Whitehat VRE Intermission

In case you’re wondering, I’m not dead… my wife and I made the mistake of walking into an open house shortly after I started the Whitehat VRE series and the short story is that we ended up buying that house and have been frantically preparing our own house for sale. It went on sale yesterday, so life is returning to normal now. I’ll get back to the series shortly. Thanks for being patient!

BTW, I’ve put a bit of content up on the Braces - Again! site. We’re going to talk next about what to do once the site’s up to get some traffic to it.

June 17, 2009 | Filed Under AdSense | 3 Comments 

Whitehat VRE Empire: Creating the First Site’s Content

At this point we’ve created the skeleton for the first site in our whitehat virtual real estate empire. Now comes the hard part — adding some real content!

Simple Stuff First

When I deploy a new site, I like to flesh out the simple stuff first, including:

I do these things first for a couple of reasons. First, it’s easy to forget to do them — witness how many default “about” pages for WordPress blogs you can find by doing a simple search for “This is an example of a WordPress page” (over 1 million!).

Second, it gets you thinking about the site: What kind of contact information do you expose? Do you need a disclaimer? What’s the site about? What kind of copyright message do you want? What will appear on the home page?

Also, they’re easy edits to do and you feel like you’ve accomplished something after doing them!

The privacy policy page is pretty much boilerplate code. The tool I’m using generated an AdSense-compliant policy automatically for me. If you use a different tool, you can model your privacy policy on this one. (If you are creating a WordPress blog, use my free Privacy Policy for WordPress plugin to do it.)

The about/contact page requires some thought. If you put an email address there, expect to be spammed — you should definitely create a separate email address for it that you can forward elsewhere. You probably don’t want to put a physical address and phone number on your site, even if it’s exposed in the domain registration. Some kind of contact form is a good idea.

The home page probably requires the most work. On sites I generate with PLRSiteBuilder, the home page is basically just an introductory paragraph or two and a list of the articles on the site. This lets it do double-duty as the human-readable sitemap and makes sure that all the pages are easily crawlable by the search engines. But you may choose to do it differently and put the article list somewhere else entirely. You may or may not want to show AdSense ads on the home page — I don’t think dropping the ads from the home page will hurt you much and it may make the page look better to anyone who happens to land on it instead of on one of the article pages.

Don’t spend too much time on this stuff, though. You can always change it later. You want to quickly get to the meat of the site.

Writing the Content

Creating the content for your first site will take more time than setting up the site itself. That said, if you chose the right topic it shouldn’t be that hard. It’s much harder when you don’t know anything about the topic you’re writing about!

You’ll want to start with at least five to ten pages of content. The more, the better. Each page should be a different subtopic and focus on a different keyword phrase. One technique that works well is to do what I discussed in Profitable AdSense Article Marketing and use the AdWords keyword tool to generate a list of related keywords and split them into two sets, the “traffic set” and the “money set”, based on their relative cost-per-click values. The “money set” becomes the nucleus for your content.

(Note: Again, I have to remind everyone that the CPC numbers you see with the AdWords keyword tool do not directly reflect the actual CPC numbers you’ll see in AdSense. See The Problems With High-Paying Keyword Lists for a detailed discussion why. Since we don’t have AdSense keyword data, we have to rely on the AdWords numbers and assume that advertisers who pay more for search placement will also pay more — substantially less, but still more — for placement on quality AdSense sites.)

Let’s try this with the “adult braces” topic. Using the keyword tool, I see that the CPC range for these keywords ranges from $0.05 to about $13 for exact searches, with most clustered in the $2-$4 range. Here’s a small sample:

vre-empire-keywords-1

From this list I’m going to pick some likely phrases on which to base my content. These ones seem particularly apt to what the site’s about:

Now transform those keywords into page titles:

It’s not rocket science to come up with titles that include the target keyword. The URL of the page should also include the keyword in question, but here you can be more flexible. For example, the page title “Do You Need Adult Braces?” could be “do-you-need-adult-braces.html” or “adult-braces.html” or even just “adultbraces.html”. Or, in this case, maybe even “braces-for-adults.html” just to vary things.

Once you’ve gotten your initial list of titles, look for any gaps in content, and be sure to fill them in (or plan for it later). Look also for any opportunities to link between pages. For example, in the list above there’s a natural linking from the “types of braces” page to the pages about metal, ceramic, invisible and lingual braces.

Now sit down and write! Write for a human, not a search engine. I’ve already given some tips on how to do this in my previous post Human Search Engine Optimization, please spend a few minutes and read it.

The only other thing to think about is spacing out the delivery of your content. If your system supports it (I can do this with PLRSiteBuilder, and you can easily do it with WordPress) then use a scheduling feature to get the content posted at regular intervals instead of all at once. You’ll want to post the first two or three articles right away, but everything after that can “drip” out. This will ensure that your RSS feed (which your site should always have) has some new content every once in a while, at least for the first couple of weeks. After that you can decide to go and write some new content or just leave the site as-is. (My Invisible Fence site’s been up for years now with no changes…)

And make sure your sitemaps are updated as you add new content, too.

