Not too long ago I reviewed AdWords180, an ebook about AdWords that I found to be different than all the other books. Although the introductory pricing is no longer in effect — it's a $97 book now — I thought I'd share with you my experiences with the book so far.

The fundamental premise of AdWords180 is that you can Google's content network as a source of cheap advertising to sell whatever you want. The book was very different from the other books I'd reviewed up to that point, since those books all relied on search advertising and the promotion of affiliate products.

I got a chance to put the techniques in AdWords180 to practice this week. I must admit my initial results were disappointing. I had several ads running, but they weren't showing. If they don't show, you don't get any clicks. No clicks, no sales. So it's important to get the ads shown. When you're dealing with the content network (AdSense sites), however, there's a significant delay in the stats reporting, so you don't really figure these things out right away. (This is why it's a good idea to set your initial daily budget fairly low so you don't accidentally waste a lot of money as you get the feel of things.)

Anyhow, my problem was that I chose to promote products in the “Internet marketing” niche, which was a bad thing to do. These are products like Day Job Killer that I've reviewed here before. But it's a hypercompetitive niche and I shouldn't have been surprised that the AdWords180 techniques weren't able to do much for me there.

So what I did was switch out of the IM niche to a completely different niche, one that had nothing to do with the Internet or marketing. This experiment was much more successful: on an initial ad spend of about $2 I made back $40 in ClickBank commissions. That's a pretty good rate of return, although only time will tell if I can sustain it. But this is the most promising system I've used so far and I'm definitely going to try some more campaigns with non-IM products.

As it happens, my review of AdWords180 sold a few copies of the book for the author, enough that he's approached me out of the blue to offer my readers a special discounted price for the book. If you want the details, drop me an email, as it's only for my readers. (I'll send a note out to my mailing lists about it later, so if you're on one of my lists then just wait for the email.) There's also an AdWords180 forum that you can peruse to get feedback from others who've bought the book — most of the forum is open to the public.

Don't be fooled, though, you still have to do work to make money with the AdWords180 technique. And you'll find a tool like Keyword Elite very handy for helping with some of the drudgery. But it does seem to work. I'll know more in a couple of weeks.

Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about 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.

Getting traffic is always an issue with any site, but especially small sites in obscure niches. You need a way to grab some attention. A lot of people lately have getting traffic by posting videos. Others post salacious images. And of course there's the obligatory linkbaiting headlines. There is no “one way” to get traffic, what works for you may not work for someone else and vice-versa. You have to try different things.

Humor is a great way to get some traffic. Yesterday I discovered a neat site called ToonDoo that lets you create your own comic strip for publication on your site or blog using simple drag-and-drop tools. There's nothing to download, the comic editor just runs in your browser (it's Flash-based) and registration for the service is free.

Anyhow, I had an idea for a one-off comic strip a while back, but not having any real artistic ability I never got around to doing anything about it. But it gave me a great excuse to try ToonDoo. Here's the result of my experiment, posted on my BlackBerry programming blog:

(OK, it's a geeky thing, but what did you expect?)

ToonDoo was very easy to use, although they could use some better help — look at the lame title I was stuck with because I didn't really know what I was doing at first. You get to choose between 1-, 2- and 3-panel comic strips and they provide you with galleries of predefined characters and objects (like those faceless people) as well as text balloons and other typical comic strip paraphernalia. You can also import your own pictures, which is how I got that RIM logo up on the meeting room wall.

When you're done with the comic, ToonDoo will generate an image tag that you can easily insert into your site or blog. The comic is actually hosted on their site and visitors can leave comments and vote for their favorite ones.

Anyhow, the point of this posting is not to prove that I'm some kind of comic genius, which should now be obvious that I'm not, but to get you thinking about another way to attract some eyeballs to your site and get people talking about it. Because that, my friends, is how you're going to make money with AdSense or whatever other monetization scheme you're using. No traffic, no money — simple as that. Since we can't all resort to displaying nude pictures of ourselves (look, you want to attract viewers, not send them running away!) then coming up with a funny comic strip, image or video is one way for your site to get some attention.

Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about 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.

