Disclaimer: I have a (loose) business arrangement with the authors of AdSense Resurrected whereby they’ve agreed to do the marketing and selling of a software tool I developed that makes it simple to create and maintain static AdSense sites. That said, my software was developed independently of the book and I only got my first look at the book yesterday. So here’s my review, but you may want to hear from others as well before making the purchase decision. If you’ve bought the book and have read it, please feel free to leave a comment with your own thoughts about the material. You can even post your own affiliate link for the product in the comment, if you’re so inclined, just sign up here to get one.

After some false starts, the AdSense Resurrected ebook finally launched yesterday. Although I had a general idea of what was in the book from previous email discussions with the authors, yesterday was my first look at the 95-page long book, which retails for $67. The book consists of the following chapters:

1. Our Story
2. Show Me The Money
3. AdSense Resurrected Tactics (ART)
4. Testing and Optimizing
5. Market Research
6. Automate Your AdSense Business
7. Make Money
8. Case Studies
9. Troubleshoot Your AdSense Virtual Real Estate
10. Resources

The bulk of the book (about 40 pages) is spent discussing the AdSense Resurrected Tactics and how to implement them, with the rest of the book devoted to background about Mo and Zeila Rich (the authors) and tips on how to automate your business, diversifying your income, and case studies. (The book could use a good editing — there are a lot of mismatched tenses and missing words — but it’s no worse than other ebooks I’ve read and is still quite readable. The main thing is that the ideas come across. And they need to do a search-and-replace of “Adsense” with “AdSense”.)

The Business of AdSense

AdSense Resurrected is about treating AdSense as a business and not a hobby. This is something I’ve discussed many times in this blog, and in fact the basic business model they’re using was discussed in some detail in my post The AdSense Crapshoot, where I pointed out there are really two basic AdSense business models: few sites with lots of traffic or many sites with less traffic. The Riches went with the latter model, owning over 1000 different AdSense sites split across 20 general categories. In other words, they spent real time and money to create a viable AdSense business — they treated it like a business and invested in it like a real business.

I can certainly relate to the first chapter of the book where it describes their first AdSense earnings, which were $0.74. We all started out that way. In my own book I described how exciting it was to make those first few cents… But many AdSense publishers don’t do much more than make those kinds of earnings. So what have the Riches done differently and is it something that others can also do?

Repeat Targeted Traffic

I’m not going to list the AdSense Resurrected Tactics here, that would be very unfair to the authors of the book and it’s not something I do in my reviews. (For example, see my AdWords book review roundup.) If you want that level of detail, you should buy the book and read it. That said, I do talk about the general ideas and tactics in my reviews and I’m not going to treat AdSense Resurrected any differently.

The main idea in AdSense Resurrected is to generate repeat targeted traffic to all those sites you build. You start small with a few sites and plow the earnings you make back into the development of more sites, repeating this several times until you have a substantial income stream.

Targeted traffic is easy enough to explain: you either pay for it (the “quick and paid” traffic method, as the Riches call it) or you get it for free organically (the “slow and free” method). The Riches themselves used mostly pay-per-click (PPC) traffic (i.e. Google AdWords) to generate that traffic, mainly because it produces results much more quickly. But they recognize that not everyone wants to spend money on PPC, which is where natural search engine traffic (via things like article marketing) comes into play. But organic traffic takes a long time to produce results, so if you want to make money quickly you need to pay for your traffic.

To be clear, though, they’re not talking about “AdSense arbitrage”, where you buy cheap AdWords clicks (there’s the hard part!) and direct traffic to your AdSense content pages. Google recently disallowed this business model and in any case it was very hard to do right. Instead, you send the traffic to landing pages where you offer them a free course/newsletter/report in exchange for their email address. At this point you have targeted traffic — they’re on the landing page because they’re interested in the topic — and once they sign up for your list they become repeat targeted traffic. This is Internet Marketing 101, really, except that unlike most other systems I’ve seen the point is not to start pushing affiliate and other products through the mailing list, the point is to get them to read the content on your sites and make money indirectly from AdSense and affiliate programs. You’re not pretending to create a relationship with the people, you’re just giving them information. It’s AdSense is for introverts on steroids.

What, You Mean It Takes Work?

One thing that Mo and Zeila don’t sugar-coat is how much work it takes to get to the stage they’re at. Building a lot of sites — especially if you’re a quality nut — takes a lot of time. They also invested some serious money on their credit cards initially in order to get the traffic flowing to their first sites. The money doesn’t come for free, nor should it. A lot of people won’t be prepared to spend the time and/or money it takes to generate the kind of earnings they do. But it should be noted that you don’t need any special tools to follow their methods, just the willingness to buy some domains and some web hosting. Everything else can be done on your own with some time and effort.

If you’re a strong believer in building high quality content sites (hi, Chuck!) then AdSense Resurrected may raise some flags for you, though nothing they advocate goes against the AdSense terms and conditions (one of the sites mentioned in their case studies — not one of their own — does in fact violate some of the AdSense program policies in terms of ad placement, however), nor are they saying you have to build low-quality sites in order to succeed. That said, you can be sure that some readers will churn out sites ad nauseum using their tactics and they won’t be stellar sites. One would hope, though, that these sites won’t be able to “pollute” the Web much. Their creators will likely be using traffic generation methods like PPC and not focusing on organic rankings, so in the end the impact should be minimal. Let’s face it, people who build those kinds of sites will continue to build them no matter what products are on or not on the market.

If you’re serious about building an AdSense business, this book has some good ideas and it all makes sense. I wish there was a bit more detail on certain things, but I suspect that information is found in the higher-priced “Jumpstart Kit”, which I haven’t yet seen. Be prepared to spend time and money beyond the book purchase, however, to put their ideas into practice.

Again, I’d love to hear comments from any of you who’ve read the book. Did you find it worth the money? What did you learn? The authors read this blog, it’s a great way to given them some feedback.

Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.

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