AdSense Quickie #1: What is AdSense?
[While I’m gone, I thought I’d publish a set of “AdSense quickies”… here’s the first one.]
AdSenseландшафт is
Tags: AdSense
Gone Fishing
In a few hours I’ll be leaving on a vacation to Paris. I won’t be bringing my laptop or my BlackBerry, so I’m going to shortly switch the blog to moderate all comments until I return. So don’t expect much activity for a couple of weeks, though there will be a few posts that will pop up now and then, if I can get them done in time… See you in September!
Tags: AdSense
How Much Of The Web Do You Own?
A recent post by Google stated that they now have over a trillion unique pages in the Google search index. That made me wonder — how much of the Web do I own, exactly? A quick calculation showed me the answer: not enough!
Anyhow, I put together a silly little online tool called How Much Of The Web Do You Own? that you can use to determine your own percentage. First calculate how many pages you have on all your sites — use the Yahoo! Site Explorer to get the numbers, it’s more accurate than Google’s site: command — and plug that number into the tool. Then bash your head against the desk…
Think of it from the AdSense publisher’s perspective. If each page you own (and “own” can be defined pretty loosely to mean any page which you can monetize via AdSense) makes you an average of 1 cent per day (I’m just pulling that number from a hat), then 100 pages doesn’t make you much — a whole $1/day. You need to get up to 10,000 pages to start seeing a significant amount of $100/day. Just think of what you could make with a million or so pages…
PLRPro Backdoor Special
PLRPro is the PLR (private label rights) content service I recommend for serious Internet marketing. They closed their doors recently to new members ahead of implementing a whole slew of new services for members, due out next month. For a few days, however, there’s a PLRPro backdoor special being run that lets you into PLRPro at $127/month. The regular price for the upgraded PLRPro service will be $197/month, so if you’ve been wavering on the fence about this one then you might want to grab the backdoor special before it’s gone.
Yes, I am a member. All existing members will get grandfathered into the upgraded service and won’t have to pay the newer monthly rate, which is essentially double the old rate of $97/month.
Note that you don’t get access to the new PLRPro services until next month. You do get access to the PLRPro content, though, for the current month and all subsequent months until you cancel. You also get access to some members-only blogs and article directories for getting backlinks to your sites and various books and forum postings on how to do things, including a nice little book on setting up your own VRE (virtual real estate) network of sites. Just remember my tip on profitable AdSense article marketing if you’re going to rewrite some of the articles for submission to article directories in order to drive traffic to your AdSense sites.
If any PLRPro subscribers are reading this, feel free to leave a comment detailing your experiences with the service. On the whole I’ve heard nothing but good things. It’s not the only program out there, but it seems to be one of the best.
P.S.: I should also mention that PLRPro also has an ebook service which is quite good. Each month you get 3 ebooks complete with (and this is what I really like) an audio version of the book, 4 different websites for selling it, an autoresponder sequence, a teaser ebook for giveaways (to encourage people to subscribe to your autoresponder), a custom WordPress blog theme and a bunch of articles for traffic purposes. If you join PLRPro you get access to the ebook service for $42/month more.
Tags: AdSense, PLR, PLRPro, private label rights
How To Squeeze Out More Keywords From The AdWords Keyword Tool
A very short tip about the AdWords keyword tool — which is free to use, as I keep mentioning, no AdWords account needed. (If you do have an AdWords account, though, might as well log into the account and use it from there, you won’t have to prove you’re human.)
Normally, the AdWords keyword tool gives you at most 200 keyword ideas. What most people don’t know is that the list of keywords can vary on each request. So by running the tool multiple times on the same keyword you can generate a slightly larger set of keywords.
Here are the steps:
- Search for a keyword (or analyze a site)
- Scroll through the results and click all the Add all links so all the keywords end up in the list on the righthand side of the browser window
- Go back to the top and hit the Get keyword ideas button again.
- Scroll through the results. Any new keywords not already in the list will be obvious, since they’re in blue and the other ones are in grey.
