Building AdSense revenue via good content

Readers of this blog should also check out Andrew Borland's latest blog entry, Building audience (and AdSense revenues) through solid content, which echoes what I've been saying for a while now — that the way to build AdSense revenue over the long term is through good content.

Andrew's posting talks about products like AdSense Empire and Traffic Equalizer as well as article “mining” software that are used to quickly build sites with hundreds, even thousands, of pages with the sole purpose of ranking highly in various search engines to capture random search traffic. (I recently described Traffic Equalizer's techniques in the last issue of my newsletter, subscribe now and you'll get it sent to you automatically…) Then there are other products like The Rich Jerk that go even further and tell you how to combine saavy marketing with these systems to make even more money.

Constrast these systems with books like my own (the old one and the upcoming new one) or Joel Comm's which are all about choosing the right niche and optimizing your content for that niche. Sure, you can go and get “free content” from RSS feeds and such, but really the thing that's going to draw visitors to your site is unique, original and thoughtful content.

As Andrew says, and as many other SEOs have been saying, content is becoming more important because the search engines are working hard to remove no-content sites (like those made by TE) and splogs (”spam blogs”) from their search results. In some sense, there's a bit of a fire sale going on here — if you've had designs about using systems like TE, AdSense Empire or The Rich Jerk, you better get cracking, because your window of opportunity is slowly closing. The real money's probably already been made (by the guys who developed these systems, and who are now making more money by selling the systems themselves), but it'll still take a while before these systems get completely invalidated. (By Google, at least, and then Yahoo!. MSN will probably lag behind, like it always does…)

The problem with original content is that, well, it takes time to write it! Right now I'm helping a friend get a site devoted to a certain brand of handbags off the ground. It sounds funny, but this person's quite passionate about them and has owned many of them and is able to talk at length about the advantages and disadvantages of each bag. So that's what this person's doing right now — thinking about what to say on the site and how to organize the material. We haven't even gotten a domain for it yet. It's not even clear to us how much money we can make from this site because the designer is actually very proactive about protecting its trademarks and has gone after Google in the past for allowing advertisers to place ads for its products linked to those trademarks. But there's some money to be made here from my initial keyword research, so I figure why not try it. But it'll probably be weeks before we get the thing off the ground and see any money from it. But that's OK. In the long run it should be profitable. You have to think long term with this stuff.

If, on the other hand, what you're interested in is short-term gains, I suggest you look into selling products from ClickBank via their affiliate program. ClickBank has a wide variety of products, some (like Traffic Equalizer) perhaps a bit dodgy, but there are also many legitimate products available. Buy one or two that interest you and then setup a website to promote it. ClickBank pays in semi-monthly cycles, so you can get your first payment in only about a month after your first sale. (Well, actually, they hold your commissions until you sell products to customers in at least four different counties/states/countries, but after that you get paid about every two weeks as long as you keep selling.) There's a book out called The E-Code (which I also reviewed in my newsletter) that talks about this in detail. Of course, very few people have the dedication and the skills to actually do this kind of selling in such a short period of time, but it's definitely possible.

But long term, what you want is content, and that will take time to write. That's why it's good to start with something that truly interests you and work from there. Maybe you won't get rich doing it, but you'll find it a lot more enjoyable.

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

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