OPAD Day 0

A dozen people so far have taken up my One Page A Day challenge, which is just great! The challenge officially starts tomorrow, which is why this post is labeled “Day 0″. At this point all the challengers should be thinking about (and even writing) the content they’ll post and where they’ll post it. I already have some ideas (and no, my “OPAD Day XX” posts won’t count for my contributions) and am looking forward to getting them out.

Don’t forget that each day I’ll be posting an “OPAD Day XX” post on this blog. Challengers should leave a comment in each of these posts (except today’s) with a link back to the content they create for that day. You don’t have to do it immediately, as I know it sometimes takes time to get things approved if you’ve decided to (say) submit an article to EzineArticles. As long as you have a comment in each of the February OPAD posts by March 10, you’ll be OK. Remember, if you finish the challenge you get a prize!

Tailor your links for maximum SEO effectiveness. Don’t just say “I posted some content at http://dkfjdkf.com/blah/whatever”, create a topical, keyword-based link with an <a> tag, as in:

My content today is an article titled <a href=”http://yoursite.com/how-to-prevent-farting”>How to Prevent Farting</a>.

This gives your link added oomph.

Good luck!

P.S.: Last day to buy PLRSiteBuilder at $67, tomorrow the price goes up…

Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!

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.

January 31, 2008 | Filed Under AdSense | 9 Comments 

One Page A Day Challenge

AdSense publishers live and die by their content. I’ve been a bit delinquent myself lately over not creating enough new content for my sites, so I thought I’d challenge myself.

For the month of February, my challenge is to create at least one page of new content each day. And to give the challenge some teeth, I’ll document the results here. I’d also like to open up the “One Page A Day” challenge to you, my readers, by offering prizes to those who take up the gauntlet.

OPAD Rules

The rules for the One Page A Day (OPAD) challenge are simple: you must create one page of new content for each day in February. Since 2008 is a leap year, that’s 29 pages of content.

A “page of content” is defined as at least 200 words of new content: a web page, a blog post, an article, or even a comment. If you use PLR content, you have to substantially rewrite it, otherwise it’s not much of a challenge.

To entice you to participate in this challenge along with me, I’m offering a free copy of Uncommon AdSense to everyone who successfully completes the challenge. One of the winners will also win a copy of PLRSiteBuilder. There are additional restrictions to win a prize, however:

Please note that I reserve the right to remove links and/or comments that are spam and/or that violate AdSense policies and/or are otherwise questionable. All decisions in this challenge are mine alone. This challenge is null and void where prohibited by law. Winners will be announced on March 15.

I realize this is a lot of work, which is why I’m giving prizes to everyone who finishes. There’s an additional benefit, however: links from my blog do not use “nofollow”, so you’ll get a PR boost for any links you submit here. I’m hoping all of this makes it worth your while. Plus you’ll have all that great new content to attract visitors!

I have no idea if anyone will take me up on this challenge, but I’ll be doing it myself. Start thinking about your content now!

Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!

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.

January 30, 2008 | Filed Under AdSense | 53 Comments 

SEO Siloing Updated For WordPress 2.3

Per popular demand (and I’ll need it myself eventually), I’ve updated the SEO Siloing WordPress plugin to handle the new category structure in WordPress 2.3 and up (the taxonomy). The plugin now works in all 2.x versions of WordPress. Download version 1.2 of the plugin and simply copy over the existing seosiloing.php file in your plugins folder. (You should deactivate the existing plugin first, of course, copy the new one up, and then re-activate it.)

You can see the new plugin in action here on an older WordPress. Well, you can’t really tell the difference, can you? OK, try this page, which is running on WP 2.3.1.

Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!

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.

January 29, 2008 | Filed Under AdSense | 2 Comments 

Google Won’t Destroy Domain Kiting

Back to our regularly scheduled programming… Over the weekend several news channels reported on how Google has decided to take a stand against domain kiting. Domain kiting is the technique used by domain name speculators to “test the waters” without having to pay for a domain. You can do this because there’s a 5-day grace period when you buy a domain that lets you back out of the transaction and get your money back… The basic idea is very simple: register a domain, immediately display some ads on it, and then wait to see if you get any traffic in the first 5 days. Then either keep or cancel the domain name. (If you’re in it strictly for the money, you don’t even bother keeping the domain name… you just keep the earnings for those 5 days and move on to another domain, or else drop and re-register the same domain…)

It may not sound like you can make much money, but if you’re testing thousands of domains it can definitely add up. (For more information on the domain name business, I recommend you read Domains Into Dollars, it’s the best one I’ve found.)

Anyhow, AdSense is a favorite program for domain kiting. It’s so easy to implement, and Google even has a specific program (AdSense for Domains) designed for domain parking. Now, however, they’ve decided that domain kiting is bad and so they’re changing AdSense to not serve ads to any domain that has been registered for only 5 days or less. Note that this doesn’t affect domain parking per se, it just means that you have to wait 5 days before you can start using AdSense for domain parking. At that point you own the domain and you can’t get a refund on the registration fee. So it shows (in theory) that you’re serious about doing something with the domain.

