PLRSiteBuilder: Quickly and Easily Build AdSense-Ready Websites
In my last post I pointed you to the Debt Is Great! site and asked you what was special about it. In fact, it’s not the site that’s special but the way it was built: it was built from a collection of text files using my new PLRSiteBuilder tool.
PLRSiteBuilder takes a series of text files and creates a fully working, AdSense-ready site out of them in no time flat. The “Debt Is Great!” site was build using a bunch of PLR (private label rights) articles I happened to own. I simply threw them into a folder, changed the names of some of the files, and made sure that each article (file) had a title (the first line/paragraph). I then ran the tool on the folder to generate the final website. Everything you see on that site was generated by the tool: the home page, the about page, the privacy page, the XML sitemap. Ads were inserted automatically into the article pages, too. It really is painless. I know the content isn’t great, but that’s not the point of the site.
Here’s some of the feedback I’ve received from a few of my early buyers:
“The software is a dream! Works beautifully and very very easy to customize your pages. It’s really a steal for the price!”
“I just purchased and had a site online within 5 minutes! I love this program, outstanding value for money.”
I’ll be raising the price on this soon, so if you want in now at a great discount, subscribe to this blog to get the magic link to the prelaunch page that explains everything in more detail. The software works on Windows, Macintosh or Linux computers. The only restriction is that you need a hosting service that supports PHP to run the generated sites, as PHP is used extensively for the templating.
Note: Of course, if you really want to do well with AdSense and get great traffic to your sites, you still need great content. This tool doesn’t help with that, it just helps you create the websites. But it’s a real timesaver. I wrote it so I could spend more time on creating good content, not wasting it building sites.
Guess What’s Special About This Site…
Take a look at Debt Is Great!. Besides learning all about student loan consolidation rates and 30-year home loans, there’s something special about this site that I’ll be revealing shortly to my subscribers. (Hint: look past the content.)
Don’t forget you get free stuff for subscribing, too, such as a copy of my SuperSuggester tool.
Sponsored Link: Have a dog that’s running loose? Read my Invisible Fence story for some advice.
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.
AdSense Conquers The New York Times
Today I learned that the New York Time was abandoning its paywall. The term “paywall” refers to a blocked off area of a website whose content can only be accessed for a fee, such as via a subscription. Many newspapers protect some or most of their content behind a paywall, a model that has seemingly worked well up until now. Or has it?
In truth, paywalls only work when the content you offer is truly unique and valuable. If there’s another way to get same content for free, guess which model’s going to win? It’s amazing the hoops people will go through in order to avoid paying for something. News is so easy to find for free these days that the NYT was probably seeing its subscription base starting to decline.
This is further validation that the AdSense monetization model — make content available for free and make money from advertising — works. Expect to see more organizations drop or cut back on their paywalls.
Sponsored Link: Check out the Simple Cash Blog for some simple online money-making techniques that anyone can implement.
Eric Giguere is the author of the AdSense book “Uncommon AdSense” and the award-nominated AdSense blog “Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense”. Subscribe to the blog and get free stuff!
Google Should Switch To Euros
As I wrote before in The Greatest Effect On AdSense Earnings For International Publishers, the US exchange rate is one variable that non-US AdSense publishers cannot control, much to their chagrin as of late.
Yesterday the Canadian dollar finally reached parity with the US dollar after 31 years of being worth less. (Sometimes much less — a few years back I was getting 45% extra for any US dollar cheques I converted to Canadian funds!) This was really just a side effect of the US dollar’s slide against the Euro.
If you’re a US publisher then this probably doesn’t mean too much to you, but it definitely affects those of us on the outside, as Google’s US-denominated payments are worth less and less to us once they’re converted over. On the flipside, however, non-US advertisers should see their AdWords costs decrease because the conversion to US dollars for bid prices will be cheaper.
Now if only Google would switch to Euros as its base currency for advertising transactions. The exchange rate is much better…
Sponsored Link: Check out the Simple Cash Blog for some simple online money-making techniques that anyone can implement.
Eric Giguere is the author of the AdSense book “Uncommon AdSense” and the award-nominated AdSense blog “Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense”. Subscribe to the blog and get free stuff!
How To REALLY Know What Google Thinks About Your Site
At some point you’ll inevitably wonder what Google thinks your site is about. You might be wondering why certain AdSense ads are showing up, for example, or why you’re ranking well for some terms but not for others. While there are many factors used by the ad selection and search ranking algorithms, there’s no doubt that the overall theme of a site plays a part in both. So how do you tell what Google thinks about your site?
