More About AdSense Resurrected
Never has there been such discussion on this blog as the comments I’ve seen in regards to AdSense Resurrected. I’ve been really busy over the last week and a bit buying a new car (when the mechanic calls you up and says your existing car needs work that’s worth more than the value of the car, it’s time to change!) and then traveling to New Brunswick for a short holiday (a 2 day trip that took 3 days thanks to a snowstorm…. at least I got to test out the Volvo XC70’s well-deserved reputation for snow handling) that I really haven’t had much time to respond to these comments. Now that I’m settled for a few days, I can contribute something to the discussion.
Despite what others might tell you, launching any kind of product, whether or not it’s an information product. Even after the product itself is ready — and that often takes longer to do than you plan for — getting the product out the door and into your customers’ hands takes a lot of work. I know all of this because I’ve participated in various product launches at work and on my own. And I’ve watched others go through the process. Having a product (and we’re not even saying it has to be a good product!) isn’t enough. Real life isn’t like Shoeless Joe — it’s not enough to build the product, you have to go out and sell it.
One of the difficulties with product launches is that you have to need to decide on dates for certain things before really knowing if you can actually meet those dates. If you’re selling an online product, you need time to sign up joint venture (JV) partners, to create your affiliate program, to prepare your site(s), to get the graphics done, etc. You also want to build a buzz, to create some excitement, because most of the money you’ll make from your product will be made in the first week — really, the first 48 hours — after the product launch. So you have to get started early and hope you can meet your launch date.
When the launch date arrives and you’re not ready (which happens more than you’d think) you have two options: you go ahead with what you have or else you push off the launch until everything’s ready. Most product creators choose the former: they go with what they have. Because if they don’t, they’ll annoy their JV partners and they won’t sell as much product as they could. Because those JV partners have limited timeslots for promoting products. They promote one product and move onto another. It’s a business, after all, and they only make money when they sell something to their audience. If the product isn’t ready, it screws up their promotion schedule and they’re not likely to promote it again. And no one should fault them for this attitude.
So making the decision to pull the plug on launch is not an easy one to make, because it angers people. It angers JV partners. It angers customers who were waiting for the product to launch. It’s very risky to do. But it’s also the right thing to do in certain cases, no matter what others think.
Let’s be clear here: I’ve never met Mo and Zeila Rich. (Those are pseudonyms, of course.) I’ve had long, extensive email conversations with Zeila, however. It’s these long conversations that have convinced me their product launch is worth waiting for. They’ve revealed the basic tactics they’ve used to me to make their AdSense fortune and I in turn have let them play with my software and made changes to it to accommodate their tactics. In fact, they have a whole list of things they want AdSenseResurrector to do that I haven’t had time to implement yet, which I plan to get to in the coming weeks. We’ve done all of this solely on trust. No lawyers were involved, no money has changed hands. It’s been refreshing to do it this way, and I’m willing to cut them some slack because of it.
But that’s just me, of course. I completely understand why everyone is skeptical. I would be, too, if it weren’t for our conversations. But this isn’t the case where you’ve paid for something and haven’t received anything in return. So my recommendation is to just be patient and wait. I agree the way the launch has been continually postponed is annoying and could have been handled better, but ultimately it shouldn’t matter as long as the product delivers. Will it deliver? Well, I know my software will — I have a good 70 or so customers using its predecessor who are happy with it. And I’ll keep improving it. As for the rest, we’ll just have to wait, but I’m confident at this point that the final product will be useful for a lot of people.
Feel free to leave some comments here if you want to argue these points of have some more questions. I’ll be heading back home in a few days, but until then I have Internet access and can discuss this stuff.
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
Merry Christmas 2007
My family and I would like to wish all of you a very merry Christmas. Below is the family picture we sent out this year. As you can see, Dino — one of the stars of the pet fence guide — is still alive and kicking, although at 16 years old he doesn’t have much longer to go. Everyone else is doing fine — the new puppy isn’t really a puppy anymore, either!
Now on to other things… I’ve received some questions about AdSense Resurrected, which has been delayed again. It’s surprising — I found out at the same time as everyone else — but apparently Mo and Zeila were unhappy with some of the outsourcers they’ve been using to create some of the materials for their packages. While outsourcing can be beneficial, it also brings a whole host of different problems to deal with.
Remember that AdSense Resurrected isn’t my package… I’ve contributed some software to it, yes, but ultimately it’s Mo and Zeila’s product and their show. They control the launch, the affiliate program, etc. My software’s only part of it. The software is a version 1.0 — there are a lot of features to come — but it’s good enough to start selling. You can certainly use the software today (and I have a number of customers who already do so) to build some great AdSense sites. But it looks like the general public will have to wait longer… more details as I know them! In the meantime, read this post and this post from Zeila for more information.
