One of the questions I often get asked is What kind of AdSense site should I create?. Well, a year or two ago it didn’t really matter what kind of site you created, not if you were in the game for short-term gain. But things are different now. Google is (finally!) cracking down on AdSense publishers who create valueless sites, both indirectly (by dropping them from the search engine result pages) and directly (by banning their accounts). Gone are the days when you could just crank out sites and see huge rewards.

No, instead, AdSense publishers need to concentrate on providing real value to their readership. That real value will draw visitors. Those visitors will click the ads and make you money.

How do you provide real value if you’re just one person with limited time and resources? By working hard on one or two sites. But what kind of sites? Conventional wisdom says that you need to create “authority” sites, but that’s not the right approach at all.

Here’s my list of the 3 kinds of AdSense sites that work best for small publishers. Start with one of these.

1. The Experience Site

The first kind of AdSense site that anyone can build, and in many ways the easiest to build, is the experience site. This is a site that describes your personal experiences with something. It doesn’t claim to be authoritative, nor even comprehensive. It’s you talking (hopefully intelligently) about what you’ve done.

There are so many possibilities for building good experience sites. If you’re an avid photographer, for example, you can build sites around your experiences with certain cameras, specific photo techniques, shooting problems you’ve had (and solved), locations you’ve captured, etc. etc. Almost any hobby is rife for material here, especially if you’ve been doing it for some time and have a lot of “war stories” to discuss.

Many experience sites are built around a blog, although it doesn’t have to be that way. My own Invisible Fence pet containment system experiences are documented in a very simple and conventional website, with a multi-stage construction was described as an AdSense case study. Were I to redo the site today, I might do it as a blog, although then I’d feel obligated to update it on a regular basis.

Why are experience sites useful? Because the problems you’ve faced and solved may be problems that others are themselves facing. Or maybe what you did is completely novel in some way. Not all experience sites are useful or well-done, and not all of them add to the value of the Web. But if you work at it, your site will definitely have value.

2. The Clarification Site

The second kind of AdSense site is the clarification site. The purpose of a clarification site is to better explain a topic. Because while there’s a lot of information out on the Web, much of it is poorly presented and/or poorly explained.

Here’s an example. A few years back, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), based here in Waterloo, created itself a website, as most organizations do. The home page at the time was very obscure about what CIGI did. Here’s what it said:

The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) is a global research centre charged with studying, advising and educating scholars, practitioners and governments. Its area of concern is the character and desired reforms of the multilateral system, particularly within the areas of economic and financial governance.

Say what? (You can visit the Internet archive to see the page in its full glory.)

I don’t mean to pick on CIGI, and in fact today their website is much clearer as to the mission of the organization and much more navigable.

The point is that a crappy yet authoritative site is still a crappy site. If you can build a site that clarifies matters, again that’s real value. The best way to do this is to build a site for a different audience than the authoritative site, since presumably the authoritative site is speaking to what it thinks is its primary audience. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other people out there who’d be interested in your Reader’s Digest version of the same material.

3. The Compilation Site

The final kind of successful AdSense site is the compilation site. This is a topic I’ve discussed before, see Are Article Directories Ethical? for example. Let me quote myself:

That’s the big problem with the AdSense article directories I see. They’re just random collections of unedited material thrown together in hopes of grabbing a search engine’s attention. There’s no thought put into their organization. There’s nothing special or unique about them. Even adding things like reviews, additional commentaries, definitions, etc. to the articles that were gotten somewhere else would be useful. Something to distinguish that kind of site from everything else.

One of the problem with the Web is how to organize and find the information you need. The information’s usually available, but it may not be easy to find it. A compilation site attempts to organize that information by summarizing the important points and then linking to all the relevant websites for more detailed information. The information on the site itself is not what’s most valuable, it’s the organization of that information and the links to the (presumably more) authoritative sites that is useful.

The best compilation sites have lots of links to other sites. They’re not afraid of external linking, and they’re all the more useful because of it. It may seem counterproductive because each link out is one more chance of losing the visitor (and hence any potential ad clicks) but it’s the links that make the site valuable to the visitor in the first place and that draw in the traffic.

What About Authority Sites?

A lot of people want to create authority sites because they think that it’s the way to really make money. Because the search engines love authority sites.

There are several problems with this viewpoint. For one thing, search engines don’t disclose what an “authority site” is. Oh, people have noticed that Wikipedia gets a lot of mileage in Google where it probably shouldn’t. And until the “Squidoo slap” occurred recently, pages on Squidoo were ranking extremely well.

But the most obvious problem with the authority site model is that few people are authorities on any given topic. I could probably argue that I’m an authority on Java ME programming, since I’ve published two books and numerous articles about the topic over the past 7 or 8 years. This blog itself showcases my AdSense expertise, so my word here would have some weight as well. But I don’t think I can be considered an authority on anything else, certainly not on a global or national level. (You can certainly be an authority within a smaller community, though — but is that authority monetizable?)

A couple of years back, the term “mesothelioma” was a hot topic for AdSense publishers once it was “discovered” that law firms were paying big bucks for mesothelioma-related advertisements. So a bunch of publishers immediately went and created sites and pages around the term. But where do you think they get their information from? The other — already existing — mesothelioma sites, including the ones put out by bona fide cancer organizations like the National Cancer Institute. These new sites were clearly opportunistic. They weren’t experience, clarification or compilation sites — sites that could provide real value beyond what was already available. (Aside: I must admit that I briefly went down that path myself with my Vioxx Lawsuit Questions site, but it became clear as I was doing it that it wasn’t really something I could develop into anything meaningful, so I abandoned it quite quickly. I think the only real contribution I was able to make in relation to the Vioxx recall was with my humor piece, and I pretty much left it at that.)

If you have the knowledge, experience and wherewithal to create an authority site, then by all means do so. But it’s not easy. You’ll have more success creating one of the kinds of sites mentioned above.

Sponsored Link: For only $7.50 learn How to Quickly and Easily Get “.edu” Backlinks to your sites. No fluff, no special software required.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

• Previous Entry: FrugalIM: Resources for the Frugal Internet Marketer
• Next Entry: Popups in PDFs? Say It Ain’t So!