- Repeat this process until you don’t get any more keywords. Try checking or unchecking the Use synonyms option while doing this to get even more keywords.
The only downside with this approach is that when you move the keywords over into the righthand side you lose all the search and competition data. If you plan on analyzing the data, you’ll want to download the spreadsheet format for the keyword data after each press of the Get keyword ideas. You’ll then have to merge the data into one big spreadsheet.
Tags: AdSense, AdWords, Google, keyword tool, tip
Profitable AdSense Article Marketing
As promised, here’s a tip on how to do effective article marketing with the help of the free free AdWords keyword tool. As I’ve mentioned before, article writing and submission is a simple and cost-effective way to get links and traffic to your AdSense pages. But you can profit more from the traffic if you do it right.
The idea is very simple: buy low, sell high. You write two sets of content for a given topic/niche: one set (the traffic set) is for distribution on other sites, the other set (the money set) is for publication on your own site. The traffic set targets low-paying (but often high-traffic) keywords, the money set targets the higher-paying keywords.
Let’s use the broad topic of cooking as an example. Type cooking into the AdWords keyword tool and sort the results by search volume and you’ll get something like this:
Many cooking terms aren’t going to pay you much per-click — remember, the values you see here are what AdWords advertisers pay to have their ads shown on Google, the earnings AdSense publishers make from ads will be much lower. What we’re looking for are relative values, however. Here’s how I’d group the keywords shown above:
| Traffic Set | Money Set |
| cooking turkey | cooking schools |
| cooking recipes | cooking school |
| home cooking | cooking classes |
| cooking online | cooking class |
| cooking | cooking com |
I’ve arbitrarily chosen the $2 mark as the cutoff between the two sets: keywords in the traffic set have values less than $2, those in the money set have values more than $2. Notice how the traffic keywords are generally about “do-it-yourself” cooking and the money keywords are about formal cooking instruction.
For traffic, then, write articles about recipes and cooking techniques and distribute them using EzineArticles, iSnare, and other article directories and submission services. For example, “How To Cook A Turkey” would target the “cooking turkey” keyword. On the other hand, for your own site/blog you’d want to write an article like “Cooking Classes Are For Everyone” to target the “cooking classes” and “cooking class” keywords.
The trick that makes this all work is to link the traffic article to the money article with a carefully-worded resource box:
To wow your company next Thanksgiving, take a cooking class and learn how to cook a turkey with all the trimmings. Find cooking classes near you with our national listing of cooking schools.
Notice the use of “cooking class” and “cooking schools” in the link anchor text. While the body of the article focuses on turkey cooking, the resource box focuses on the cooking classes. The two links should go directly to a page (or pages) relating to formal cooking instruction. Thus you get SEO benefits from the article (links to your pages with the all-important money keywords) and very targeted traffic (anyone who clicks the links to visit your site).
If you’ve chosen good money keywords, your per-click earnings should be much higher than they’d be if you’d just blindly targeted high-traffic keywords. (Don’t feel sad for the article directory: the directory will also make money, of course, because some of the readers will click ads on the directory site, but not as much as your pages will… although they’ll probably make more in terms of sheer volume.)
That, my friends, is the key to profitable AdSense article marketing.
Tags: AdSense, AdWords, article directories, article writing, content, Google, keyword tool, traffic
What Does Google Think Your Page Is About?
In my previous post, How To Find Profitable Niches, I showed how to use the free AdWords keyword tool to find new topic ideas using high-traffic news and general interest sites. But the tool has other uses.
The most interesting use from an AdSense publisher’s perspective is to see what Google thinks your site is about. Actually, it can be more specific than that — you can use the keyword tool to determine what Google thinks of an individual page.
Take All About CRM, a demo site I created with PLRSiteBuilder. If I run its homepage through the keyword tool, I end up with an extensive list of keywords grouped under the following primary keywords:
- customer service
- crm software
- small business
- customer relation
- crm
- customer
- software
Some miscellaneous keywords are also in the list. Most of the keywords are in the CRM category (CRM = customer relationship management), which is what I want. But not all of the keywords it lists are ones I want to target — customer service is too broad a topic, for example. This tool makes it easy to discover if your site is properly targeted or not.