In the meantime, have a happy holiday!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
Scrolling AdSense Ads
People search for the oddest things. I have a little window into what people search for and I’m always fascinated by what people search for. How else would I learn that RedTube (that’s a safe link, but visit RedTube.com at your own risk!) is the YouTube of porn, or that there are a lot of Indians looking for rail travel?
Anyhow, as I was poking along the site I came across an example of scrolling AdSense ads on the government grants for women page. Since these ads don’t show up too frequently, I fired up Camtasia and did a little video for you shown scrolling AdSense ads in action:
If you can’t see the video, please follow this link: Scrolling AdSense Ads Demo.
If you see these on any of your sites, it’s quite safe to click on the arrows to scroll through the ads, but of course don’t click on the ads themselves. I suspect scrolling ads show up when there’s a lot of ad inventory available for a given topic. Search Google for government grants and you’ll see a lot of sponsored ads, and apparently many of the advertisers have the content network enabled in their AdWords ad campaigns.
OK, OK, back to my coding now…
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
AdSense Resurrected: Interview With Zeila Rich
As promised, here’s the interview I did with Zeila Rich, one of the two masterminds behind AdSense Resurrected.
Q: We understand you’re using pseudonyms for privacy, but can you tell us a bit about yourselves?
A: We’re a couple from Singapore. We’ve been married for about 1.5 years and have an 8-month old baby. Mo is a national scholar and teacher in a high school and doesn’t intend to quit because he loves teaching. He’s completing his PhD in Educational Psychology and has a Masters in Biological Science Research. As for me, I used to work for a non-profit organization but have quit to look after our daughter full time and to help Mo out. Both of us are in our late 20s.
Q: When did you first join the AdSense program? What were your earnings first like?
A: Early 2006. Mo joined the program, and I joined him. It was embarrassing. Our first month was about $10, and the second month was about $20, and never grew beyond that by the third month.
Q: When did the ideas for your “AR Tactics” first occur to you? How quickly did you implement them?
A: Mo came up to me one day and asked me why our AdSense earnings were stagnant. And being an absolute newbie at this, I gave him answers and I supposed that made him think hard. We brainstormed and then we came up with a plan. We immediately implemented our tactics with the help of several credit cards. Once our websites were up, the earnings came gushing in lterally. The effects of our tactics were phenomenal considering the buzz at the time was that AdSense was dead. Literally overnight we “resurrected” AdSense and it’s never going to die again. It has become immortal.
Q: You’ve got a lot of sites. How much do you depend on outside help to maintain them?
A: Different sites have different maintenance requirements. Based on that, we outsourced some of the work to companies in India and China. But once the sites are up, we maintain them ourselves and they usually don’t require much maintenance. We have a system for looking after them and we constantly add more websites to our network. We don’t have to manage them on a daily basis, however, because they’re not blogs.
People have become disheartened when their dreams of making millions from their blogs fail. They don’t know how to make millions from the Internet because these bloggers learn from people who’ve not made millions and hence, they too can’t be millionaires. It’s a paradigm shift that’s crucial. Drop the blog and stop blogging to death. The money is in the content, but blogs are not the only way, there easier and faster ways. Treat this like a business. Most bloggers treat it like their hobbies, and they ask why they are not earning enough.
Q: Some people automatically assume that you’re creating “Made For AdSense” (MFA) sites. Why are they not MFA sites?
A: We have high quality content on all our websites. We built the websites not for AdSense, but for making money in general. As long as the websites brought in revenues for us, we made them, but they are all websites with content that everyone can use. We monetized the websites to their maximum potential and all these tactics are revealed in our book, soon to be released. Everything is out strategizing and troubleshooting.
Q: If hundreds or thousands of people start implementing your tactics, how ill it be possible for all of them to succeed? Your already have over 1000 sites, if even a few hundred people do the same thing then how will they not dilute the market and compete with each other?
A: there are infinite niches to go for. Different niches have different saturation points, and in our AR book we will tell you the 3 phases of any website. When the saturation point has been reached, you move the niche up to the next phase, and so on. In this case, you are not really diluting the market. The truth is that there are a billion Internet users. We will show you how to get access to all of them.
The great thing about knowledge is that it’s ever changing and growing. There’s no such as thing as competition in the information arena.
We will even show you new avenues of information other than the text format.
Q: What can we expect from AdSense Resurrected in terms of packaging and pricing?