Pundits who think this will destroy domain kiting are wrong, of course. Domain kiters will simply move to other advertising programs. And there will be plenty of script kiddies who will jump into the fray and offer new scripts to fill in the void.

Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!

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.

January 28, 2008 | Filed Under AdSense | 8 Comments 

PLRSiteBuilder $67 Until February 1

Last week I made PLRSiteBuilder available at the special price of $67 to my mailing list, warning them I’d increase the price shortly to $77 for the public release. As someone pointed out, I really didn’t given many people time to think it over carefully before raising the price… so I’ve decided to lower the price to $67 until February 1. I’ll be contacting those who bought it at the higher price to arrange for an upgrade or rebate.

Now you have no reason to hesitate! Go directly to the order page. (And for $20 more you can get a copy of Uncommon AdSense, which is sold separately for $67!) Hurry, hurry and start building your AdSense empire today!

(Starting to sound too much like a marketer….)

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.

January 28, 2008 | Filed Under AdSense | 1 Comment 

PLRSiteBuilder Is Now Available

Due to popular demand, I’ve officially launched PLRSiteBuilder, and it’s now available to the general public. You can download the PLRSiteBuilder manual for free to see what the software lets you do.

The documentation needs more work. I’ll be increasing the price of PLRSiteBuilder over time as I add more documentation and videos to make it a more complete product. The software works, however, even if all the features haven’t yet been documented.

I built this software as much for my own use as for anyone else’s. I wanted something that would let me quickly and easily build a content-rich website, a website that was complete and worked “out of the box” and yet was easy to change and update. PLRSiteBuilder lets you work with simple text files, letting you concentrate on the content. Sites like Debt Is Great (that’s tongue-in-cheek) and Credit Card Scorecard are two examples of some simple sites created with PLRSiteBuilder. Then there are mailing list “squeeze” sites like Eat Less, Weigh Less!. There’s also an option to create a site whose home page is an order page. (I don’t have an example of that one yet.)

You can easily change the look and feel of the site, either directly through the user interface or by editing CSS files. There’s even a template system if you really want to change things around. You can also automatically insert affiliate links and other links into the content. You can automatically split long content pages into multiple pages, complete with automatically-generated navigational links.

And, of course, AdSense ads are already embedded in the content.

Like I said, there are lots of features. Start by looking a the manual. Ask me questions if you want. All sales are through ClickBank, with a full 8-week guarantee.

Not much of a sales pitch, I know. The affiliate program’s open now, though, so go ahead and market it for me. ClickBank vendor ID is “plrsiteb”, as in egiguere.plrsiteb.hop.clickbank.net — just replace the “egiguere” with your own ClickBank ID.

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.

January 25, 2008 | Filed Under AdSense | 9 Comments 

Eternal Vigilance

One of the downsides of having multiple sites is that there’s more to manage. I was editing my Squidoo lens this morning to add the Clueless About feed, but the feed kept timing out. After some investigation I determined that someone had hacked the site and inserted various penis-related links into the main index.php file, hidden within a zero-sized font tag. A look at some of my other blogs showed the same problem, as well as world-writable directories. Sigh. So today I’m cleaning up the mess. I’m not sure how the exploit happened yet, but it’s probably a WordPress vulnerability. I was going to write about made for AdSense sites today, but that has to wait now until I fix things. (If you depend on organic search traffic, it’s important to fix these things as soon as you can, before you get penalized for excessive links to bad neighbourhoods…)

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.

January 23, 2008 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

More Changes To AdSense Referrals

Looks like the general outcry over changes to the AdSense referrals program has had an effect:

Hello AdSense publisher,

We are writing to give you an important follow-up to the changes we announced earlier this month to the referrals to AdSense program. Since announcing the changes, we’ve received a number of responses about the program being dependent on the location of the referring publisher rather than the referred user. After carefully considering this feedback, we have decided to modify our planned changes.

Specifically, you will have the option to add a referral unit for AdSense within your account when you target any referral unit to Japan and/or any countries in North America and Latin America. To ensure payment for valid conversions, we recommend that you check the targeting settings on your current AdSense referral units.

We’d also like to let you know about upcoming changes to the referrals programs for Google Pack and Firefox:

Google Pack: Currently, you can earn up to $2 when a user downloads and runs Google Pack for the first time after being referred through your link or button. Starting the third week of February, each successful Pack referral will earn up to $1. This change will apply to all referrals for Google Pack and is independent of user location or publisher location.

Firefox: We will also be reducing payments for Firefox referrals from China during the third week of February. This specific referral payment change will only affect installations from users in China. As with referrals to AdSense, this is independent of your location as a publisher.