It’s trivially easy, actually. All you need is the AdWords keyword tool. It’s a free tool available to anyone, not just AdWords advertisers. While it’s mostly used to build keyword lists and determine how profitable specific keywords are (by doing some investigation of the bid prices), it can also be used to do site-specific keyword analysis. Here’s what you do:
- Start the AdWords keyword tool (opens new window) and click the Site-Related Keywords tab:
- Adjust the language and country restrictions, if necessary, and type in the URL of the page you want to analyze:
You can ask Google to consider other pages on the same site, which is useful if you’re trying to gather information about the overall theme of a site. For individual page analysis, leave this unchecked. - Press the Get keywords button. Google will immediately dispatch a crawler to analyze the page:
The crawl is immediate, which means that any changes you made to the page since the last time it was analyzed will be reflected in the list of generated keywords — a very handy feature for fine-tuning your pages. (It’s really meant for AdWords advertisers looking to tune their landing pages to match them to the keyword groups, but it serves our purposes well.) - Google will then present you with the set of keyword themes that it thinks best reflect what your site is about based on the content of the pages it analyzed:
Some of the themes may surprise you. Notice the inclusion of the WordPress-related keyword themes in the list above: that’s because No Debt Is Good is a WordPress blog and doesn’t (yet) attempt to hide it. (Here’s a great tip: if you’re an advertiser, create a separate ad group for each theme, it’ll really help the targeting.) - Keyword themes are broken down further into individual keywords, as shown in this small example:
You’re also given some general information about the popularity of the keyword among both searchers and advertisers, which may steer you in one direction or another when you’re looking to fine-tune your content. For example, I should really have articles on credit card debt consolidation and debt elimination programs on my site to directly match some of these keywords.
That’s it! Repeat this process as many times as you want with any or all of your pages.
There is an important caveat to using this tool, however: the tool does not consider links from other sites in its analysis. Those links can have a huge impact on how your pages rank, especially in highly-competitive topics. There’s usually very little you can do about external links, but you can definitely work on improving the internal linkage of your site and making sure the content-based themes discovered by the tool match your expectations. This will ensure consistent ad targeting at the very least, although it should also improve your rankings in the long run.
Sponsored Link: Check out the Simple Cash Blog for some simple online money-making techniques that anyone can implement.
Eric Giguere is the author of the AdSense book “Uncommon AdSense” and the award-nominated AdSense blog “Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense”. Subscribe to the blog and get free stuff!
AdSense-Related Searches
I’m always on the lookout for AdSense-related topics for use as fodder for this blog, so it occurred to me the other day to put my SuperSuggester tool (available free to subscribers!) to work and see what Google thinks people are searching for when it comes to AdSense. Below is the list I came up with. It’s not perfect by any means, of course, since it presumes that all the searches start with the word “adsense” — that’s a limitation of the Google Suggest service. Still, there are some interesting things to talk about in this list:
- I sorted the data by the number of pages in Google’s index, so the usual suspects are at the top: “adsense”, “adsense google”, “adsense blog” (sadly, this blog doesn’t even rank in the top 100 places — hey, folks, a few links back to memwg.com on that term would really help!), “adsense forum”, etc.
- Type-in traffic always amazes me… people looking to sign up for AdSense or even just to login to their account search Google for “adsense.com” (which now takes you to the AdSense login), “adsense home” and “adsense login” to list a few.
- Lots of questions about AdSense on Blogger, even though Google makes it really easy to add AdSense to your Blogger pages: “adsense blogger”, “adsense blogspot”, “adsense on blogger”.
- Many money-related searches, of course.
The really interesting searches, though, are the ones that have fewer matching pages in Google, i.e. the bottom half of the list. Lots of product mentions in there — with some people looking for free/cracked versions of things.
I’ve gotten a few ideas from this list already, but I’m always looking for more. Look through the list and if there’s something there that you’d like to know more about, just leave a comment.
Sponsored Link: Check out the Simple Cash Blog for some simple online money-making techniques that anyone can implement.
Eric Giguere is the author of the AdSense book “Uncommon AdSense” and the award-nominated AdSense blog “Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense”. Subscribe to the blog and get free stuff!
Google AdWords Case Study: Site Design
Time to continue our AdWords exploration. (I bet you thought I forgot about it!) In Part 1 we dissected AdWords text ads, in Part 2 we looked at AdWords keywords, and in Part 3 we examined the infamous AdWords quality score. Today we combine everything we’ve learned so far to come up with AdWords site design guidelines. Which, not unsurprisingly, end up being good guidelines for AdSense publishers as well.
AdWords Site = Content + Optimized Landing Pages
The basic formula to follow when creating a site in order to get the most bang for your AdWords bucks is quite simple, really. Your site needs two things: content and optimized landing pages. Let’s look at each part separately.