A: AdSense Resurrected has only one purpose: to bring as much joy, peace and happiness to the world as possible. We didn’t want to surface from the underground. We were far too comfortable being unknown. But I always knew that to make more people rich is better than making us many times richer. Mo and I share this philosophy that there is abundance everywhere we are. If we could just share our knowledge, tools and everything for free, we would. But based on Mo’s views in psychology, and his experience dealing with students, people are less motivated to see through an entire plan and be successful if they are given hand-outs. So we had to come up with a pricing strategy that addresses this. We’ve been reading, and we had enough of gurus “stealing” hard-earned money from the “small” people. We are here for the underdogs.
We want to give these people a break. AdSense Resurrected will be made available to everyone, even those without a penny to their name. We have put in place strategies to help those without money to find the money to purchase the book, and then the package, and finally AdSenseResurrector.
The book by itself will cost $67. We wanted to make it cheaper, but our book reviewers have warned us about devaluing its quality. But we may bring down the price further. The book comes with the 10 Minutes AR Tactics Flyer, which anyone can use to understand AR in less than 10 minutes. It’s graphical, so it’s easier to understand.
Then we want to get everyone started on AR. We are selling the AR Jumpstart Kit for $97. It includes the blueprint to success with AR, the book, the flyer, plus over 300 AR-ready websites that can immediately earn you money. We wanted people to immediately see the power of AR.
Our software, AdSenseResurrector (co-developed by Eric Giguere) will have different pricing to meet everyone’s wishes. We have the lifetime use license and the flexi use license. We accept monthly installments for the lifetime use license and our flexi use license costs only $97 a month. So, for $97, anyone can have access to AdSenseResurrector, which is the most advanced piece of software the Internet world has ever seen. [Eric: Zeila may be overstating things a bit…] This software will not only build websites in seconds but it will also drive traffic to every one of your websites and help you do many, many things. To find out all about these you have to wait for the launch. 1 minute before Christmas!
We hope to overdeliver and we don’t really fancy hype. We are in this for the long run. We don’t intend to stop just with the software. We will have coaching and mentoring programs, seminars, workshops and conferences. We are offering the entire suite of products and services to help everyone succeed in AR.
Our belief is that everyone can be a success story and it’s all in a MEAL. We will cover this in our book. All our products come with a 90-day money-back guarantee. We want everyone to have the same time we had — 3 months — to make their first million from the AR tactics we use.
[End of interview]
Let me clarify something that’s been asked before. AdSenseResurrector (the software) was not used by Mo and Zeila to build their AdSense empire. It just so happened that I was getting set to release some software I’d built based on my own tools around the same time that they were going to originally launch… we met by chance (I sent them an email asking them to spell “AdSense” properly, if you can believe it… what can I say, it bugs me!) and they were looking for something to help their potential customers do what they did without having to outsource anything, or at least outsource much less. So I’ve been transforming my software according to their directions and hopefully we’ve come up with something that you’ll find really useful. I just don’t know how I’ll do it all before Christmas, but that’s a different problem….
If you have any questions for Mo and Zeila, feel free to leave a comment here.
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
Join the AdSense Resurrected Affiliate Program
AdSense Resurrected is scheduled to launch just before Christmas. I’ve been getting lots of questions about it, so I’m going to post an interview with Mo and Zeila Rich, the creators of AR, shortly. In the meantime, though, you should sign up for the AdSense Resurrected affiliate program (it’s not ClickBank anymore). It’s a multi-tier program and you get a $10 bonus for signing up, plus you get bonuses for referring new affiliates.
There’s also another great reason to sign up now: register before the launch of AdSense Resurrected and you’ll get a coupon that will let you waive the yearly access fee to the AdSense Resurrected Affiliate Business Account, which after launch will cost $197/year. To get your free AR Affiliate Business Account, become and affiliate, login to your affiliate account, and then email me to get the coupon code for the business account.
Note that there are several variants of the AdSense Resurrected package. Some of them include software I’ve written, AdSenseResurrector. So I’m not exactly unbiased here. But I think many of my readers will find it all very interesting. Like I said, more details are coming.
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
Me, Myself and I: 3 Ways To Title Your Posts
So I’ve decided to dust off CluelessAbout.com, and I thought it would be a perfect way to demonstrate the “Me, Myself and I” title optimization technique. Although I’ll be discussing it in the context of a WordPress blog, the technique can be used on any site, not just blogs.
Recently, I discussed the importance of titles for search engine optimization and proper ad selection. Getting the right words into the <title> tag of a page is an easy way to get a boost in search engine rankings. The key is to create a unique title for each page of your site, not just repeat the same title over and over again.