We understand that these changes may decrease revenue for some of you currently participating in these referrals programs. While it is our goal to help publishers earn as much as possible with the AdSense program, like any other referrals advertiser, we are constantly evaluating our campaigns to make them effective and sustainable.

Again, thank you for your feedback and support of the referrals program.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Making the referral validity dependent on where the potential referree (the page visitor) is instead of where the AdSense publisher is located makes a lot more sense, since presumably there’s a correlation between where new publishers are located and how well Google fares from them. They still haven’t said why they’ve made these changes in the first place, one can only assume that they’ve crunched the numbers and concluded that they’re losing money due to fraud from certain areas of the world. Less money means fewer espressos and other goodies for their overworked developers, so we can’t have that!

Sponsored Link: Read my Unique Article Wizard review for a recommended article distribution service.

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.

January 23, 2008 | Filed Under AdSense | 3 Comments 

Know Your AdSense Limits

Keeping abreast of AdSense program policy changes is one of the many things an AdSense publisher must do. Changes occur from time to time and you don’t want to find yourself in violation of the policies, so it’s important to keep up with what’s new in the AdSense world.

One of the important parts of the program policies limits how many snippets of AdSense code you can place on any given page of a website. Here are the current limits, as taken directly from the Ad Placement section of the program policies:

The maximum-of-three limit for ad units hasn’t changed in a long time. Link unit limits changed from 1 to 3 almost a year ago. Referral unit limits have varied, for a while you were able to use up to 2 referral units per product on a page, but the current limit is 3 total per page.

Search boxes are perhaps under-utilized. The limit of two means that you can have one search box for searching Google and one for searching your site.

The remaining restrictions have more to do with anti-MFA (Made For AdSense) initiatives than anything else, but are still good to know.

Remember that checking the program policies is very easy to do. Just open your AdSense management console (i.e. login to your AdSense account) and you’ll find links at the bottom to both the program policies and the terms and conditions. Note that the program policies are considered part of the terms and conditions, so not following those policies is a simple way to get your account terminated. See How can I avoid being banned from AdSense?.

Sponsored Link: Read my Unique Article Wizard review for a recommended article distribution service.

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.

January 22, 2008 | Filed Under AdSense | 4 Comments 

PLRSiteBuilder… Is Resurrecting!

Based on discussions with my existing PLRSiteBuilder customers (about 80 of them) and various comments and emails from interested people, I’ve decided to “resurrect” (there’s that word again!) my PLRSiteBuilder software as a public offering. What’s going to happen with AdSenseResurrector? I don’t know at this point, I’m still waiting to hear back from the Riches as to what their plans are. I don’t even know if anyone has bought it yet. (If you have, I will support you, don’t worry…)

The whole point of this venture was to get someone to market my software for me better than I could, yet without excessive hype. I hope the controversy so far hasn’t spoiled the market for me, but I think my current customers are quite happy with what I’ve created with PLRSiteBuilder, and I have a number of improvements planned for the future. Originally I wasn’t going to market PLRSiteBuilder separately because I wanted a single code base to deal with (simpler to maintain) and I wanted someone else to generate interest and sell it, but now it looks like both will either co-exist (and go in different directions) or else ARtor won’t see the light of day.

I haven’t settled on a price yet. Early customers got ridiculously good deals from me and have told me I should be selling it for a lot more, like in the $150 range, with a nice affiliate program of course. I’ll probably start with a special price and move it up to that level shortly thereafter. DealDotCom’s interested in featuring it as well. Perhaps the controversy will be good in the long run…

Now I’ll need to setup a blog and maybe a forum for PLRSiteBuilder, and finish the documentation… things that I’ve delayed doing until AdSense Resurrected had launched. So I don’t know exactly when PLRSiteBuilder will launch. Join the PLRSiteBuilder mailing list to not miss it and any special launch price.

To see what PLRSiteBuilder can do, here are two sites to look at. The first, Debt Is Great!, shows what you can do in five minutes with PLRSiteBuilder — I just took some (not that great) PLR content I had sitting around, shoved it into a folder, and ran PLRSiteBuilder on it. The second, Credit Card Scorecard, shows you what you can do if you spend a bit more time on content and on layout. Note the auto-generated RSS feed and Google sitemap. To add to this site all I do is create a new text file in the input folder and re-run PLRSiteBuilder. You can do all your testing using a local web server like XAMPP. The software runs on any computer that can run Java 5 — Windows, Macintosh, Linux. There are lots of useful features in it. This is software that builds sites the way I want them to be built. See also the PLRSiteBuilder overview up on YouTube.

If any existing PLRSiteBuilder customers are reading this, feel free to leave a comment about the software and what buyers can expect from it, you’re my best means of marketing this thing 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.

