uncommon AdSense has lots of advice to help you build better and more profitable sites.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

February 9, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Next Page →