AdSense Case Study: What kind of doctor are you?
As promised, we're returning to our discussions of my ongoing
href="http://invisible-fence.ericgiguere.com/adsense-case-study.html">AdSense case study
currently the Invisible Fence Guide ranks #3 on Google for “
href="http://www.google.com/search?q=adsense+case+study">adsense case study
ranks #4 and #5 indirectly (through this blog) on Yahoo!. At least today it does.
Side note: One thing that I've been doing with the case study that I don't recommend you do is redirecting the Invisible Fence
Guide's home page to different pages within the site. I've done this quite deliberately, of course, in order to showcase the site's evolution.
You wouldn't normally do such a thing, and I highly recommend that you stick to one consistent set of URLs. Yahoo! seems especially touchy
about this, so the Invisible Fence Guide is not ranking very highly there right now, with only a few pages showing up in the index. Things will sort themselves out naturally over the long run once I'm done fooling around with the site and I place the final content pages in their proper spots at the root of the site.
Back to the main event: You may be wondering what the title of this posting means. How does What kind of doctor are you? relate to anything having to do with AdSense in general or this case study in particular? More than you think!
When people train to become a medical doctor, at some point they have to decide what niche they're most interested in serving. For simplicity, let's limit their choices to one of three possibilities:
- Family practitioner
- General surgeon
- Brain surgeon
How does a medical student decide what kind of doctor they want to be? There are so many factors to consider. One of them is income:
- Family practitioner: $150,000
- General surgeon: $300,000
- Brain surgeon: $600,000
(These figures, by the way, are meant to be representative rather than actual salaries.)
Based on income alone, then, it would make the most sense to become a brain surgeon. But income is just one variable. What about training?
- Family practitioner: 4 years medical school + 3 years residency
- General surgeon: 2-5 additional years than the family practitioner
- Brain surgeon: 3-5 additional years than the general surgeon
Whoops, that changes things a bit, doesn't it? Sure, brain surgeons gets paid more, but they require that much more training.
It gets even worse if you factor in where these doctors can live and practice medicine:
- Family practitioner: pretty much anywhere they want
- General surgeon: near a hospital
- Brain surgeon: near a large hospital in a major city
What about job stress?
- Family practitioner: low stress, especially if they don't have to be on call
- General surgeon: more stress, have to be on call
- Brain surgeon: high stress
What about job fulfillment?
- Family practitioner: can get pretty boring treating colds and other common illnesses
- General surgeon: more interesting and varied work
- Brian surgeon: exciting and dangerous work
In the end, then, a medical student chooses the niche they want to pursue based on a number of variables. What's right for one isn't necessarily right for another.
Doctors are not the only ones who must choose their niche. Every AdSense publisher has to decide what kind of doctor they are. Are you going to be happy as a country doctor seeing just a few patients but with lots of time to golf? Or do you want the high-income and high-stress life of a brain surgeon? Or something in between?
Once you've decided what you want to be, work hard towards reaching your goal. The profession of family physician may not be as glamorous as that of a surgeon, but don't forget that family physicians work hard to get where they are today through university, medical school and residency.
First, of course, you have to pass medical school. This means learning about building sites and blogs, about search engine optimization, about AdSense itself. (Hint: get yourself a good book :-)) Then you can pursue your niche.
Is the Invisible Fence Guide ever going to be a high-traffic site? Of course not! Will it do well in its chosen niche? It already does, at least well enough for me to be happy with it. But it's taken some work to get there, as you've seen if you've been following the whole case study as it progressed.
OK, OK, I'm getting off the soapbox now…
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google. Subscribe to his AdSense newsletter for more tips and advice on AdSense and content monetization.
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