January 21, 2008 | Filed Under AdSense | 8 Comments 

Review: AdSense Resurrected

Disclaimer: I have a (loose) business arrangement with the authors of AdSense Resurrected whereby they’ve agreed to do the marketing and selling of a software tool I developed that makes it simple to create and maintain static AdSense sites. That said, my software was developed independently of the book and I only got my first look at the book yesterday. So here’s my review, but you may want to hear from others as well before making the purchase decision. If you’ve bought the book and have read it, please feel free to leave a comment with your own thoughts about the material. You can even post your own affiliate link for the product in the comment, if you’re so inclined, just sign up here to get one.

After some false starts, the AdSense Resurrected ebook finally launched yesterday. Although I had a general idea of what was in the book from previous email discussions with the authors, yesterday was my first look at the 95-page long book, which retails for $67. The book consists of the following chapters:

  1. Our Story
  2. Show Me The Money
  3. AdSense Resurrected Tactics (ART)
  4. Testing and Optimizing
  5. Market Research
  6. Automate Your AdSense Business
  7. Make Money
  8. Case Studies
  9. Troubleshoot Your AdSense Virtual Real Estate
  10. Resources

The bulk of the book (about 40 pages) is spent discussing the AdSense Resurrected Tactics and how to implement them, with the rest of the book devoted to background about Mo and Zeila Rich (the authors) and tips on how to automate your business, diversifying your income, and case studies. (The book could use a good editing — there are a lot of mismatched tenses and missing words — but it’s no worse than other ebooks I’ve read and is still quite readable. The main thing is that the ideas come across. And they need to do a search-and-replace of “Adsense” with “AdSense”.)

The Business of AdSense

AdSense Resurrected is about treating AdSense as a business and not a hobby. This is something I’ve discussed many times in this blog, and in fact the basic business model they’re using was discussed in some detail in my post The AdSense Crapshoot, where I pointed out there are really two basic AdSense business models: few sites with lots of traffic or many sites with less traffic. The Riches went with the latter model, owning over 1000 different AdSense sites split across 20 general categories. In other words, they spent real time and money to create a viable AdSense business — they treated it like a business and invested in it like a real business.

I can certainly relate to the first chapter of the book where it describes their first AdSense earnings, which were $0.74. We all started out that way. In my own book I described how exciting it was to make those first few cents… But many AdSense publishers don’t do much more than make those kinds of earnings. So what have the Riches done differently and is it something that others can also do?

Repeat Targeted Traffic

I’m not going to list the AdSense Resurrected Tactics here, that would be very unfair to the authors of the book and it’s not something I do in my reviews. (For example, see my AdWords book review roundup.) If you want that level of detail, you should buy the book and read it. That said, I do talk about the general ideas and tactics in my reviews and I’m not going to treat AdSense Resurrected any differently.

The main idea in AdSense Resurrected is to generate repeat targeted traffic to all those sites you build. You start small with a few sites and plow the earnings you make back into the development of more sites, repeating this several times until you have a substantial income stream.

Targeted traffic is easy enough to explain: you either pay for it (the “quick and paid” traffic method, as the Riches call it) or you get it for free organically (the “slow and free” method). The Riches themselves used mostly pay-per-click (PPC) traffic (i.e. Google AdWords) to generate that traffic, mainly because it produces results much more quickly. But they recognize that not everyone wants to spend money on PPC, which is where natural search engine traffic (via things like article marketing) comes into play. But organic traffic takes a long time to produce results, so if you want to make money quickly you need to pay for your traffic.

To be clear, though, they’re not talking about “AdSense arbitrage”, where you buy cheap AdWords clicks (there’s the hard part!) and direct traffic to your AdSense content pages. Google recently disallowed this business model and in any case it was very hard to do right. Instead, you send the traffic to landing pages where you offer them a free course/newsletter/report in exchange for their email address. At this point you have targeted traffic — they’re on the landing page because they’re interested in the topic — and once they sign up for your list they become repeat targeted traffic. This is Internet Marketing 101, really, except that unlike most other systems I’ve seen the point is not to start pushing affiliate and other products through the mailing list, the point is to get them to read the content on your sites and make money indirectly from AdSense and affiliate programs. You’re not pretending to create a relationship with the people, you’re just giving them information. It’s AdSense is for introverts on steroids.

What, You Mean It Takes Work?

One thing that Mo and Zeila don’t sugar-coat is how much work it takes to get to the stage they’re at. Building a lot of sites — especially if you’re a quality nut — takes a lot of time. They also invested some serious money on their credit cards initially in order to get the traffic flowing to their first sites. The money doesn’t come for free, nor should it. A lot of people won’t be prepared to spend the time and/or money it takes to generate the kind of earnings they do. But it should be noted that you don’t need any special tools to follow their methods, just the willingness to buy some domains and some web hosting. Everything else can be done on your own with some time and effort.

