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.

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