It’s also a good way to determine if your topics are search-worthy or not. Plug in the URL for the Alaska Ferry Travel site and you see keywords like this:
As you can see, the site is right on target keyword-wise, but many of those keywords don’t get a lot of searches.
But so what? If those keywords are super targeted and you can get ranked for them, the small stream of traffic they generate is probably worth more than any other traffic stream.
Contrast those stats to those for the DUI Attorney Finder:
The search numbers here aren’t that hot, either — how many people other than search marketers are really looking for help with drunk driving charges? But look at the competition numbers — way higher. Just from this fact alone you can deduce that per-click revenues for “DUI attorney” type content is going to be much higher than “Alaska ferry” — and much harder to break into.
The ideal is to find keywords that have high search numbers and low competition numbers… while still being profitable. That’s really tricky, because those keywords are far and few between. It requires legwork.
Next we’ll take a look at how to use the keyword tool for effective article marketing.
Tags: AdSense, AdWords, Google, keyword tool, keywords
How To Find Profitable Niches
Many AdSense publishers find themselves looking for new topic ideas from time to time. Here’s a quick and easy way to find new niches to explore that relies on the AdWords keyword tool (which is free) and various popular news/interest sites (also free). This techniques give you broad ideas for profitable niches, but it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth pursuing or not.
- Build yourself a list of popular news and general interest sites, high-traffic sites whose content changes a lot and is geared towards a general audience. Sites like Yahoo!, Wikipedia and CNN fit the bill. If you’re a techie you might also want to throw in more techie-oriented sites like News.com.
- Go the AdWords keyword tool and select Website content under How would you like to generate keyword ideas?
- Now on the right type in the URL of one of the sites in your list, being sure to check Include other pages on my site linked from this URL
- Press the Get keyword ideas button. The keyword tool will crunch away for a minute and analyze the content of the site you gave it to come up with a list of relevant keywords complete with bidding costs and search volumes.
So what do you do with this information? Some people will tell you to enter a large value for the maximum CPC bid to see which of the niches pay a lot per click. You can do this, but take the values you see with a grain of salt — see my high-paying AdSense keyword lists series for the reasons why. Don’t worry too much about maximum values. Look more at volume and competition estimates. Try bidding down the CPC value to see at what point bid positions shift from the 1-3 range to the 4-6 range.
The goal here is to come up with ideas for things you wouldn’t have thought of yourself while avoiding niches that are obviously going to pay you just a few cents per click. Do this procedure for each of your news/interest sites and do it over the span of a few days and you should come across several potential niche ideas that hold promise.
Tags: AdSense
How to Find Your Site’s Position in Google Search Results
Some readers asked me how I could tell where my site ranked for a given keyword. It’s actually very easy to do with the right tools. There are two ways.
The first is to use my free Rank Checker tool. It’s a desktop application where you feed it a bunch of URLs and a bunch of keywords and it tells you which URLs rank for which keywords. I released it as a “mystery tool”, and I might still charge for it, so get it now while it’s free…
Anyhow, the other way to do it involves these steps:
- Start a copy of Firefox.
- If you haven’t already, install the SEO Tools for Firefox add-in. (You’ll have to restart Firefox.)
- Go to the Google home page and click the Preferences link. Set the preferences to display 100 results per page and save the preferences.
- Make sure the SEO Tools plugin is enabled — the “SEO” icon in the bottom right of the status bar should be in color.
- Search Google for the keyword/phrase of interest. You’ll see a bunch of extra information at the bottom of each item in the Google results page. These are inserted automatically by the SEO Tools extension. Right now you’re mainly interested in the position, i.e. “#1″, “#2″, etc.
- Hit CTRL+F to bring up the Firefox search box. Type in the start of the URL you’re interested in tracking. (If I want to see what position this blog is in, I just look for memwg.com.) After typing in the URL (or partial URL), click the “Next” button immediately to the right of the search bar.