If you’re a strong believer in building high quality content sites (hi, Chuck!) then AdSense Resurrected may raise some flags for you, though nothing they advocate goes against the AdSense terms and conditions (one of the sites mentioned in their case studies — not one of their own — does in fact violate some of the AdSense program policies in terms of ad placement, however), nor are they saying you have to build low-quality sites in order to succeed. That said, you can be sure that some readers will churn out sites ad nauseum using their tactics and they won’t be stellar sites. One would hope, though, that these sites won’t be able to “pollute” the Web much. Their creators will likely be using traffic generation methods like PPC and not focusing on organic rankings, so in the end the impact should be minimal. Let’s face it, people who build those kinds of sites will continue to build them no matter what products are on or not on the market.

If you’re serious about building an AdSense business, this book has some good ideas and it all makes sense. I wish there was a bit more detail on certain things, but I suspect that information is found in the higher-priced “Jumpstart Kit”, which I haven’t yet seen. Be prepared to spend time and money beyond the book purchase, however, to put their ideas into practice.

Again, I’d love to hear comments from any of you who’ve read the book. Did you find it worth the money? What did you learn? The authors read this blog, it’s a great way to given them some feedback.

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.

January 18, 2008 | Filed Under AdSense | 176 Comments 

AdSense Resurrected Now Available

AdSense Resurrected is now available. I actually have a copy of it to look at, finally… it’s 95 pages long. I will post a detailed review after I’ve read it, so stay tuned. Oh, and my software should also be available, but I’m not sure I can do a credible review of it :-)

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.

January 17, 2008 | Filed Under AdSense | 14 Comments 

Know Your AdSense Dead Zone

Almost every AdSense account has a “dead zone”, a time period in which earnings hardly ever increase. When you first start out the dead zone is pretty much the entire day (!) but over time as your traffic and content increase your should see the dead zone (or zones, there can be more than one, but typically one is more pronounced than the others) shrink.

For North American publishers, the dead zone tends to start around 2-3 AM Eastern time, which is when the people in California stop surfing and go to bed. That dead zone is pretty easy to track, actually, because the daily AdSense earnings flip back to zero at midnight Pacific time, i.e. 3 AM Eastern time. For a long time I had no appreciable earnings in that time period until about 8 AM Eastern, after which it would continue to climb.

Things have changed for me, but I’d still characterize the period from 2 AM to 6 AM as my AdSense dead zone because it doesn’t earn me nearly as much as the rest of the day.

If you’re not in North America, your dead zone may be harder to track. This is where an ad tracking script comes in handy. Even though they’re not as reliable as they once were, ad tracking scripts are still useful for collecting data about which specific pages are making you money (and where the traffic came from) and when the clicks occurred. By collecting statistics for a week or two (you’ll often find a big variance in click patterns on weekdays vs. weekends, so it’s good to use a week or more of data) you can discover your AdSense dead zone.

Once you’ve done that, do some simple analysis to see what part of the world your traffic is coming from during the dead zone period. A simple tool like the SunClock will show you what parts of the world are currently in daylight. Using this and data from your web server access logs you can quickly figure out which areas of the world are making you money and why. You can use that information to guide your content creation decisions.

Of course, targeting other parts of the world isn’t necessarily easy. Language is a big issue. I’ve seen people sell pre-made AdSense sites that come with an automatic translation feature, but the translated pages are truly terrible. (Of course, maybe that’s why those sites work… the translations are so ugly that the readers click any link they see just to get away…) Creating content that appeals to other parts of the world isn’t easy if you’re not doing it in your own language.

Then again, you don’t necessarily have to do anything with the dead zone and instead work on increasing your earnings throughout the rest of the day. Again, knowing where your traffic comes from at any given hour is valuable information that can guide your writing. Knowledge is power, and power is money, so in theory knowledge is money… (though at times it’s not clear that transitivity really applies..)

Sponsored Link: Read my Unique Article Wizard review for a recommended article distribution service.

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.

January 17, 2008 | Filed Under AdSense | 1 Comment 

Review: Unique Article Wizard

A few months ago I meant to try the Unique Article Wizard service, but only recently did I find the time (and the inclination) to fork out the money for the subscription. At $47/month it’s not overpriced, but it’s enough to make you think hard about doing it. Still, I’d heard mostly positive things about it and so I thought I’d give it a try. So far, I’ve been pleased with the results.

Unique Article Wizard (UAW for short) is an article distribution service. It lets you post your articles to up to about 800 different article directories, groups and newsletters. That seems like a lot, but the actual number of submissions will vary depending on the niche you’re targeting — the articles are only submitted to relevant sites.

Article marketing is something I’ve discussed here many times, with a comprehensive post on the subject called Articles 101: Writing Articles For Traffic And Profit. AdSense publishers can use article marketing both to get links (and traffic) to their own sites and also to create their own directories.