That’s it for today, I have to run off now and write the content for my new site! In the next post we’ll talk about what to do when the site is ready to go “live”.

May 12, 2009 | Filed Under AdSense | 45 Comments 

Whitehat VRE Empire: Building The First Site

If you’ve been following along, you know it’s time for us to build the first site in our VRE empire. You need to have chosen a topic that interests you and has some (but not necessarily much) commercial viability.

The topic I’ve chosen for my first site is adult braces. Like many people, I had braces when I was a teenager. But as I grew older, my teeth started crowding. What they know now is that people who have braces need to continue to wear retainers at night for the rest of their life in order to avoid problems with moving teeth. So people like me who had braces when they were younger suddenly discover they need braces again in their thirties or forties!

As you can imagine, I wasn’t thrilled to discover I needed braces again. I even put it off for a couple of years. But it was getting to the point where I needed to do something about it or lose a tooth that was being crowded out.

Rather than use traditional metal braces, my orthodontist offered me the option of using so-called “invisible” braces from a company called Invisalign. Made of transparent plastic, they aren’t permanent and can be taken off to eat and drink. They can’t make the same kinds of changes that metal braces can, but they were good enough to fix my basic problem of tooth crowding. So that’s what I went for. I’m almost done the course of treatment now, so I thought it would make a good topic for a site.

What follows is a long and detailed explanation of how I take this basic idea and transform it into an AdSense site. I hope you find the details useful.

The Domain

I’ve had the idea for this site almost since I started the treatment, so I actually reserved a domain name a while back in anticipation. The domain I’m using is bracesagain.com. Notice that I’ve got a relevant keyword (”braces”) at the start of the domain. That alone should ensure I get relevant ads on the site. The domain also gives the visitor a good idea of what the site is about.

This step is hard, though. It took me a while to find something suitable. Stay away from trademarks if at all possible, use generic terms. I generally start by generating a list of keywords with the AdWords keyword tool and use GoDaddy’s bulk registration facility to see if any of them are available as .com domains. (See Find Keyword-Rich Domain Names In 3 Easy Steps for details on how to do this, except you only need steps 1 and 3 — you can skip step 2 because the GoDaddy bulk domain registration tool automatically strips out spaces.)

Once you’ve found your domain, register it and adjust its nameserver settings to point it to your hosting service. Then go over to your hosting service and create an account for the new domain. I’m not going to show you how to do this, it depends on which domain registrar and hosting service you’re using. It should be fairly straightforward.

The .htaccess and robot.txt Files

The first thing I do after setting up hosting is create the .htaccess and robots.txt files for my site. Let’s start with the latter, since it’s simpler.

The robots.txt file controls which parts of your site the search engines are allowed to crawl. For a simple site like ours, you normally have nothing to block them from. You could in fact not bother with the robots.txt file since the default is to “crawl all pages” if the file is missing. But there’s a good reason to create a robots.txt: sitemap discovery.

One of the things we’re going to do is create an “XML sitemap” for our site. This is a special file that search engines can examine to find the pages on our site. See Sitemaps.org for details on how XML sitemaps work. In particular, take a look at Specifying the Sitemap location in your robots.txt file, which explains why we’re creating a robots.txt file: to specify the location of our sitemap.

With your favorite text editor, create a file called robots.txt that contains the following four lines:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Sitemap: http://www.bracesagain.com/sitemap.xml

You’ll need to adjust the URL of the sitemap, of course. Place this file in the root folder of your website using your favorite FTP program. (Again, I’m not going through the details of how to do that, you can find lots of help for this on the web.)

Next, we create our .htaccess file. The main purpose of this file is set the “canonical name” of our website. Do you want it known as “bracesagain.com” or “www.bracesagain.com”? Either way, there are commands you can place in the .htaccess to redirect visitors to the “correct” form of the website domain. You’ll find the detailed instructions in my previous post The AdSense-Ready WordPress Blog. I’m going to use “www.bracesagain.com” as the base address for my website, like most sites out there.

However, I also need the .htaccess file for another purpose. I’m going to be using my PLRSiteBuilder software to build the site, but I want to use nice “.html” extensions on my files instead of “.php”. But the “.html” files still have to be processed as if they ended in “.php”, because they’ll have PHP commands in them. So I need to tell the system to do just that using an “AddType” command. (This is all purely cosmetic, I just like to see “.html” used as the extension. My quirk.) I also want to add a mapping so that references for “sitemap.xml” actually get handled by “sitemap.php”.

So the final .htaccess file for my site looks like this:

RemoveHandler .html
AddType application/x-httpd-php4 .html

Options -Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^bracesagain.(.*)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.bracesagain.com/$1 [qsappend,R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} sitemap.xml
RewriteRule . /sitemap.xml [L]

Details of what goes into the file may vary, depending on how your hosting service works. If you don’t want to do the .html-to-.php mapping, leave out the first two lines. Or use your hosting service’s control panel to do the mapping. Whatever works for you!

Again, this file goes into the main website folder alongside the robots.txt file.