One thing I don't think I've ever talked about explicitly is the concept of siloing. Siloing is something many sites do to organize their pages. The article Theming Through Siloing describes the concept in detail, but basically it means:

• Grouping similarly-themed pages together under a single “landing” or “index” page to create a “silo”
• Link directly between pages in the same silo
• Across silos, link only to the other silo's landing/index page

A natural silo structure often arises when you group content by folder/directory or by subdomain. (About.com, despite its ugliness and use of popups, is perhaps the best example of siloing via subdomains.) Actually, many of these are “semi-silos”, because they'll link directly to pages in other silos, breaking the “link only to the landing page” rule. Silos can be nested, of course, to divide a broad theme into a set of subareas.

The primary purpose of siloing is to improve a site's search engine rankings. For any given theme, the silo's landing page targets a primary keyword for the niche, while the individual pages within the silo target narrower (often long tail) keywords and phrases.

A Siloing Example

Take my No Debt Is Good site. Originally developed as an example of a single-page AdSense site, it would be a perfect site for me to develop using the silo model. (The site currently has more than one page on it already, so it's not a single-page site anymore. That honor now belongs to the site's opposite, Debt Is Great. It's funny, I've had people — banking types — mail me about the debt-free living site to tell me my views were all wrong, but no one's mailed me about the debt accumulation site to tell me that. Hmm.) Here's what I'd do:

1. The overall theme of the site is “being debt-free” or “debt-free living”.
2. Using a tool like Keyword Elite, come up with a set of silos related to “debt free”. (You don't have to use KE, of course, use any keyword tool you want. Even playing around with Google Suggest will give you some ideas.)
3. Ideally, you want to pick the keywords with the highest volume as your silo keywords, which is why a keyword tool like KE is useful for cutting through the drudgery. The initial set of silos I was able to come up with using KE's Project #1 (to get the list of related keywords) followed by Project #2 (to get the search volumes) are:
   • credit cards
   • debt consolidation
   • debt reduction
   • debt solutions
   • debt free
   • debt counseling

   Another way to generate this kind of list is to look at the top 2 or 3 sites on Google for “debt free” and use the AdWords keyword tool to get a list of site-related keywords based on those URLs, grouped by theme. The list of silos I get back from this method include:

   • debt consolidation
   • credit card
   • debt reduction
   • money makeover
   • debt management
   • debt help

   The lists are very similar. You could probably have come up with most of these ideas on your own, too, but it's always good to check things with a keyword tool to make sure you're covering all the heavy hitters.

4. Create a folder for each silo. The name of the folder is based on the silo keyword, of course, which will have important implications on our AdSense ads.
5. Create 5 or 6 pages of content for each silo. Each page should directly relate to the silo's primary keyword. Again, you can find a tool like KE or the AdWords keyword tool to find relevant keywords.
6. Within each silo, create an index page that links to each of the silo's pages. Each page of content should also link to other pages within the silo. Standard SEO techniques are to be used here, such as varying the anchor text of the links, using proper page titles, headings, etc. Link out to other silos where appropriate, but only to the silo's index page, never to any of the content pages in the other silo.
7. Finally, create the top-level index page that links to the index pages of the different silos.

Again, there's nothing radical in any of this, and as I mentioned before many sites naturally organize themselves along similar lines.

AdSense and Siloing

SEO siloing is about search engine rankings. So how does it relate to AdSense? Well, the AdSense patent — you get my detailed analysis of it free by purchasing Uncommon AdSense — describes how the AdSense targeting system selects the ads for a particular page of content. The criteria include the following:

• the URL of the page
• the content of other pages within the same folder/site as the page
• the anchor text of links from the page to other pages
• the anchor text of links to the page from other pages
• the page title

The siloing technique ensures that each page of content focuses all of these factors onto a very specific subtopic of the site's overall theme. Which means that the ads displayed on those pages will themselves be tightly focused on the same subtopic. Better relevance means more clickthroughs, which in turn means more money.

So the next time you start a new content site, or if you want to fix up an old site, use the siloing technique to get both great ad relevancy and great search engine rankings.

If you're a WordPress user, be sure to watch Michael Gray's Make WordPress Search Engine Friendly video, where he shows how placing posts in just one category is an easy way to achieve a siloing effect. You should also refer to my AdSense and SEO for WordPress article and my AdSense and robots.txt series for further tips on creating an optimized WordPress blog.

Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about 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.