A free 150-page site template? What's the catch?
The other day I got an email from one of my newsletter readers asking if I'd pass them an offer to receive a free “150-page site template” designed specifically for AdSense. Now, I value my readership and I'm not just going to send them any old offer I receive. So I signed up for his offer myself and took a look at what it really is.
What you get after you sign up for his mailing list are two things: the address of his site and a link to a ZIP file containing the complete source code to the same site. The site is cars.27days27gurus.com, which is you look at it closely is a subdomain of the “27days27gurus.com” domain. That's an odd domain name, and a little fishing with Google found me these related sites in the same domain:
There were a few others, but those sites seem to be down. Anyhow, the point of this posting is not to given these sites added publicity (which is a side effect of talking about them) but to talk about what these sites are doing. These are definitely MFA (”made for AdSense”) sites, no doubt about it. It's easy to tell — the sites consist entirely of articles written by other people and wrapped with advertisements. The point of this posting is not to debate whether such sites are useful, but to talk about the techniques used by the sites.
The cars site I find particularly interesting, because it does a really good job of blending ads with content. The top of the page is mostly devoted to two vertical AdSense blocks, the content is at the bottom — either links to articles or else the contents of an article. On the side are Amazon links to related books. Of the three, this site is the one I consider the most attractive, and not actually a bad layout for someone looking to build a site that displays ads quite prominently without making it look so tacky. There's even a bit of JavaScript code at the top to put today's date on the page, making it look current. Clever.
The ZIP file, by the way, does contain the source for this site, as a set of PHP files. If you're still interested in getting it, contact me and I'll forward you the signup information, but I'm not sure you'll get much out of it other than what you'd get from looking at the sites themselves, and I can't guarantee anything about the owner of the mailing list. If you want to build your own MFA site, you'd want to choose a different set of articles anyhow.
Or, you could go one better and write your own content. What a thought!
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!
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