Everything I’ve described so far is routine setup stuff. You’ll do it every time to create a new site, varying the details according to the site. After you do it a couple of times it will become routine. (Note that if you’re building a WordPress site there are plugins available to do this stuff for you.)

The Site Skeleton

Now we’re ready to start on the site proper. Start PLRSiteBuilder and start the Site Design Wizard, as shown below. (The screenshots shown here can be clicked on to see them full size.)

vre-empire-braces-1

We’re creating an “article/informational” site, of course. Now enter in basic information about the site: the name, the description, the domain, the main keyword:

vre-empire-braces-2

Next we define the folders we’ll use for this site. One folder is the “input” or “content” folder, the other is the “output” for “site” folder. I like to put them under a single root folder for the site:

vre-empire-braces-3

Finally, decide if you want to show live AdSense ads right away. Normally, I recommend you don’t turn on the ads until you have some real content on the site, for reasons I’ve explained before:

vre-empire-braces-4

The wizard finishes and the skeleton site is now generated, ready for uploading:

vre-empire-braces-5

Except that I want to make a few tweaks before doing any uploading, so back on the main property page for the project I go to the Site tab and specify that I want to use .html as the file extension:

vre-empire-braces-6

Moving to the Folders tag, I specify a “copy folder” for my project. The site generated into the output folder will also be copied here. I use this to test out the site locally using a copy of XAMPP, a standalone bundled version of Apache and PHP — the site gets copied directly into the folder where XAMPP looks for web pages to display:

vre-empire-braces-7

Now I press Generate the Site to regenerate the site. I test it out locally to make sure it’s OK, then upload it to my hosting account using FileZilla, the free FTP client I like to use. Here’s what the site looks like:

vre-empire-braces-8

There’s no content, so it doesn’t look like much. But click on the links and you’ll see it has the requisite pieces, such as an “about” page, a privacy policy, a sitemap (both kinds — the home page is the human-readable one, but you can’t see that yet because there is no content yet), and even an RSS feed (under http://www.bracesagain.com/feed/).

Don’t Waste Your Time

Did you notice that I haven’t really spent any time tweaking the way the site looks? There are two reasons for this. First, it’s hard to do without any real content — you really need some paragraphs of text to see how things flow across the different pages. Second, you can waste a lot of time making the site look perfect. I know, I’ve done it myself… spent literally hours trying to make a site look “just right”…

My advice to you is to just get the site looking “OK” and work on fleshing out the content before you spend too much time on making it pretty. This applies to any site building tool you use, including WordPress. You can spend a LOT of time looking for the “right” theme to use for your WordPress site… or you grab a standard AdSense-ready theme and move on!

Remember, the key is to get the sites up and running as quickly as you can. Once you do it a few times, the setup process will become second nature, leaving you to concentrate on the content.

I think I’ll stop here for now, this is a pretty long post. We have our skeletal site up, now it’s time to put in some content, which is what we’ll do next time.

May 11, 2009 | Filed Under AdSense | 9 Comments 

Whitehat VRE Empire: The First Site

Time to get started with building our VRE empire! That means creating the first site.

What’s Your Passion?

You’re probably expecting a long thesis on keyword research and finding the best niche for your empire. But that’s not at all what we’re going to do.

The first site in your AdSense network should be about a topic that’s interesting to you on a personal level. Forget about mortgage consolidation, mesothelioma, or those other “high click value” topics.

On a piece of paper, write a list of topics. Each topic in your list should be something that you can write about with minimal research: a hobby, a skill, an expertise… whatever turns your crank.

Now go through the list and prioritize them based on interest, with the most interesting topic at the top of the list.

Finally, run through the list and stroke off the ones with no or few advertisers using the simple test explained below.

What you’re left with are the initial sites you’ll create for your AdSense network.

Why do it this way? It removes mental roadblocks. If you start with a topic you know nothing about, you’ll just won’t be as interested in getting your network up and running. You’ll have to do some research, so you’ll put it off. Or you’ll get started and other things will distract you because you’re not that interested, leaving you with a half-finished site. Hey, I know, I’ve been there!

Start with your passions, even if they’re never going to be big moneymakers. Get a few sites off the ground, then focus your efforts more on the money side.

The Quick AdSense-No-Go Test

There are some topics, of course, that should ALWAYS be avoided. Anything that contradicts the AdSense program policies is a no-go.

You’ll also want to avoid topics with few or no advertisers. The easiest way to do this is with Google’s own AdWords ad preview tool. The ad preview tool lets AdWords advertisers see what ads are shown given a search query, a Google domain, a geographic area, and a language.

Set the preview tool to show results in the language, geography and domain of the typical visitor you’re targeting. For many of us that would be the google.com domain from English-speaking United States.

Now type in a keyword or phrase related to the topic of your putative site and press the “Preview Ads” button. Look at the sponsored links section on the right side of the resulting search results page. If there are less than four ads, that’s not good.

The ideal situation is to see a “More Sponsored Links” link immediately below the ads, which happens when there are more than 8 advertisers bidding on the term. That’s good!

