I get the occasional email from my newsletter subscriber asking me my opinion on a certain AdSense-related product, in this case an ebook called AdSense Arbitrage Voodoo. I'm usually able to answer, but not always, because I don't have the time (or the money!) to review every AdSense infoproduct that comes out. But if one of my readers is interested, it might be something worth checking out. Hence this review.
AdSense Arbitrage Voodoo
AdSense Arbitrage Voodoo is written by George Katsoudas. Like the sales page for my own book, the main AAVoodoo page doesn't have a fancy ebook cover on it. Most of the page is the usual over-the-top sales copy, but scroll down to the bottom and you'll see a section labeled “Special Reports” which links to several pages of content such as “How to Write Google AdWords Ads” and “How to Improve Your AdSense Quality Score”. This is a nice change — some actual content to read! What the sales page doesn't say is that those are actual extracts from the AAVoodoo book itself, so they give you a good idea of how the book's written and the level of detail covered. The book weighs in at 71 pages, by the way, although there are a fair number of screenshots at the front of the book that beef up the page count.
You are excused for thinking that AdSense Arbitrage Voodoo is about AdSense arbitrage, because that's what the title implies. It isn't, not really, unlike the AdSense Arbitrage and Leveraging ebook (see my review) which is precisely about that topic. But AAVoodoo only touches the surface of the arbitrage concept in comparison.
The basic technique promoted by AAVoodoo is to combine the arbitrage concept — buy PPC (typically AdWords) traffic at low cost and send it to a page with higher-paying AdSense ads — with the affiliate marketing concept. In other words, send your traffic to a landing page that has three things on it:
- An AdSense block (preferably 250 by 250 or else two stacked 264 by 60 blocks — to show only the highest-paying ads) in the top left of the page
- An affiliate link for a related product
- An opt-in form for a related course/newsletter that you create
The book comes with four different page layout templates that you can use as starting points for your own landing pages.
So the basic idea behind AAVoodoo is that you give visitors three chances to (directly or indirectly) make you money: either by clicking an ad, visiting the affiliate product's sales page (which he recommends you open in a new window in order to keep the visitor on your page) or by signing up for an autoresponder series you've created.
In some ways this goes against the grain. Most marketers will tell you not to mix these three elements together and focus on one thing only, ideally building your mailing list. Does the AAVoodoo method work? I can't answer that as of yet.
Let's get back to the arbitrage topic. Although AAVoodoo isn't exclusively or even mainly about AdSense arbitrage, it does discuss it. It starts with niche selection (there's a list of suggested niches if you don't have any ideas) and keyword research. AAVoodoo recommends Wordtracker as its keyword tool of choice and has a number of screenshots showing you how to build a keyword list. He then briefly goes over the same tasks with the Google and Overture online keyword tools. One thing he mentions that's true from my experience is that none of these tools have exactly overlapping sets of keywords, so it's good to use as many of them as possible to generate your list. I'm surprised he didn't include instructions on how to do the keyword generation with Keyword Elite, because there's nothing in what he's doing that can't be done with KE. (Aside: sign up for my free Keyword Elite mini-course.) He also mentions some free online tools that you can use to manipulate the keyword lists you come up with and shows how to use Microsoft Excel to do some basic list operations.
The whole point of this exercise is to find low-volume but also low-cost terms that you can bid on for pay-per-click (PPC) traffic using Google AdWords.
That's the list of keywords for traffic generation. Next you have to create a list of keywords for content, i.e. to attract higher-paying AdSense ads. You do that using the AdWords keyword tool, letting it suggest synonyms for you and then playing around with cost estimates to find ads whose first three ad positions are relatively high-paying. You can only do rough estimates, of course, because the keyword tool gives you search network costs, not content network costs (which is where the AdSense earnings come from), and you don't get all that money anyhow. What the book's actually talking about here is the “bid gap analysis” I've mentioned before. The process can be sped up significantly (and more accurately) by using AdSenseAccelerator,
by the way.
After you've built your lists, time to build the landing pages. As I mentioned before, the book provides you with some templates and gives advice as to how to structure the page and write the content. It also talks about writing the autoresponder messages for the email part of the technique. Nothing radical here, just a lot of work.
There's some good advice about trying to make your content pages “sticky” so that the visitor stays there and you have more opportunities to make money as well as look more legitimate in Google's eyes. One way to do this is by adding relevant YouTube videos to the pages, and the book shows you how to do this. (You really don't need instructions, though, it's ridiculously easy.)
Then comes the iffy part of the book, getting the PPC traffic to your site. It has the standard advice about writing keywords-targeted ad groups and including the keywords in the ad itself. It then tells you to create a fake subdomain for your landing page site based on those keywords and to use that fake subdomain as the display URL for your ad. You'll get slapped by the AdWords editors, but apparently if you plead your case they'll let it through. I dunno, seems dubious to me…
This is followed by advice on how to create landing pages that automatically adjust themselves to reflect the ad group that triggered the click, which basically means sprinkling in a bit of PHP code into your pages. The concept's fine, but the implementation's a bit off because most webhosts run with the “register globals” feature of PHP turned off, so the code he shows won't actually work unless you add this snippet at the top of the file:
<?php $ag=$_GET['ag']; ?>
An easy fix, but one that will most undoubtedly trip some people up.
There's a section about using site targeting as a traffic generation source, which is the technique described in much more detail by the AdWords180 book (see my review.)
The remainder of the book is a set of short sections about building a business, stopping information overload, and overcoming procrastination.
Overall, this is an OK book. The title is somewhat misleading and there is a questionable tactic or two mentioned, but if you're willing to put in the work (aye, there's the rub) then the general technique the author presents is quite workable. You'll need other books if you want to delve more deeply into certain aspects that the book covers fairly superficially, but that's not unusual in the world of infoproducts.
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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.
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