AdSense Case Study: Analysis of Stage 1
In my last posting I introduced Stage 1 of an AdSense case study, my Invisible Fence Guide (opens in a new window), without much fanfare. Here are some more details.
The whole idea behind this project is to build a real, money-making site in distinct, documented stages. My hope is that some of my readers will learn something from this project by watching what I do to the site over time. Unlike a conventional site, I'm actually keeping the stages separate and physically distinct. You'll see that Stage 1 is in a “stage1″ subfolder on the site. When I introduce Stage 2, it will be in its own subfolder. This will let you go back and forth between the stages to see what's really different. Normally, you wouldn't do this, of course, but it will be useful for educational purposes.
Stage 1 is all about content. If you've read my book, you'll know I spend a lot of time discussing content creation. I don't even talk about HTML or CSS until Chapter 6. For the average person, good content is the way to be successful with AdSense. Really, good content is the way to be successful with any website or blog, whether or not you're trying to make money from it.
Stage 1 showcases my initial content for the site. The site is about my experience with the Invisible Fence system, which is a “hidden fence” system used for pet containment. Even though we had a wooden fence on our property, one of our dogs managed to get out. So we installed an Invisible Fence system to keep the dogs in despite their best efforts to leave.
Why did I choose this topic? There are several reasons:
- It's something I know.
- I have interesting stories to go with it.
- It's about a product or service.
- There are advertisers for the product. (For a quick test, use the Overture view bids tool to see for yourself.)
Really what I'm building here is a niche site about pet containment systems. Searchers looking for information about Invisible Fence will hopefully find this site useful. If they visit, they're looking for information about hidden fence systems, so they'll be interested in advertisements for those kinds of systems. This is the beauty of AdSense's contextually-targeted advertising, of course. (If you haven't read my book, I encourage you to download the sample chapter called Finding Something to Say which is all about topic selection.)
Content creation can be hard, of course, and I've talked about this before in this blog. Sure, you may see a book at the bookstore and think “I could have written that!”, but if you actually sat down to write that book, you'd find it wasn't as easy as you thought. For Stage 1, I have less than a dozen pages, but it still took me two or three hours to write it all down.
But if you look at the pages in Stage 1, you'll see that they really are mostly about content. Use the “View source” option in your browser to look at the HTML for one of the pages. What you will see is mostly content and navigation. There are a few <div> tags to separate things, and of course there are headings and titles, but nothing else except the AdSense code to show some ads. The pages don't look very pretty, but they're quite readable. You can start at the first page and easily navigate all the way through to the last page of the site. That's the way Google's crawlers see your site, by the way.
Staying in a similar vein, Stage 2 will be about enhancing the content of Stage 1. We're not going to worry about making the site look good until later. Stay tuned.
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.