Repeat this process with other keywords related to your site. You want to get a feel for whether or not there are AdWords advertisers bidding on the keywords that relate to your potential site. If there are just a few advertisers, skip the topic: remember that many advertisers skip the content network (AdSense sites like ours) when targeting their ads, so if only a few ads show up there may in fact be none available for AdSense publishers to display.

As a final sanity check for English topics, head over to EzineArticles and search for articles with matching topics. See if the AdSense ads that accompany those articles are on-topic. If they’re not, skip the topic.

Plan Out Your First Site

Once you’ve got your list of topics, take the first topic and sketch out the site you want to develop. At a minimum, the site should contain the following:

You’ll also have to find a suitable domain name, which can be hard. All the obvious ones are surely taken, so you’ll have to spend some time to find a domain name that has a topic-related keyword in it. And you’ll have to decide whether or not you want to go with a private domain registration.

If you’ve truly chosen a topic that interests you, coming up with the initial pages of content should be easy. The rest of the stuff depends on how you’re building the site. It’s quite easy to build such a site with WordPress and a few well-chosen plugins. You can also build the site with my PLRSiteBuilder software.

That’s it for today. Next, I reveal the topic I’ve chosen for my first site and I’ll even build it in front of your eyes.

May 9, 2009 | Filed Under AdSense | 18 Comments 

Whitehat VRE Empire: Why Multiple Sites Make Sense

As we get started with building our virtual estate empire, we have to ask ourselves this question: Do we build a network or small sites or one or two really large sites?

The answer is that it’s better to create a network of sites. There are several reasons for this, but the most important reason is that you simply get more links with more sites. More links generally means more traffic. More traffic means more money.

One of the things you’ll do to promote your sites, for example, is submit them to various web directories. In general, each website can only be submitted once to any given directory. So if you have one gigantic website, you only get one link back from the directory. And that link is from a single category. If you have twenty websites, each website can get its own directory link from a very targeted category. You’ll see a similar pattern with social bookmarking sites.

Then there are the links between your own sites, which will carry more weight than links within sections of a site. Yes, Google knows they’re all your sites as soon as you put your AdSense code on them, but so what? As long as you’re linking smartly between sites (links from similarly-themed sites — see How To Link Multiple Sites) then you’ll benefit.

Then there are the other reasons for using multiple sites:

The downside to having multiple sites is that there’s more to manage. When Google requires you to change the privacy policy on your sites, for example, you’ll have to do it N times. You’ll also have to track domains and web hosting accounts.

Then there are the expenses for domain name registration and web hosting services. It’s cheaper to run a single site than a network of sites.

But the advantages of having an AdSense network outweigh the management effort, in my mind. So that’s what we’re going to do in this series: build our virtual real estate empire using a network of websites.

Next we’ll look at creating the first site in our network.

May 8, 2009 | Filed Under AdSense | 17 Comments 

Whitehat VRE Empire: Preliminaries

Time to embark on our whitehat virtual real estate (VRE) adventure. The goal is to create a profitable network of AdSense sites with additional monetization via affiliate links where appropriate.

Let me state at the outset, however, that I make no guarantees as to how well such a “VRE empire” will do, there are simply too many factors that come into play. My hope is that you’ll follow along with me and build your own network, but I can’t promise you’ll make money with your network. I can’t even promise that with the one I’m about to create in front of your eyes! Although I have some strong advantages to start with — I have a couple of “old” sites with fairly high PR that I can use for linking purposes, plus a well-read blog for quick indexing, and a lot of experience building sites — the fact that I’ll be doing this all in public will be a disadvantage. I’m sure some clown will try to do some click fraud to get me kicked out of AdSense — it won’t be the first time it’s happened! No risk, no reward, though.

Sign Up For AdSense, Analytics and Webmaster Tools

If you’re not already an AdSense publisher, please go to the main AdSense page and sign up for the AdSense program. You’ll need an existing site or blog to apply, so you may have to wait. It can take a few days to get approval, so best start now.

You’ll also want to sign up for Google Analytics. Now I know some people will object to this, but if you’re using AdSense on your sites it’s not like Google doesn’t know which sites are yours. And since we’re being totally whitehat, there’s nothing to hide from Google, anyhow.

Finally, sign up for Google Webmaster Tools, a free website management center that lets you see how Google crawls your site. Same argument here as with Analytics — Google will know all about your sites anyhow, so why not take advantage of the free info you can get from Google?

Pay For Domains And Web Hosting

You can build your VRE empire pretty much for free, but there are some costs: you have to pay for domain registration and for web hosting. (Technically, you can avoid web hosting costs by building your sites on free services, but I don’t recommend that — you lose control of your empire. It’s like building on leased land. You want to own the land.)

As I’ve mentioned before, I have a strict separation-of-church-and-state policy with respect to domain registrars and web hosting services. Don’t host sites with your domain registrar. It will save you grief down the road, trust me.

For domain registration, shop around. If you need privacy on the domains, I usually recommend 1&1, because privacy is available for free and the price isn’t bad. If privacy isn’t a concern, you can go with the big players like GoDaddy. (Be sure to Google for “GoDaddy coupon codes” before paying, there’s always an active coupon code that gets you .com domains much cheaper than the stated retail price.)