As good as article marketing is, however, it does involve some drudgery. Finding a set of article directories to submit your articles to and formatting them appropriately for each directory takes time, time I’d rather spend on the articles themselves. That’s why many Internet marketers use automated (or semi-automated) tools for article submission. Or outsource the process entirely to someone who’s willing to spend the time and effort to submit the articles on your behalf.

UAW does more than just submit articles, however. It also generates unique versions of your articles for each directory. It doesn’t do this by rewriting the content, changing synonyms, or any other automated means. You’re actually involved in the rewriting process and can directly control what’s happening, which means the generated articles will always make sense. Which is great. (The terms of service forbid me from telling you exactly how the unique versions are generated, but anyone with a half a brain can figure it out, I’ve actually seen at least one other tool that does something similar. But since I want to keep using this service, I have to abide by their restrictions!)

Here’s an example of an article I submitted recently using UAW:

Electronic Pet Fences Stop Dogs From Digging
by Eric Giguere

When a wooden fence wasn’t enough to keep our golden retriever from digging her way out of our backyard, we decided it was time to install a proper pet containment system to keep her safe and enclosed. Most dog owners install electronic fencing as an alternative to visible fencing, but the two systems can actually work together to secure your backyard.

The Invisible Fence brand system we chose works like all wireless pet containment systems. First, a wire is placed along the property line (or the containment area). Second, the dog (or dogs) is fitted with a special electronic pet collar. On approach of the property line, the dog’s collar buzzes or beeps to warn the dog to back away. If the dog continues to approach, a short but surprising electric shock ensures that the dog returns to the safe area.

Electronic pet fences are very effective, but they’re not completely safe. Dogs only receive a small shock, and a dog that is determined to cross the line can still do so. That’s why proper training and conditioning is essential, something that many wireless fence owners don’t do.

You can get better results by using a pet fence together with a real fence. That’s what we did by installing an Invisible Fence system in parallel with our existing wooden fence. The electronic fence was easy to install in this scenario, because in most places we could simply attach it to the back of our wooden fence to save us a lot of digging.

The advantage of this system is that the physical fence keeps the dog from jumping off the property while the wireless fence keeps the dog from digging its way under the other fence. You can also adjust the pet fence’s electronic field to be fairly narrow, which means the dog can still approach the physical fence quite closely before being warned away.

So if you’re having trouble keeping your dog contained, consider combining a regular fence with a wireless electronic pet fence. It’s the best of both worlds!

Learn more about how we used an Invisible Fence pet containment system with a normal fence to keep our dogs contained in our backyard.

Nothing fancy, just a basic article of decent length with a few carefully-chosen links in the resource box at the end. The article promotes my pet fence guide, which I’ve discussed here many times before as an AdSense case study.

That’s one version of the article. Here’s a different version of the same article generated by UAW:

How To Stop Dogs From Digging With Wireless Fencing
by Eric Giguere

You’d think a tall, wooden fence was enough to keep our golden retriever in our backyard, but it wasn’t. She just dug her way out! So we decided to install an electronic pet containment system to keep her safe in addition to our wooden fence. It seems weird — most dog owners install wireless fencing as an alternative to visible fencing — but the two systems work well together to secure our backyard.

The Invisible Fence brand system we chose works like all wireless pet containment systems. First, a wire is placed along the property line (or the containment area). Second, the dog (or dogs) is fitted with a special electronic pet collar. On approach of the property line, the dog’s collar buzzes or beeps to warn the dog to back away. If the dog continues to approach, a short but surprising electric shock ensures that the dog returns to the safe area.

As good as they are, of course, wireless pet fences aren’t foolproof. The shocks are small, and a determined dog can still cross the buried wire if they want to. Proper training and conditioning is essential to ensure that the dog immediately turns back away from the protected area, something that many owners neglect to do.

The best combination for safety is to use an electronic fence in conjunction with a normal fence, which is exactly what we did. Our Invisible Fence system was installed parallel to the wooden fence along the perimeter of our backyard. We didn’t even have to bury it in most spots — we were able to just tack it to the existing fence.

The advantage of this system is that the physical fence keeps the dog from jumping off the property while the wireless fence keeps the dog from digging its way under the other fence. You can also adjust the pet fence’s electronic field to be fairly narrow, which means the dog can still approach the physical fence quite closely before being warned away.

So if a real fence isn’t enough to keep your dog out of trouble, consider combining it with an electronic pet fence to get total safety and peace of mind.

Read more about how we used a wireless pet fence system with a normal fence to stop our dog from escaping our backyard.

Just as readable as that first version, but different. I can generate umpteen different versions of the article at any point, which is useful if you want to submit the article manually to sites that aren’t supported by UAW. (EzineArticles is the biggest omission from the list of article directories because of the strict submission guidelines they have… but if you have an EzineArticles account it’s trivial to grab a unique version of your article from UAW and submit it. It works, I’ve done it.)