- If your URL is in the results, you’ll jump immediately to it and see what position you’re at.
- If not, go to the next page of the results and click the Next button again. Repeat this process as many times as necessary until you either find your site or run out of results.
The key is the 100 results per page setting — it makes the process much less tedious.
Don’t forget that the results you see are dependent on which Google site you’re using, what language you’re targeting, etc.
Tags: AdSense
Google Depenalization Paying Off…
It looks like my Google depenalization efforts are paying off. As of today, The Unofficial AdSense Blog has jumped up about 700 spots in the search query for adsense, putting it at about #46 in the list. I’d still like it to be higher, but I’m much happier with that positioning.
Now the question is, will depenalization affect the other pages on the site as well? Currently none of the other pages shown any PageRank, despite the home page having PR 5. PageRank values in the Google toolbar are not updated on a daily basis like search engine results are, so it may be weeks or months before the site’s “real” PR values get reflected externally.
I’m still looking at what to do with affiliate links, though. There are differing opinions about them.
Hopefully the depenalization means more AdSense publishers will find this blog and subscribe to it… I’ve seen a recent jump in subscriptions to the feed, actually, I wonder if it can be attributed to the depenalization…
AdSense and Google Knol
I’ve been playing around with Google Knol a bit over the past few days, just getting a lay of the land and such. Knol is kind of a cross between Squidoo and Wikipedia, letting users submit articles on pretty much any topic that others can edit and/or comment on (if the authors allow it).
My first impression of the Knol homepage was “uh oh, spam city” because of the topics of the featured articles: cancer, diabetes, and other ailments. Typical fare for a low-quality info site, in other words. But a closer look showed that the articles were actually high quality, written by medical specialists. And there were no ads on those articles, so money wasn’t the motivation for writing them. (Well, maybe Google paid them… but they weren’t MFA articles.) It sounds like Google rounded up some people beforehand to write quality articles for the site.
Still, this is an AdSense blog, so let’s get to the topic everyone’s interested in…. How do you make money with Knol? The obvious answer is through its integration with your AdSense account.
When you register with Knol, you have the option of associating your AdSense account with your user profile. You must do this explicitly, even if your login is the same as your AdSense account login, and you’ll get an email from Google asking you to OK the association. Once you do that, your AdSense info is passed to Knol. There’s some kind of review that happens at this stage, which may take up to 2 weeks to happen. If you’re approved (I wonder if they’re looking to keep out obvious spammers) then AdSense ads will appear on any knols you author and the clicks will go straight to your AdSense account.
Knol has an unfair advantage over other revenue-sharing info sites. Unlike those sites, you don’t have to share your AdSense revenue with Google, since of course they already make money from every AdSense click no matter where it happens. Presumably this is going to make Knol more appealing than Squidoo and other place that take a cut of the AdSense revenue to support their business model.
Expect to see spam show up on Knol, of course. I know of at least one person who’s released a tool to automatically submit articles to Knol. All links on Knol are “nofollow”, however, so from an SEO perspective getting links from Knol to your sites won’t do you much good… but they may still be good for traffic. And then there’s the revenue-sharing…. there’s definitely some appeal there for the shadier types.
What I’m really interested in seeing is if Knol pages get high rankings in search engine results the same way that Google favors Wikipedia pages. Given that everyone’s talking about Knol, presumably there will be a large number of natural links pointing to the Knol site to give it good PageRank. Will that be enough to overtake Wikipedia in the long term? Guess we’ll have to wait and see….
Google Lets Advertisers Combine Keyword and Placement Targeting
AdSense publishers are part of what Google calls its “Content Network”. AdWords advertisers can choose to place ads on the content network, but previously they had to choose between keyword-targeted ads — ads triggered based on the content of a page — or placement-targeted ads — ads triggered based on the domain/URL of a page.
Google is now letting advertisers combine both types of targeting. This lets you effectively target specific pages of a large, multi-topic site by keyword instead of having to list off all the URLs on that site that match your criteria.