Content
AdSense publishers are already familiar with “content is king”, but AdWords advertisers may not realize how important the content on a site is. “Content” in this context, however, refers to information a potential customer finds useful. These include but are not limited to:
- Contact information: Who are you? Where are you located? Do you have a phone number? A mailing address? A contact form? The more details you can provide, the better.
- Privacy policy: What do you do with customer information? How do you collect it? Is it safe?
- Logos and certifications: Are you a member of the BBB? Do you have a “hacker safe” designation? Prominently mention this kind of stuff.
- Sitemap: Help the customer navigate the site.
- Sample newsletters: If the customer is going to sign up for your list, let them see a sample of what they’ll get first.
- Product details: Tell as much as you can about the product(s) you’re selling.
Google in particular loves to see detailed contact information along with clear privacy policies. A “good” advertiser site from their point of view therefore consists of at least three pages:
- The home page (i.e. the default landing page)
- The “about” page (contact information)
- The privacy policy page (disclaimers, etc.)
If you have a one-page selling site, as many affiliates do, you can generally increase your quality score simply by adding contact information (either on the page itself or separately as described above) and a privacy policy.
But don’t stop there. You’ll do even better if you have more content on your site. Articles about topics related to what you’re selling: tips, techniques, things you can do with the products, etc. Make sure these articles are available from the home page and are also listed in your sitemap. Use basic search engine optimization (SEO) principles when you create this content (you may be able to grab or rewrite content from elsewhere) but don’t focus too much on the SEO aspect — you’re including this content not to rank well in the search engines (although that would be a great side benefit) but to keep the potential customer on your site and increase the probability that they will buy something, sign up for your mailing list, etc. The longer they visit, the better.
Optimized Landing Pages
Having good content is the basis for a decent quality score. But you can go one step further by creating optimized landing pages that are geared specifically to the keywords you’re targeting and the text of your ads. By matching the keywords to the ads to the landing pages you get the highest quality score.
It’s not hard to do, but it takes time. The first step is to create narrowly-targeted ad groups. Each ad group should consist of only a few closely-related keywords (ideally one keyword per group, not counting the matching variants or negative keywords). Each ad in the group should include one or more of the keywords in the ad text.
The second step is to create specific landing pages for each ad group. The title of the page should include the primary keyword or phrase in the group. It should also be in the main heading and at various other points on the page. Big bonus points if you can also get the keyword into the URL of the page itself.
If this sounds like work to do, it is, and it’s not very exciting work either. The payoff is in sometimes drastically reduced advertising costs. (There are systems you can buy or code yourself to do some of the grunt work for you, such as generating landing pages that are automatically “tuned” to a given keyword. These can be a real time-saver, but make sure that the landing pages they generate actually make sense!)
At this point some of you are going to worry about all that duplicate content. If you have 20 ad groups, after all, you’ll be creating 20 landing pages but they won’t be very different from each other. Don’t wet your pants! If it worries you, exclude your landing pages from the search engines using your robots.txt file: that’s what it’s for. Just be sure, however, to let the AdWords landing page quality bot see those pages, otherwise all your work will be for naught. See the AdWords help for more details.
What’s Next
At this point I hope everyone reading this series has a good grasp of the basic principles necessary to lower their advertising costs. If something’s not clear, please leave a comment and I’ll be happy to explain it further. Next, we’ll start the actual case study by looking for an affiliate product (or products) to advertise. The eventual goal is to build a site around that product that we can then advertise via AdWords and hopefully get ourselves a positive return on investment (ROI).
Sponsored Link: Check out the Simple Cash Blog for some simple online money-making techniques that anyone can implement.
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. Subscribe to the blog and get free stuff!
Hybrid Ads: Links in AdSense Ad Units
As you know, Google is constantly testing different ways to improve the earnings of their AdSense ad units. One of the things they’ve been doing lately is embedding link units right into regular ad units, effectively merging the two into a hybrid kind of ad unit. Here’s what it looks like, a screenshot taken from this very blog over the weekend:
You won’t see these too often. Google does split testing on these kinds of changes to see if they work or not. There is no way for you to opt out of these tests, unfortunately, which means that any AdSense publisher can become a guinea pig for Google’s experimentation. Other publishers have reported being forced to display CPA (cost per action) ads, for example.
Anyhow, if you wonder why your ads look different sometimes, that’s why… if these hybrid ads prove to be successful, expect them to be rolled out across the network. They might be made optional in that case. (And they really only work with the banner ads — they need lots of horizontal space.)