Creating your articles takes longer, of course, because of the rewriting. UAW has a nice set of web-based wizards that step you through the entire process, however, and it makes it very simple to do — you don’t have to use a text editor like Notepad anymore. UAW also includes a handy tool to generate your resource boxes, which are arguably the most important parts of your articles since they’re the ones with the links.

Before submitting your articles you have to give UAW a list of relevant keywords and also rank the articles according to some predefined category lists. UAW uses this information to winnow inappropriate directories. So far, each of my submissions has been submitted to 200-400 directories, which I suspect is fairly normal. This is good, I’d rather have my articles listed only in relevant directories, it gives added oomph to the links.

As I mentioned, there’s a wizard that walks you through everything and makes it very simple to create and submit your articles. Submission is not automatic, however, as someone at UAW eyeballs your articles before they actually get sent out to ensure they’re readable and relevant to the appropriate keywords/categories, which is a great feature. The approval happens within a day or so, after which unique versions of the article are generated and submitted to all the appropriate directories. Directories have the option of refusing any article, of course, but most of them will accept the articles. You’ll get confirmation messages from some directories and pingbacks if the links in your resource box refer back to a blog.

After submission, you get a report listing how which directories your article was submitted to. You can also track the progress of your articles using some simple statistics that it gathers for you. UAW likes to use Yahoo for its tracking, so you’ll have to track Google stats by hand. But it’s pretty easy to do.

And yes, you can use pseudonyms when submitting your articles, something I’ll be talking about shortly in a different post.

Unique Article Wizard is definitely a service I’m staying subscribed to. It’s not cheap, but it’s not outrageous. But don’t sign up for it unless you have the time and the inclination to write articles for submission — you’ll be wasting your money if you don’t use this service to submit at least a few articles a week. Also, article marketing is a long-term thing, so be prepared to wait before you see any upswing in your traffic numbers. You may also be interested in using UAW as a content source for your own blogs/article directories: the “unique article” certainly makes their content more appealing than that of regular directories.

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.

January 16, 2008 | Filed Under AdSense | 2 Comments 

Mail From The AdSense Team? Don’t Panic!

So last week I got an email from the AdSense support team. Here’s how it started:

While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our policies. For instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as [URL removed].

It then proceeded with a fairly generic message about not encouraging invalid clicks:

Publishers are not permitted to encourage users to click on Google ads or bring excessive attention to ad units. For example, your site cannot contain phrases such as “click the ads,” “support our sponsors,” “visit these recommended links,” or other similar language that could apply to the Google ads on your site. Publishers may not use arrows or other symbols to direct attention to the ads on their sites, and publishers may not label the Google ads with text other than “sponsored links” or “advertisements.”

That last line isn’t quite correct, as Google now allows ads to be labeled with other text. But that’s beside the point.

I get emails like these from AdSense support every once in a while. Not very often, but it does happen. There are grey areas, after all, and sometimes you end up pushing the envelope.

So what do you do when you get these kinds of emails? I wrote some advice in a new post on interacting with AdSense support, but the main thing is to be polite and to respond promptly to their notices. Their initial email to me was a big vague, for example, so I politely asked them for some clarification. (Just reply to the initial email.) They got back to me fairly quickly with some specific examples of what they didn’t like. I immediately made some changes and asked them to verify the changes. They said everything was fine now and that was that.

So many people respond to those emails with angry messages, and I never understand why. Google normally doesn’t terminate or suspend a publisher without good reason and without giving them a chance to rectify the situation. Use your common sense and you’ll be fine.

Sponsored Link: PLRPro is one of the best PLR content sites. They’re now offering a 14-day trial for only $1.

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.

January 15, 2008 | Filed Under AdSense | 2 Comments 

Find Keyword-Rich Domain Names In 3 Easy Steps

A keyword-rich domain name is an easy way to get a boost in search engine rankings and to get great ad targeting for your AdSense ads. Finding those names can be quite cumbersome, however, since all the “obvious” ones are taken. Here’s a video tip for you on how to find keyword-rich domain names in 3 easy steps — for free!



To summarize what’s in the video:

  1. Use the AdWords keyword tool (it’s public — no AdWords account needed) to generate a large list of keyword phrases from a set of primary keywords. (You can use any keyword tool to do this, of course, such as Keyword Elite or my own SuperSuggester.) Download the keywords to your computer.
  2. Open the keyword list in your favorite text editor and remove all the spaces. Copy the revised keyword list to the clipboard.
  3. Go to the GoDaddy bulk registration page and paste the contents of the clipboard. Check that the “.com” checkbox is checked, then try to register the domains. All the unavailable domains will be removed automatically, leaving you with a list of available keyword-rich domains. Choose the ones you want and register them with your favorite registrar.

That’s it! Simple. Watch the How To Find Keyword-Rich Domain Names video for an example of how it’s done.

Sponsored Link: PLRPro is one of the best PLR content sites. They’re now offering a 14-day trial for only $1.

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.