It’s a nice feature for advertisers and will make the content network more appealing, which is good for us.
Copyright and Derivative Works
So yesterday’s situation serves as a good refresher on the concept of a “derivative work”. In the United States, federal copyright law defines a derivative work as follows:
A “derivative work” is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications, which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a “derivative work”.
The law goes on to say this in Section 106:
… the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights … to prepare derivative works based on the copyrighted work
This is US law, of course, and not all countries have such an explicit definition. Canada currently does not, for example, though the copyright legislation does list similar rights as examples of what the copyright owner can do.
The point here is to be very careful when creating something based on someone else’s work. As I discussed before in my Private Label Rights Pitfalls article, just because something is labelled as “PLR” doesn’t necessarily mean that it is PLR.
The easiest way to avoid copyright problems is to write everything yourself from scratch. Use other material as research, sure, but make sure you’re not just rewriting someone else’s content so that it falls under the “derivative work” rule… As ad AdSense publisher, you’ll probably find that you have better results from natural organic search traffic with completely original content anyhow.
Tags: AdSense, copyright, derivative works
A Nemesis Tale
Do me a favor and read my review of Google Nemesis. Then read this other one and tell me what you think.
What’s that saying about flattery again?
Update: I’ve decided to give Bjorn the benefit of the doubt on this one, especially now that he’s linked back to my review as a reference for his own.
Tags: AdSense, Google, Google Nemesis, review
How To Get A ClickBank Refund
There’s a lot of crap for sale on ClickBank. There are also some good things available. Personally, as a software/ebook seller I like to use ClickBank because they handle all the tax collection issues (this is going to become a big issue for people selling things directly via PayPal in the next few years, trust me) and they pay regularly and consistently.
But I also like to use ClickBank as an individual buyer because they make it easy to get a refund. So if something I buy isn’t up to snuff for whatever reason (see my recent Google Nemesis review) I can get a full refund within 8 weeks of the purchase, no questions asked.
There are two ways to get a refund. The simplest is to simply take the electronic receipt ClickBank mailed you after the purchase and forward it to refunds@clickbank.com along with a brief message asking for a refund and why you want the refund.
The second way is to go to the ClickBank purchase questions page and select the “I would like to request a refund” subject. You’ll have to fill in the purchase details (obtained from the aforementioned receipt) and give an explanation. (Since you need the receipt to do this, it’s just simpler to mail a copy off IMHO…)
In either case, you’ll get a refund within two or three business days. It’s really that simple.
BTW, refund requests shouldn’t be knee-jerk reactions. If you’re having a problem with the product, contact the vendor first and see if they can fix it. Refunds should be a last resort. Sellers get notified when refunds occur and can see the reason why a refund was requested… there’s nothing worse than getting a “the product never worked” reason when you could have fixed it easily enough if the buyer had contacted you first.
Out of all the ClickBank products I’ve purchased, I think I’ve only asked for refunds on two of them.
Watch the Free Traffic Secrets Videos
Somehow I found the time over the last few days to watch the three free traffic videos by John Reese. These videos were released to promote his Traffic Secrets 2.0 course, which is launching this week.
The videos are high-quality but very simple, mostly John talking to the camera… you can listen to them while doing something else. The first video discusses a traffic strategy called “results detection”, which is essentially figuring out what other people are doing to get traffic and then doing something similar using that research. He gives several examples of how to do this for search engine rankings, getting to the first page on Digg, etc.
The second video is all about “owning a larger piece of the Internet”, i.e. creating and distributing content. The “trick” here is to write lots of content in batches and let it trickle out slowly, using syndication to get it distributed far and wide. By doing it in batches you free up time to do other things, instead of being a slave to your daily blog posts…
The third video is about generating traffic by creating software: toolbars, WordPress plugins, online calculators, etc. Reese considers this to be an underused traffic generation method.
None of this is earth-shattering information, but it’s well presented and it might be a useful refresher. AdSense publishers will find the second video the most interesting, of course, since AdSense is all about content monetization.
