Making Money With AdSense Is Not So Easy Anymore
Four years ago, I was writing a book called Make Easy Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program. While I didn’t come up with the title, it does reflect fairly accurately the general tone of the book. Because when I wrote it, it was easy to make money with AdSense.
But I wouldn’t use that title today. Making money with AdSense — or any advertising or affiliate system — isn’t nearly as easy anymore. Especially in the last year.
Why? Because it’s hard to get ranked in Google. Targeted organic traffic — which is what really works well with AdSense — is so hard to get now that anyone just starting out is going to find it hard to make any significant money.
Content Grows Exponentially
Not too long ago, I created a silly online tool called How Much Of The Web Do You Own?. Type in how many pages of content you have on the Web and it tells your miniscule percentage of the entire Web. Today, for example, it says there are 1,152,913,072,000 pages on the Web, with 12,000 more pages being added every second. See Estimating the total number of web pages for my logic.
There is a fundamental flaw in my logic, though, in that it assumes the growth of the web is linear. And if everyone was interesting in creating content rather than getting that content to rank well, that’s probably what it would be.
But the reality is that many webmasters want their pages pushed up in the rankings. After they’ve chosen good titles for their pages (perhaps the most important on-page SEO factor) and implemented a good site structure, the next thing they need are links from external sites. Lots of links.
You can go and buy links, but there’s only so much money you can spend doing that. You can go and leave comments on blogs and forums, but there’s only so much time you can spend doing that. These techniques also take a long time to have an effect.
What the big boys do is create lots of content in automated or semi-automated fashion. You can read posts like SEO Empire to get an idea of what’s involved. Once these sites are created, their owners can use them to give their “money sites” a big boost in the rankings by linking to them. Whether or not you agree with these tactics, it’s what people are doing. Let’s not debate ethics.
The point is that while regular website owners and bloggers are putting out one or two pages of content per day on their sites, there are others out there creating essentially thousands of pages of content per site per day. And some of those sites in turn end up feeding other sites, which generate even more content (automation is key).
Add to the mix webmasters who decide that they have to go in that direction themselves to succeed and you can see why I say that content is growing exponentially, not linearly.
But Searches Don’t
On the other hand, the number of searches being done — we’re talking search terms here, not search volume — is not growing exponentially. It can’t — there are only so many people in the world and there are only so many things they’ll search for and so many ways they’ll search for it. A lot of searches are influenced by outside events. Others are in response to needs and wants. The number of truly “new” searches done is surely quite small.
If content is growing exponentially but searches are growing linearly, this means that the number of pages that match a given search term will grow quite quickly over a short amount of time. It’ll be exponential in some cases, linear in others, but either way there will be a lot of content to compete against in the search engine rankings, and it only gets worse as time goes on.
Not to mention that there’s a feedback loop built into the whole system: to outrank a competitor, you need more links. So you create more content. The competitor fights back and creates even more content. And so on ad infinitum.
And Then There’s Recency…
One of the things Google’s done to its ranking algorithm in the last year is place a premium on recency. New, fresh content gets a temporary big boost over older content, although after a day or two it falls back down to its “natural” place in the rankings. Giving prominence to up-to-the-minute content makes for more relevant searches in many cases.
Of course, the content creators aren’t fools and they’ve noticed this. Rather than unleash their autogenerated content in big chunks, they “drip feed” it out to the Web via blogs or other feed-based content management systems. A blog that updates itself with new content every couple of hours gets visited often by the Googlebot, and it doesn’t take those pages long to get into Google’s index. Take those feeds and add them to RSS aggregators like Feedage and you’ll get some immediate links to that blog. Bookmark the blog for good measure on as many social bookmarking accounts as you can to get a few more links. (Many will be nofollow, but not all will, and you’ll get some traffic and legitimacy from the links.)
By drip feeding content, webmasters can get their “new” content to rank temporarily way higher than it normally would. And they get the search engines visiting that much more often, which means their content gets indexed that much more quickly. Which means the links in that content can boost the rankings of the sites they link to.
Pity The Poor Website Owner
Making money with AdSense is all about traffic. You can say that about affiliate marketing, too, but the payouts in affiliate marketing can be so much larger than the per-click values you’ll get from AdSense that you can make money with much less traffic. This is why all the big guns in Internet Marketing focus on affiliate marketing these days.
That said, AdSense is an easy way to monetize a traffic stream when you have lots of content. Google makes a huge profit with the AdSense ads it places on hundreds of thousands of websites.
There are sites out there making good profits from their share of that revenue as well.
But the easy AdSense money is long gone. (It’s like the despair phase of the gold rush.) You can’t just throw up a site and expect it to get organic traffic. You need a “foundation” (like the SEO Empire post mentions) of pages that link to the site to increase its rankings. You need regularly-updated content to keep the crawlers coming back. You have to work hard at getting traffic to your site, because the numbers just don’t add up anymore — too many people are fighting over a pie that just isn’t large enough to feed everyone who wants a bite.
And Your Options Are?