For web hosting, you’ll want a hosting account that supports multiple domains, ideally an unlimited number of domains. You won’t be needing a lot in terms of bandwidth and disk space per site, so usually the smallest web hosting account that offers unlimited domains is adequate, and they’re pretty cheap. Check out DreamHost for a popular service. You might consider using a reseller account, though, which while a bit more complicated to manage may make it easier to sell a site later on. I like ResellerZoom for reseller web hosting. But shop around.

That’s it for the preliminaries. Next, though, we’re going to discuss why we’re going with a network of sites as opposed to a single site with subdomains. I have my reasons!

May 7, 2009 | Filed Under AdSense | 10 Comments 

Building a Whitehat Virtual Real Estate Empire

As I mentioned not too long ago, I’m returning this blog to its original purpose as a purveyor of AdSense help and information. My laptop problems have distracted me as of late, but I can finally move forward with a new series of posts.

I’m calling this series “Building a Whitehat Virtual Real Estate Empire”. Essentially, it’s about building your own network of low-maintenance, totally legitimate AdSense sites.

I’m sure you’ve heard the term virtual real estate — VRE for short — before, it’s certainly not my invention. The “empire” bit is perhaps an overstatement, but it sure sounds good. All VRE empires are based on the creation of multiple monetized niche sites.

I want to emphasize that I’m only going to be discussing legitimate, above-the-board methods in this series. If you’re interested in “blackhat” methods, best search elsewhere.

The Whitehat VRE Empire Series

Here is the complete series so far, the list will be updated as I post them:

  1. Whitehat VRE Empire: Preliminaries
  2. Whitehat VRE Empire: Why Multiple Sites Make Sense
  3. Whitehat VRE Empire: The First Site
  4. Whitehat VRE Empire: Building The First Site
  5. Whitehat VRE Empire: Creating the First Site’s Content
  6. Whitehat VRE Empire: Publicizing the First Site (coming soon)

Please bookmark this page so you can easily access all parts of this series.

Resources and Additional Reading

As well, you may be interested in one or more of these products to help you build your whitehat VRE empire:

The resources above are all optional. You need a hosting service, of course, and you have to pay for domain registrations, but you can build your AdSense network without using commercial products or paid services. At some point you may want to “outsource” some of the work, however, and some of those resources may be useful.

You may also want to read the following:

Remember, though, there’s a point of diminishing returns when it comes to reading about making money online — if you don’t act on what you learn, you won’t make any money.

Try to follow along with what I do. Learn and profit from experience, not from being a couch potato.

May 6, 2009 | Filed Under AdSense | 20 Comments 

Google Updates AdSense Program Policies

Google just announced a series of changes to the AdSense program policies. Some of the changes are cosmetic — they cleaned up the policy page to make it easier to find information about what’s acceptable or not acceptable. They also clarified some of the vagueness around encouraging clicks and such — read the Inside AdSense article for the details.

If you wonder why this is important, it’s because the AdSense program policies are officially part of the AdSense terms and conditions. They’re not “unofficial policies” or “recommendations”, they’re real rules that AdSense publishers have to follow. (If you don’t believe me, read the first section of the terms and conditions.) It’s important for AdSense publishers to keep up-to-date with changes to the program policies.

Meanwhile, I’m doing my taxes (grrr) and am trying to figure out how to go forward with my broken laptop. I’ve pulled the two hard drives from the laptop and purchased some hard drive enclosures so I can access them as external drives, but it’s an imperfect solution because that just gives me access to the data, not the apps. I think I’ll consolidate everything onto a single external drive and install PortableApps so I can run Firefox, FileZilla, Thunderbird, and a few other useful things directly from the external drive. This will save me from having to reinstall the world when forced to switch devices.

I’m so disappointed that my HP notebook died, though. I didn’t cheap out, I bought a developer-class 64-bit laptop running Vista Ultimate so I could use NetBeans, Eclipse, and all the other tools a good developer uses. Also on my laptop was the Finale software I use for music notation, along with the drivers and software needed to record my piano playing and singing, which means it’s been impossible to update my new site since then.

One of the commenters suggested I go for a cheap netbook, but I need a machine with good horsepower for programming. What a pain… losing a hard drive would have been simpler, because then I’d have a backup to work from. Losing the entire computer because of a faulty graphics chip is incredibly frustrating… And, of course, my model of notebook is not listed on the special HP limited warranty extension page. Somehow, I doubt I’ll be replacing my notebook with another HP, which is too bad for HP — I was happy with the notebook up until this incident.

April 29, 2009 | Filed Under AdSense | 18 Comments 

AdSense CPA Peformance Trends

If you feel I’ve been neglecting you, it’s because my HP laptop is officially on the fritz due to a motherboard problem that many others have encountered. My life as an Internet marketer is on that laptop, so it makes it hard to do some things. The data’s fine, but it’s hard to use it without a computer. Still trying to decide what to do to move forward. I hope HP will repair it for free, but that will take a few weeks and what do I do in the meantime? What a pain.