Note that everything he talks about requires work. There are no magic bullets, which is a nice change from other books and courses I’ve seen. I can’t comment on how good the Traffic Secrets 2.0 course is, since I haven’t seen it, but if the videos reflect the quality of the information in the package then it’s probably decent value. The price tag’s high, but it’s delivered as a physical product (12 DVDs and various workbooks) and not just a series of downloads. (It’s much cheaper than the original course, BTW.)
Aside: Anyone know of any good WordPress plugins for easily editing old posts? I have to make some changes to this blog as part of my depenalization effort, but the thought of editing all those posts through the standard WordPress admin console is not a happy thought…
What Kind of Text Links Are Safe?
Yesterday I mentioned how I disabled text link ads on this site… a reader had a question that I thought deserved a proper answer in a separate post instead of as a comment. Here’s what was asked:
do you mean by that company text-link-ads [DOT… you know]?
Or do you mean something else? doesn’t google adsense itself provide text link ads? what about things like for CJ products/advertisers — is that also verboten now?
The text link ads I was referring to are essentially paid links that pass PageRank. Google doesn’t like paid links when those links are used to influence search engine results. Matt Cutts has discussed this for a long time:
What if a site wants to buy links purely for visitor click traffic, to build buzz, or to support another site? In that situation, I would use the rel=”nofollow” attribute. The nofollow tag allows a site to add a link that abstains from being an editorial vote. Using nofollow is a safe way to buy links, because it’s a machine-readable way to specify that a link doesn’t have to be counted as a vote by a search engine.
Essentially, Google wants you to either use “nofollow” on your paid links or use links that are generated dynamically when the page is loaded via JavaScript. (The latter kind of links don’t pass PageRank because the web crawlers don’t actually “see” them.) AdSense ads are done using the latter, for example.
The key is to avoid services that sell “dofollow” links. Google is penalizing sites that use such links.
Tags: AdSense, Google, links, PageRank, paid links
Google Depenalization - Steps 1 to 3
I’ve taken the first steps to getting Google to depenalize this blog. They were:
- Removed text link ads. I had some text link ads sprinked in a few places. It made me a bit of money, but not enough to offset the penalization IMHO. I’ve disabled the ads and removed this site from the ad marketplace entirely.
- Turned off comments on older posts. I installed the Comment Timeout plugin to disable commenting on posts older than 15 days. The plugin is pretty flexible, it lets you keep active posts open for longer as long as commenting is occurring.
- Went through and cleaned up ALL existing comments. This took a while, but I went through all the comments on this blog and removed the few spammy ones that had managed to squeak past both Akismet and me. BTW, I’ve concluded that Chuck Brown leaves the longest, densest, most insightful comments!
The next step is to run through the blog’s content and put “nofollow” on any disreputable and/or affiliate links. That will definitely take a while.
My goal with this is to not only restore the site’s natural search engine rankings but also to give contributors the proper PR boost they deserve, otherwise what’s the point of having a “dofollow” blog? Right now, though, I don’t think any PR is being passed to the other sites.
Recovering From a Google Penalty
If you have a site that’s penalized by Google (like this one — only the home page has PageRank) then you need to do your best to recover from that penalty. The most comprehensive advice on what to do is found on Google Penalty Advice for Webmasters. Someone’s story about how they reversed a penalty is also useful reading.
Note that penalties are easier to obtain when you have a “dofollow” blog — that’s one of the disadvantages.
I’ll document my journey here as well…
AdSense and Yahoo BOSS
Yahoo! has opened up its search technology to all comers via its BOSS service. I’ve looked over the BOSS licensing terms and the AdSense terms and conditions and it appears to me that it would be legal for now to display AdSense ads on pages that contain search results obtained via BOSS. At some point Yahoo! will supply its own ads (which more than likely will come from Google, ironically enough) and you’ll get a share of the revenue, but I think until then AdSense is a viable option for using BOSS.
If you think otherwise, please let me know why, I may have missed something somewhere in those documents.