Sponsored Link: Check out the Simple Cash Blog for some simple online money-making techniques that anyone can implement.
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. Subscribe to the blog and get free stuff!
IvanAnywhere
Let’s take a break from AdSense and online marketing and discuss something completely irrelevant and fun (at least for me): a robot friend of mine named IvanAnywhere.
“IvanAnywhere” is the name for the real-life robotic avatar created for Ivan Bowman, a colleague of mine at Sybase iAnywhere here in Waterloo, Ontario. I’ve known Ivan for a long time now — first as a co-op student on my team, then as a full-time colleague — and when he decided to follow his wife out east (to Halifax) he became a telecommuter, working remotely for iAnywhere out of an office in his house. Ivan’s a very bright bulb and we were lucky to keep him as an employee.
Working remotely is not without its downsides, of course, in that it’s harder to interact with your colleagues. I know this because I myself work remotely for a team in California. My situation’s different, though, because I still work out of the Sybase Waterloo office and I have two co-op students working with me here.
Ivan’s all alone, though. Which is why “IvanAnywhere” came to be, a way for Ivan to remotely interact with his colleagues without being tied to a single location within the Sybase Waterloo office. Both it and Ivan himself were featured in the local paper last weekend, so please read the IvanAnywhere newspaper article for more details.
What’s really interesting about all of this is how relatively inexpensive it was to create Ivan’s robotic avatar and how much Ivan’s enjoyed using it to interact with the other members of his team. And I suspect the free publicity iAnywhere’s gotten from it (psst… we make the best mobile database and the best mobile application platform) makes our little telepresence experiment well worthwhile.
Sponsored Link: Check out the Simple Cash Blog for some simple online money-making techniques that anyone can implement.
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. Subscribe to the blog and get free stuff!
AdSense Split Testing
As I’ve written before, the best way to optimize your AdSense earnings is through testing, because every site is different and what works on one site may not work on another. Only by testing different ad formats, placements and colors can you find what works best for your pages.
There are different approaches to testing, but the most popular is a technique called split testing, also referred to as A/B testing. Done properly, it’s a quicker way to find what works and what doesn’t, without affecting your earnings too negatively. Here’s what you need to know about split testing.
What is Split Testing?
Split testing is pitting two alternatives against each other to see how they compare. By directly testing alternative A against alternative B (hence the A/B testing moniker) you reduce the complexity of the testing scenario and can more easily determine what is working and what isn’t working. You then discard the “losing” alternative and pit the “winner” against a third alternative. You keep doing this until you’ve exhausted all the alternatives or you’re happy with the performance of the ultimate “winner”.
Optometrists use split testing during eye examinations. They place a complicated-looking device in front of your head, block off one of your eyes, and ask you to focus on a wall chart. They then start split testing different lenses: “Which one is clearer? This one or this one?” Eventually they land on the lens that works best for that eye.
Normally, the alternatives in A/B testing are tested using a 50/50 split so that each alternative is tested equally, just as the optometrist does in the previous example. You can vary the ratio to avoid rocking the boat too much, however, which is important when you’re testing a proven money-maker against an unproven alternative. When testing web pages, for example, you might show the normal page 90% of the time and the variation only 10% of the time. It takes longer to collect meaningful data, but the impact to your earnings will be minimal.
Split Testing AdSense
What kind of AdSense split testing can you do? There are many things to test:
- The number of ad units on a page
- The number of link units on a page
- Which formats works best
- Which placements work best
- Whether the link units siphon traffic from the ad units
- Which colors work best
You can also test search boxes and referral units. Really, there’s no end to the things you can test, and it’s up to you to decide what’s important. You may discover that an ad unit directly underneath the heading of a page or post maximizes your earnings but really interferes with the readability of your content, so you don’t pursue that path. It’s not my job to tell you what’s important, only to show you how to accomplish the split testing.
Split Testing and Custom Channels
The first thing you’ll need to do for split testing AdSense is to create some custom channels to track the alternatives. You’ll need two channels at a minimum: one for alternative A and one for alternative B. You should only test two things on a single page at any given time, otherwise you won’t really know which change is responsible for the increase or decrease in earnings.
Don’t go overboard with your custom channels. You don’t have to create a custom channel for each alternative you’re testing. Remember that multiple channels (up to 5) can be assigned to each ad or link unit, so all you have to do is add the “alternative A” or “alternative B” channels to the existing ad or link unit code. Just keep track of what it is you’re testing at any given point in time so that the reports are easy to sort out. The 24-hour block that starts at midnight PST (”zero hour” for AdSense) is the best period to use, since the earnings are reported on a daily basis. If you can’t time your tests that way, use different pairs of custom channels and switch over to a new pair when you change the tests.