Anyhow, earlier this week Google released an interesting whitepaper called CPA Performance on the Google Content Network, which I suggest you read when you have the time.

The term “CPA” refers to cost-per-acquisition, which is advertising speak for the price you pay to acquire a customer lead or sale. (It depends on what you’re targeting.) It’s a broader term than “CPC”, which is cost-per-click. CPA measures the cost of obtaining traffic and converting that traffic into customers and/or sales.

Because AdWords advertisers can optionally allow Google to track how well ad clicks convert into sales or leads (by inserting special tracking code that Google generates onto their landing pages), Google was able to crunch the numbers to see how well ads clicked on the content network (AdSense publishers like you and I) fared versus ads clicked on the search network (ads shown on Google-generated search result pages).

The main conclusion is that, on the whole, advertisers pay less per-conversion for ads shown on the content network versus the search network, but it’s not really much less, only 2.6% less. Does this mean that advertisers are paying almost the same per click on the content network? No. The really interesting part of the whitepaper from our perspective as AdSense publishers is this fragment:

… for the median advertiser, Content Network clicks are on average over 28% cheaper than search network clicks. This lowered cost is partially a result of smart pricing, which automatically reduces maximum CPC bids for certain pages in the Content Network based on their likelihood of driving actionable business results.

I would love to see the cost differentials between content and search described in more detail on a broad niche level, I’m sure that there are some niches where the difference is much more than 28%. Proper niche selection can make such a huge difference in this game. What we need is a formula that takes into account the CPC published in the AdWords Keyword Tool, which is for the search network and returns the likely equivalent CPC for the content network.

April 22, 2009 | Filed Under AdSense | 21 Comments 

AdSense Competitive Ad Filter Size Increase

Catching up on some AdSense news, been pretty busy lately. The big news that will make some publishers very happy is that Google has increased the number of URLs you can add to the competitive ad filter from 200 to 500.

The AdSense competitive ad filter lets AdSense publishers exclude specific ads from appearing on their content sites. This exclusion is done by URL only, which some publishers think is too limiting. The URLs you enter into your filter are matched against the display and destination URLs of the AdWords ads that are to be displayed on your sites. Any ads whose URLs match one of the entries in your filter are not displayed on those sites.

The primary purpose of the competitive ad filter is to prevent direct competitors from bidding for advertising space on your sites. If your primary business is selling widgets and you have a blog about widgets, you typically don’t want someone else advertising widgets on that blog. The filter is the only tool you have to reject those ads.

A secondary purpose is to block inexpensive ads for “MFA” (made-for-AdSense) sites from appearing on your sites. This was a big deal a couple of years ago, but I don’t see many people talking about that now. Google did crack down on using AdSense arbitrage as a way of generating traffic to AdSense sites. (You can still do it, but only using carefully-targeted ads that directly relate to the content of your landing page.)

The ad filter is a manually-intensive process — you have to figure out which URLs you don’t want yourself, often only be looking at the ads you see on the site — and it’s not something that most AdSense publishers should worry about, but it’s there if you’re having some problems.

Unrelated note: My new blog, I’m Not In Marketing, premiered yesterday. If you’re a techie, check it out!

April 15, 2009 | Filed Under AdSense | 14 Comments 

Google AdSense and Google Analytics Integration Guide

Google Analytics is a free service that lets you gather and analyze website traffic statistics. Answers to questions like Where does most of my traffic come from?, Which keywords are generating the most traffic? and How long do visitors stay on my site? can be answered using Google Analytics.

Not that long ago, Google allowed you to link your AdSense account with your Analytics account. (Note that you can only link single accounts together. If you have multiple AdSense accounts, you’ll need to create multiple Analytics accounts.) You can do this right from your AdSense management console — it’s very simple to link the two accounts. (See here for more details.)

Assuming you’ve added the Analytics tracking code (see here) to your AdSense pages, you should see AdSense earnings appear in your statistics within a day or so. Here are some sample stats:

adsense-analytics-sample

The great thing about these stats is that you can do page-by-page earnings analysis without having to create separate AdSense channels for each page. This is especially useful if you have more than 200 pages of content, since you’re limited to 200 channels per AdSense account.

If you have multiple sites, though, there’s an extra step you need to take to do a proper integration. AdSense earnings are only collected for the primary domain in your Analytics account. If you don’t see a section labeled “AdSense Performance” in the per-page stats then you know AdSense data isn’t being collected:

No AdSense data in Google Analytics

Why can’t you see the AdSense earnings for this site? The likely cause is that you forgot to include the AdSense Analytics Code (ASAC) at the top of each page that displays AdSense ads. The ASAC is a small bit of JavaScript that should be inserted into a page immediately after the <body> tag and before any AdSense code:

<script>
window.google_analytics_uacct = "UA-99999-3";
</script>

Replace the tracking ID above with the ID for your site — you’ll find it in your Analytics account by clicking on “Analytics Settings” to access the account overview page. Do this for each site you want to track.