But you can actually go further. There are in fact THREE title elements to consider:
- The page title: the contents of the <title> tag;
- The page slug: the path of the page/post within the site; and
- The main heading: the topmost, biggest heading seen by the user (usually the first <h1> tag).
In most WordPress configurations all three title elements are essentially the same: the title of the blog post is the main heading, the page title (prefixed or suffixed with the blog name) and (slightly transformed) the page slug. But with a bit of work (not much!) you can make all three title elements different from each other, which can give some added “oomph” to your search engine optimization. Here’s how you do it.
Main Heading
The main heading is the post title. On the index and archive pages of your blog there will be multiple posts, but we’re mostly concerned with the permalink page for each post. See How can I avoid being banned from AdSense? for an example.
The only trick here is to make sure that the WordPress theme you’re using uses <h1> tags for the post titles. A lot of themes surround the blog title with <h1> tags and relegate post titles to <h2> or even <h3> tags. In fact, it should be the opposite — you could even argue that the blog title (and subtitle) shouldn’t even be in a heading tag, just normal text.
The main heading should always be created with the human reader in mind, because it’s usually the first thing they’ll see on the page.
Page Slug
By default, the page slug (the part of the page URL after the hostname) is derived from the post title. The algorithm is simple enough: all characters are lowercased, invalid characters are removed (not all printable characters are allowed in page URLs) and spaces are replaced with hyphens. Thus How can I avoid being banned from AdSense? normally transforms to how-can-i-avoid-being-banned-from-adsense.
But that’s the default behavior. You can use your own custom slug. On the right side of the post editor screen there’s a Post Slug section. Expand the section to reveal a text field and enter your custom slug value here:
What should you put in your custom slug? Anything you want! But you should keep it short and include a relevant keyword or two. An abbreviated form of your post title is a good choice. You can vary it by changing word order, excluding common words (like “and”), or by using synonyms and/or plurals. Don’t worry too much about making it human-friendly, it’s more the search engines that are going to look at it. The slug I chose for the AdSense banning post is adsense-ban-avoidance.
Page Title
The final title to worry about is the page title. The page title is the title that show up in the browser’s title bar. And it’s seen by both the humans and the search engines. Thus my post How can I avoid being banned from Google? has the page title Avoiding AdSense Banning.
To change the page title you need to install a WordPress plugin called SEO Title Tag. You have to make a small edit to your theme’s header.php file to activate it, but then you’re off to the races. Once it’s active, you’ll see a new “Title Tag” field show up in the post editor:
Just enter the custom title in that field and you’re done. (If you leave it blank, the default behavior applies.)
Note that it’s customary, but certainly not required, to use “title case” (capitalize most words) when writing titles. As with the slugs, keep them short and include a keyword or two.
What About Non-Blogs?
Everything I’ve mentioned here applies to non-blogs as well, except of course the way you specify the different title elements is different. But there’s no reason all three should be identical.
I hope this helps some of you get some better page rankings. It takes very little time and effort to come up with title variants but it can really pay off in the long run.
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
Post Teaser WordPress Excerpt Plugin
In my previous post I forgot to mention that I really like the Post Teaser WordPress plugin that I found when I went looking for a new way to create post excerpts. The standard WordPress excerpt feature doesn’t work very well for me because it strips out the formatting and tends to clump paragraphs together, making for ugly-looking excerpts. Post Teaser, on the other hand, does a great job and is also easily customizable. You can see it in action on the home page of the free keyword lists site. Highly recommended!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
Free Keyword Lists
Every once in a while I put together a list of keywords and publish it here. I’ve had requests for more of this, but I don’t want to transform this blog into a big set of keyword lists, so I’ve created a separate site for those kinds of posts. If keyword data interests you, feel free to visit Free Keyword Lists. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to get notifications — I’ll also be adding the ability to get notifications by email.
I’m still playing with the site so there’s not much there yet, just some preliminary lists for ferry (based on our recent discussions about FerryTravel.com) and home equity (gotta have one of those popular “money” keywords to start with!). I’ll be posting different kinds of data on the keywords once I setup my systems to make it semi-automatic to create the lists, hopefully along with a bit of commentary and analysis about the list data. If you have any keywords you’d like to see, drop me a note and I’ll add them to my queue. I have a whole bunch of keywords gleaned from various sources.
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
Google Cracks Down on Link Buying
Although I’m not normally a simple parrot, I think all of you should take the time to read these two posts by Google’s Matt Cutts:
If you’ve ever thought about buying or selling links, there’s some serious food for thought here. I wonder how many people will drop out of programs like Text Link Ads because of this forceful stance by Google.
Please note that AdSense ads aren’t affected by this policy, as the links used in the ads don’t pass PageRank.
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.