Split Testing with PHP
The easiest way to do split testing is to add a bit of PHP to your files. PHP is a simple-to-use programming language for creating web pages. Please don’t be scared, it’s a lot easier than you think. All you do is take an HTML page and insert some PHP commands into it. When a web browser asks for the page, the web server runs the embedded PHP commands and the resulting page is what gets sent to the browser. (Such a page is usually called a “dynamic” page because the contents of the page are created or altered on the fly — dynamically — by the embedded code. Non-dynamic pages are called “static” pages.)
Normally this only happens for web pages that end in a “.php” extension, but a little “magic” can be used to make PHP work even with “.html” and “.htm” files. All you do is create a file called “.htaccess” (or edit the one that already exists) in the root folder for your site. At the top of this file, place these lines:
RemoveHandler .html .htm AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .html .htm
This tells the web server to check all “.php”, “.html” and “.htm” files for embedded PHP commands. You can now go ahead and insert PHP code into any of your web pages. (There’s a slight performance penalty to pay, though, so when you’re done with testing and you don’t need to use PHP any more you can simply remove the lines above from the .htaccess file to re-enable the default static page behavior for .htm and .html files.)
Simple Split Testing
Now we’re ready to do some split testing. It’s actually very simple. Insert this somewhere at or near the top of the page:
<?php $splitpoint = rand( 1, 100 ); ?>
This generates a random number between 1 and 100 (inclusive) and stores it in the variable “$splitpoint”. You can now use this pattern throughout the file:
<?php if( $splitpoint > 50 ){ ?>
<!-- put HTML for alternative A here -->
<?php } else { ?>
<!-- put HTML for alternative B here -->
<?php } ?>
What this does is wrap your two alternatives with an “if/else” construct. Only one of alternative A or alternative B will be included in the HTML that is sent to the browser. In this particular case alternative A is used if $splitpoint is greater than 50, otherwise alternative B is used, which is the standard 50/50 split for testing. If you want to serve alternative A 80% of the time then you would change the condition to be:
<?php if( $splitpoint > 20 ){ ?>
You choose 20 as the comparison point because 100 - 80 = 20. (If you wanted to serve alternative A 20% of the time and alternative B 80% of the time, the comparison point should be 80.)
Here’s a simple HTML page that demonstrates the split testing at work:
<?php $splitpoint = rand( 1, 100 ); ?>
<html>
<head>
<title>Split Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Split Test</h1>
<p>The split point value is <?php echo $splitpoint; ?>.</p>
<?php if( $splitpoint > 65 ){ ?>
<p>This text is shown 35% of the time.</p>
<?php } else { ?>
<p>This text is shown 65% of the time.</p>
<?php } ?>
<p>Refresh the page to test it again.</p>
</body>
This page uses a 35/65 split to show two different lines of text. You can see the page in action on one of my sites. Refresh the page a few times to see the values change.
That’s all there is to simple split testing with PHP, and it works well with AdSense. Just replace the “alternative A” and “alternative B” blocks with the two pieces of AdSense code you want to test, each properly labeled with a different custom channel. Let the test run for a day or two and see which code made you more money. Repeat with the winner and a different piece of AdSense code. Do this as many times as you want, testing one or two small changes at a time until you’ve found the optimal solution for your page.
There’s more to write about split testing, but I’ll save it for another post.
Sponsored Link: Check out the Simple Cash Blog for some simple online money-making techniques that anyone can implement.
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. Subscribe to the blog and get free stuff!
AdSense Publishers Can Now Specify Allowed Sites
If you log into your AdSense console now, you’ll see that a new section called Allowed Sites has been added to the AdSense Setup tab, right after the competitive ad filter:
The allowed sites feature is something for which AdSense publishers have long been clamoring, the ability to give Google the list of sites on which they’re displaying ads. Because AdSense is so easy to implement, it’s also easy to abuse — before this feature was introduced there was no way to prevent anyone from grabbing your publisher ID and using it maliciously.
The default behavior is for your publisher ID to work on all sites. If you choose to only allow certain sites to show ads, however, you can specify a list of URLs that Google should use as a reverse filter — only URLs that match those in your list will count as ad impressions towards your account. The URL format lets you specify domains or subdomains, which means it can be used with Blogger accounts and other shared hosting situations. See the AdSense help for allowed sites for more details.
If you’ve been having problems, or you’re worried that you will have problems, go ahead and use this feature. Just don’t forget to add any new sites or blogs you create to the list, otherwise your earnings won’t go up like you’ll expect them to 
Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense — for serious AdSense publishers only!
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.