That’s all you need to do to integrate your AdSense earnings into your Analytics account. Give it a few days to collect some information and start your analysis!

April 1, 2009 | Filed Under AdSense | 32 Comments 

Google In Talks To Buy General Motors

In a surprising turn of events, Google today revealed that the search giant is in talks to buy majority control of beleaguered auto manufacturer General Motors, which it plans to rename Google Motors.

“It’s become clear to all of us at Google that the auto industry is a major driver of the economy and that we simply can’t afford to let General Motors fail,” said Google CEO Eric Schmidt. “If GM disappears, so will many jobs, and that will ultimately affect Google quite negatively. We make our money from advertising, after all, and if the auto industry tanks then it’s going to reduce our profits. We’re not just being altruistic, we also want Google to continue to thrive. We need a stable, growing economy for that to happen.”

Google also sees this as an opportunity to transform the culture at General Motors to benefit the environment. “We’ve always been on the leading edge of the green curve,” continued Schmidt, “and we’re going to use this opportunity to push GM into the twenty-first century and bring affordable and workable green technology to the fore.”

“Let’s face it, we have a lot of smart people at Google whose talents are currently being wasted. Instead of figuring out how to tweak AdSense ads to make us more money, these bored PhDs can tackle more important problems.”

When asked if Google’s advertising model could be extended to the automobile sector, Schmidt was evasive. “There are some synergies there that we plan to explore, for sure,” he said, “but we can’t discuss those details publicly as of yet.”

The transaction is expected to close within the month.

April 1, 2009 | Filed Under AdSense | 17 Comments 

AdSense Video Units Are Dead

My grandmother died last week (not unexpectedly) and while I’m still sorting through the event and will have something to say about it later, I thought I’d discuss some recent AdSense news.

The big news is that AdSense video units are being discontinued at the end of next month (April 2009). Google refers to it as “sunsetting”, I refer to it as “good riddance”.

The problem I always had with the video units was the lack of inventory. I could never find videos that related to the keywords I wanted.

The success of the AdSense program has ultimately been its ability to automatically match relevant advertising to content. Google has been able to do this by tapping into the sheer breadth of search-related advertising available via its AdWords program. They haven’t been able to replicate that breadth with the video units, hence the poor returns for them and for AdSense publishers. (Google had also had to discard similar forays into radio and print advertising for similar reasons — they haven’t been able to replicate their success with text ads with other kinds of advertisements.)

I don’t think many AdSense publishers will miss video units. Everyone I talk to is primarily using the same basic ad units that have been around since the start of the AdSense program. Personally, I still get a steady stream of hits on my original AdSense Tips page and those tips are still relevant today, four or five years after I wrote the first four of them! (If you want 40 more detailed and useful AdSense tips, check out my inexpensive Uncommon AdSense book. You also get a free copy of my analysis of Google’s AdSense patent when you buy it.)

There are a lot of smart people at Google, but they still haven’t come up with anything that comes even near to matching the success of the original AdWords and AdSense concepts as a money-maker for Google. And perhaps never will…

March 30, 2009 | Filed Under AdSense | 14 Comments 

Eric’s Google AdSense Tips For $10

Doing a bit of housecleaning… if you’re looking for a comprehensive set of AdSense tips, techniques and strategies, you can now purchase my Uncommon AdSense ebook for only $10. And as bonus you get my special report on understanding the AdSense patent. Over 100 pages of useful information for only $10, a real steal!

Visit UncommonAdSense.com today and order your copy now before I change my mind!

March 27, 2009 | Filed Under AdSense | 9 Comments 

Follow Me On Twitter

You can follow me on Twitter here: Eric Giguere on Twitter.

Unlike half the world, I promise not to post inane tweets every five minutes or so. I’ll try to be informative or humorous. Twitter’s a cool idea, but it also globalizes stupidity. Before, only your friends and acquaintances knew you were stupid. Now the whole world has the opportunity to experience it firsthand!

Let’s not fall into that trap, shall we?

March 25, 2009 | Filed Under AdSense | 10 Comments 

Mastering the Google Ranking Bounce

As I’ve argued before (see It’s All About The Traffic, Stupid!), you need traffic to make money with a website. It doesn’t matter if you’re monetizing with AdSense, affiliate offers, CPA offers, or some other advertising system — no traffic, no conversions; no conversions, no money.

One way to get traffic is to show up in the top 10 results for a well-searched keyword phrase on Google. This is the Holy Grail of Free Traffic. But it can be very hard to hit that top 10, or even the top 20.

There is a way to do it on a temporary basis, though, with some effort. I call it the “Google ranking bounce”.

Here’s how it works: Google currently gives a “freshness boost” to newly-published content. If the site that hosts the content is authoritative enough, this freshness boost can be enough to temporarily catapult the new content into the top 30 results for the content’s main keyword. (We’re assuming good on-page SEO here, of course, with the main keyword in the title of the page and ideally also in the URL itself, plus sprinkled appropriately throughout the content.) The boost lasts for 2 or 3 days, after which the page will “slide down” to its natural rank, there to stay until it gets pushed up through “natural” means (i.e. link acquisition). The page may in fact disappear for a few days from the index before reappearing.