January 10, 2008 | Filed Under AdSense | 17 Comments 

AdSense Referrals Brouhaha

So yesterday Google announced that it was changing the AdSense referral program yet again. The quick summary: for publishers in North America, Latin America and Japan the program reverts to its old “make $100 when a referred publisher earns $100 in the first 180 days” model. Publishers outside those areas are out of luck, however — the referral program won’t be available to them anymore. (Note that this only refers to the AdSense program, referrals to other products and programs are unaffected.) This is causing a real brouhaha among the publisher community right now.

My take on this is quite simple: I don’t care. The AdSense referral program is just over a couple of years old now — see my first post about it. But it’s never excited me. In fact, to quote my own AdSense deferrals post:

Call my cynical, but for me this is just a deferral of non-income. Forget about those referrals. Slap a few buttons on your pages if you want, but work on your content and getting more traffic to your site. That’s where the real AdSense money is found.

I don’t know of any AdSense publisher who makes significant money referring others to AdSense. The real money with AdSense is in the ad and link units, not the referral programs. My advice still stands: work on content and getting more traffic. Don’t get worked up about the referrals, it’s just not worth it.

Sponsored Link: PLRPro is one of the best PLR content sites. They’re now offering a 14-day trial for only $1.

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.

January 9, 2008 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

AdSense Is For Introverts

As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, I’m a big AdSense fan. But some people don’t understand why. I’ve gotten comments from Internet marketers over the years saying that it’s silly for anyone to focus on AdSense with its “low payouts” and “unpredictable earnings”, that you can’t really make lots of money with AdSense these days. (AdSense Resurrected notwithstanding, of course :-) ) So why do I stick with AdSense? I gave this some serious thought over the Christmas break. And I think it has as much to do with who I am.

What I’ve concluded is that AdSense is great for introverts. The “classic” Internet money-making technique is to build a mailing list and mail product recommendations to that list. If you’ve built a good relationship with that list, you’ll get some percentage of the list buying the products you recommend. If the list is large enough, that percentage will translate into significant income, whether you’re promoting your own products, resale rights products, or someone else’s products. Mailing lists are a form of relationship marketing, in other words. The best list marketers are the ones that build trust with their lists, that can get their readers to believe that their lives will improve because of the products and services they recommend.

Every marketing textbook will tell you that it’s important to build a relationship with your customers. It’s easier to make money by selling to your existing customer base (marketing theory refers to it as a “re-buy”) than to find new customers. That’s what a mailing list is all about, essentially. Get someone to signup for your list by giving or selling them something, develop a relationship with them, and start selling (overtly or not) them other things.

But what if you’re an introvert and you don’t really want to develop chatty, ongoing “relationships” with random people? I think that becoming a successful list marketer is much harder for introverts than it is for extroverts, just because introverts are disinterested in the networking aspect that is fundamental to list marketing. (If you’re not an introvert and can’t relate to what I’m saying here, I suggest you read Jonathan Rauch’s great article Caring for Your Introvert.) If you want to be a success at list marketing, you have to communicate with your list. You have to give them stories. You have to personalize the message to make it look like you’re talking to just one person at a time, even though you’re really sending the same message out to thousands of people. You have to get them excited. Ugh!

There’s a parallel between list marketing and social networking. Extroverts are the best social networkers, because social networks give them tools to extend their natural need for interaction. Us introverts, however, don’t see the point. Yes, I have Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace profiles, but I don’t use them, and I don’t think I’m unusual in that respect. I’ve staked out my territory, so to speak, but I’m not really interested in doing much more than the bare minimum to maintain it.

Back to AdSense. AdSense is perfect for introverts. Once your account’s been activated, you don’t need to talk to anyone. You put up a site, slap on your AdSense code, and move onto the next project. You don’t have to interact with anyone if you don’t want to. You provide a way for advertisers to connect with potential customers, after which you step out of the equation entirely. That’s perhaps one of the biggest criticisms of AdSense from Internet marketers, but from my viewpoint it’s the saving grace. Give me my money and leave me alone. That’s why AdSense is perfect for the introvert.

Sponsored Link: One of the few monthly services I recommend is the Unique Article Wizard article distribution service. It requires more work upfront on your part to create the articles, but once you’re done they do all the hard submission work for you. I especially like the fact that a human eyeballs your articles before they’re sent out. A simple but effective way to get backlinks and organic search engine traffic.

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.

January 7, 2008 | Filed Under AdSense | 15 Comments 

Back For The New Year

Well, my vacation’s over. However, after having driven through a snowstorm on the way to New Brunswick and then another on the way back, I’m ready for a vacation from my vacation! I have well over a week’s worth of emails to plow through and some other housekeeping to take care of, so probably no new posts here for a few days. I wish everyone a happy new year and I hope your 2008 AdSense earnings will surpass your 2007 earnings!

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.

January 3, 2008 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off