There are things you can do to even things out, of course:
- Build a content network. Don’t settle for one or two sites. Build yourself a network of sites that’ll give you the linking power you need to rank well.
- Build a captive audience. Although controversial, the AdSense Resurrected technique is still valid if you can do it: build a list (pay for it) and get each person in that list to visit your pages in a specific sequence, making money from AdSense ads and affiliate links sprinkled throughout the content. As long as the average income per list member exceeds the cost to obtain those list members, you’ll make money.
- Pay for traffic. You pretty much have to abandon AdSense for this one, as AdSense arbitrage doesn’t work very well. So you have to focus on affiliate marketing, on products that have relatively large payouts in order to pay for the traffic.
None of these are new, of course. And they all take a lot of time and a lot of effort.
Of course, in the “real world” business owners face these issues all the time. How do you get your message out to a widely dispersed and fragmented audience? How do you get people into your place of business? How do you find and reach potential buyers?
The Web has gone mainstream, and so has AdSense. That means it’s no so easy anymore.
I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments on this topic.
Is Obama The Antichrist?
That is the top way to complete the phrase “Is Obama…” according to Google’s search completion feature. For posterity, let’s preserve the list here since it’ll likely change over the coming weeks. According to Google, the most likely search queries about Barack Obama are:
- Is Obama the Antichrist? (not touching that one)
- Is Obama a Muslim? (no — see here)
- Is Obama a US citizen? (if he wasn’t, he couldn’t have run for president… you have to be a natural-born citizen to be president, sorry Arnie…)
- Is Obama a socialist? (also not touching that one)
- Is Obama black? (yes)
- Is Obama a citizen? (see #3)
- Is Obama a Christian? (see #2)
- Is Obama an American citizen? (see #3 again)
- Is Obama a terrorist? (no)
- Is Obama going to win? (yes)
As mentioned in the last post, I had to move my Suggest Explorer tool to another hosting service due to security issues with Servage. Moving a site almost always causes problems and so I’ve been monitoring the site for a few days to make sure everything’s OK — good thing I did, because I screwed a few things up and didn’t notice right away. Anyhow, I’ve been monitoring the top queries page and that’s where I noticed the is obama query suddenly became popular… turns out someone linked to it from Digg in response to a very similar entry there.
There’s not much of a point to this post, I just found the query amusing.
I am preparing a big post for tomorrow, though, that’s going to be very interesting to all AdSense publishers. It revolves around the eternal question of “can you make money with AdSense?” and what I say may surprise you. Stay tuned!
Don’t Host With Servage
Regular readers know that I tell it like it is. Well, I’ve had it with Servage, one of the hosting companies I use, because of the continual security breaches on the sites I host there. One of those sites was the Google Suggest Explorer, which I just moved over to another hosting provider this morning. Every few days the site would get hacked and some script would insert links to dubious sites into various pages, eventually causing the site to be flagged by Google and others as a bad site unless I caught the offending pages in time and removed the bad stuff from them. This happens to the other sites that are still hosted there, which I plan on moving shortly as well. Moving sites is a pain in many cases because of the databases involved, but the short-term pain will be worth the long-term gain of peace of mind and better search engine rankings. There are other downsides to Servage, too, so I really can’t recommend them and in fact really regret using them. (I’ve had no such issues with ResellerZoom and others.)
If you do need to move hosting services, for whatever reason, here are some tips:
- Back everything up before switching. It should be a given, but before you switch your site over make sure you have a recent backup of everything on the site. This includes any MySQL databases you may be using. How you do this depends on the system you’re using, if your system uses cPanel for controlling the site (Servage doesn’t, by the way, which is another complaint I have) then there’s a “Backup” tool that makes things pretty simple.
- Get as much of the new site going before switching. You can create a new account on the new hosting provider to host the site and you can do a lot of preparation — such as uploading files — before actually switching the site over to the new provider. Instead of working with domain names, for example, us raw IP addresses when moving things to the new servers.
- If you’ve had security problems, don’t use the backups you made. This may seem contradictory, but in security cases it’s best to work from “fresh” data rather than potentially compromised data. Most people I know have a “local” copy of their websites that they can work with. Start from there, not from the data you’ve downloaded from your working site. WordPress users have to use the data from the site, of course, since all the posts and so on are stored in a MySQL database. But use this as an opportunity to upgrade your “new” site to the latest version of WordPress and then use WordPress’ built-in export capability to export the blog data to an XML file that you can later import into your new blog.
- Give yourself lots of time. Don’t be surprised if it takes you a few hours to move things over, especially the first time you do this kind of thing.
- Stay near your computer for a few hours. Once you switch the nameserver (DNS) entries for your site to the new provider, don’t assume you’re done. You’ll probably have more stuff to do once the new site goes “live” and you’ll want to check every nook and cranny to make sure there are no missing pages and so on.
You’ll find lots of advice online, too, don’t just listen to me. This is a common situation for webmasters. Just give yourself lots of time to do it and expect things to be screwed up for a day or two and you’ll be fine.