I’ve seen this boost happen on my own sites (I have a few old domains) and on sites like EzineArticles. You can get a real, but unfortunately temporary, traffic boost from this rankings boost.

So what do you do? Write several articles/posts of content targeted at the main keyword and then publish them several days apart. If you’ve done it right, the freshness boost will ensure that one of your articles is continually in the top 10/20/30 until your supply of content is exhausted.

This is not easy to do, and it takes real effort to write all that content. The best place to start is with EzineArticles, I think. Find a high-volume search term that displays two articles from EzineArticles in the top 10. You won’t be able to displace the first article, but you can probably temporarily push out the second article. You’ll be surprised at how many times your article will be viewed. It’s temporary, of course, and only some of the traffic will make it to your own site, but it’s a cheap way to get some good, targeted traffic.

If you try this technique, let me know how it goes for you. It definitely takes work, though. The good thing is that over time all the content you write will itself reach critical mass and help you rank higher in the future.

March 24, 2009 | Filed Under AdSense | 18 Comments 

Changes Afoot at MEMWG

I’ve been reviewing things I’ve been doing lately and I’ve concluded that I’ve strayed too much from my core mission of AdSense coverage on this blog. As of today, then, I’m stopping any reviews of things that aren’t directly related to the Google AdSense program. Most non-AdSense discussions will also stop, although I can’t guarantee that I won’t let one slip in here and there.

If you’re interested in my reviews, you can check out the new reviews section of my personal website. (Yeah, the site’s very old school. I’m not about to futz with it, though.) Some of the reviews already published here are going to be summarized and/or rewritten and republished there. The first one, Beating AdWords Review, is up, more will follow.

I’m also in the midst of developing an SEO tool that I need and that I think others also need, I hope to have it ready for sale in a week or two. Warning: the price point will be fairly high, probably $150 or so. I’ve had some pushback about this, but because I don’t have a huge hype machine or mailing list to fall back on, it’s hard to make a decent return on my programming if I sell things for $10 a shot. Anyhow, I’ll make an official announcement here when the tool is out. If you’re not already on one of my lsits, though, send a blank mail to memwg@aweber.com if you want to get on my mailing list to get early notification.

If you have any features you’d like to see in an SEO tool, drop me a note or leave a comment here, maybe it’s something I can add to the tool if it’s not already supported. Think “If only I had a tool that did…” and let me know what’s missing from your life. Who knows, if you have a great idea I may even give you a free copy of the tool!

March 23, 2009 | Filed Under AdSense | 2 Comments 

New AdSense Privacy Policy Guidelines

As of April 8, 2009, Google is requiring AdSense publishers to update their privacy policy with information about Google use of cookies for serving advertisements and how visitors can opt-out of those cookies. I have updated the Privacy Policy Plugin for WordPress to include language that complies with the new guidelines, so if you’re using the plugin please install the new version before April 8 to make sure your site stays compliant. You can see an example of what the plugin now generates from the MEMWG privacy policy page.

March 21, 2009 | Filed Under AdSense | 1 Comment 

SenseApp: Track AdSense Earnings On Your iPhone or iPod Touch

Reader Hans Schneider wrote to tell me of his new SenseApp application that lets iPhone and iPod Touch users track their AdSense earnings on their devices. I don’t own either device (I have a BlackBerry) so I can’t do a review, but the screenshot looks pretty good. Worth trying out if you feel a need to track your earnings while you’re on the go.

March 18, 2009 | Filed Under AdSense | 3 Comments 

How To Become A Super Affiliate

Over the weekend I was visiting the Fat Loss 4 Idiots affiliate support page. Hadn’t been there in a while, but right now I recommend that everyone who is interested in affiliate marketing take a good look at their Super Marketing Affiliate Secrets, which I think is perhaps the best free advice about affiliate marketing I’ve seen in a long time. The most interesting points:

In fact, here’s a quote on what they think about article marketing:

For example, try to think of various topics which appeal to women over 30 years old — and then create your PPC (and article) campaigns around those topics.

Don’t just write 2 articles on each topic and then quit……..you should write 50 or 100 articles to ensure that you’ll still make money even if they are indexed poorly by the search engines.

HIGH VOLUME is the key.

If you write enough articles then you’ll get lots of visitors even if they are indexed poorly.

The days of writing an article and "ranking #1" (for a highly sought after keyword) are gone — those days are gone forever.

The key to making money in 2009 is to use VOLUME and CLEVER THINKING (just like we’ve outlined on this page).

If you begin to think cleverly and work hard — then you’ll soon discover the kind of money which our top affiliates are quietly making behind the scenes (they are laughing all the way to the bank while the rest of the affiliate world has no clue what’s really going on).

There’s some sound advice in there, and it doesn’t just apply to Fat Loss 4 Idiots, either, it can work with any affiliate or CPA offer.

Seriously, take the time to read the entire super affiliate tips page and start thinking out of the box.

March 9, 2009 | Filed Under AdSense | 8 Comments 

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