The Only AdWords Guide You’ll Need

Something a little different now… I’ve started writing a short little ebook called The Only AdWords Affiliate Marketing EBook You’ll Ever Need (PDF). Just four pages so far, but if people like it I’ll add in more information. It’s one of the free resources on my AdWords Tips and Resources page. I find that so many AdWords guides fluff themselves out with lengthy explanations about AdWords, affiliate marketing, ClickBank, etc. that I thought a bare bones “just give me the details” report might be of interest. Let me know what you think. You can distribute it for free to anyone you want as long as you don’t charge for it — see the copyright notice at the bottom of the first page for the details.

More details about AdWords can also be found in the AdSense FAQ (frequently asked questions), specifically in the answer to What is AdSense?.

How To Get AdSense FAQ Updates

Response has been good to the AdSense FAQ I’ve started. I’ll continue to post here when I add an entry to the AdSense FAQ, but if you want to be doubly sure not miss any updates, you now have two options:

Also, at the bottom of each AdSense FAQ entry there’s a link back to this blog for making comments and suggestions relating to that entry. I didn’t want to retrofit a commenting system on that site, so it seemed simplest to just let the comments flow back to this blog. I also fixed a stupid mistake: there was no link to the AdSense FAQ from any of the other pages on EricGiguere.com! You’d think that with 15 years of site building experience I’d remember to give a new section an internal link or two… :-)

I’m planning on having a new entry out shortly. Keep the ideas coming!

Where To Find Top-Paying AdSense Keywords

The third entry in the AdSense FAQ deals with every AdSense publisher’s favorite topic: where to find lists of high-paying AdSense keywords. After all, if you don’t have such a list handy, how do you know whether you should be writing articles about mortgage refinancing ($33.73 average advertiser CPC) or upside down mortgages ($0.08 average advertiser CPC)?

Of course, as I’ve said before, you have to take the values published in these lists with a large grain of salt. Just because an advertiser is paying $30+ a click for the #1 ad spot on Google for “mortgage refinancing”, that doesn’t mean that you’ll get $30+ per click from the ads on your “mortgage refinancing” blog. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee you won’t see anything near that amount…. let alone how you’ll get traffic to your blog in such a competitive industry.

High-paying keyword lists should come with a disclaimer: “For Amusement Only”

How Much Can You Make With AdSense?

My second entry in the AdSense FAQ discusses the question that everyone asks me, especially press types — how much money can you really earn with AdSense anyhow?

More than you think, but also less than you think… most sites are in the “long tail” of the earnings curve. Forget optimization and keyword selection, in the end it’s all about one thing: traffic.

Introducing the AdSense FAQ

I’ve been thinking about what to write about for this blog, and I think it’s time to put all my experience with AdSense to use in answering some of the questions I get from readers and that I see asked over and over again on various forums and blogs. That’s why I’ve created the AdSense FAQ. I was going to host it here on this site, but I’ve got some weird WordPress issues going on with static pages and rather than figure out what’s wrong I’ve decided to put the AdSense FAQ on one of my oldest sites. If you’re wondering why the page layout looks so dated, it’s because the site is almost ten years old now.

There’s only one question in the AdSense FAQ so far: What is AdSense?, which is a short explanation of AdSense and AdWords (the two are intertwined). Look for more — I’ll post a note here when I put more content up.

Review: Article Marketing Automation

Article marketing is an easy way to get links and traffic, but it’s also very time-consuming. If you’re serious about article marketing you’ll try to automate parts of the process, especially article distribution.

A few weeks ago I mentioned that PLRPro was expanding its services to include some new features. One of these new features is the Article Marketing Automation service. It’s free to PLRPro members but is also available independently for $47/month, which is substantially less than the $197/month PLRPro is going to be charging soon for its members.

Article Marketing Automation

AMA is actually two things:

  1. a network of independent sites and blogs that have agreed to distribute AMA articles; and
  2. a human-controlled content rewriter

Let’s look at the network first.

The Article Site Network

A key characteristic of an article distribution system is how many sites are in its distribution network. The more sites you can get you content to, the more links you’ll get to your own sites. Unlike other systems, though, AMA isn’t limited to established article directories. Rather, it targets blogs and CMS (content management systems) based sites — any site that has a remote publishing API (application programming interface — a way for computer programs to talk to it) can be added to the network. This includes WordPress blogs (both self-hosted and on WordPress.com), Blogger blogs, Drupal sites, Joomla sites, etc.

Note that you don’t have to subscribe to the service to have your site included in the distribution network. Just sign up for a free AMA account and add your sites to the network.

Sites get added into specific categories on the network, and site owners have the option of seeing and manually approving any and all articles before they get added to their sites. This is a great way to ensure that only quality content makes it onto a site. The only restriction is that site owners are not allowed to modify the links in the articles.

When you submit an article to the network, the article is not broadcast to all sites on the network. Rather, it is “drip-fed” to a few random sites at a time over several days or weeks, and only to sites that match the article’s category. So links build slowly over time, which is a great feature.

Note that unlike every other system I’ve seen, AMA doesn’t restrict you to using links in the “bio box” of an article. In fact, you don’t even need a “bio box” if you don’t want one. You can embed up to 3 links anywhere within the article content. That’s a big plus in my book! You can even vary the links using the article rewriting feature.

The Article Rewriter

The article network is the most important feature of Article Marketing Automation, but close behind is the article rewriting system. Now let me point out that this feature is completely optional: you can submit articles directly to the network with no rewriting and they’ll get distributed with no changes.

Content rewriting is all about generating “unique” (or at least “semi-unique”) content. You do this by replacing words, phrases, and paragraphs with alternate versions that have the same meaning. AMA builds a “unique” article from the alternate text you’ve submitted.

Here’s a simple example:

When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the {red~blue~green~brown~yellow} ones last?

This would generate any of these phrases:

The replacements can include HTML and can even happen inside links. So you can vary anchor text quite easily:

The <a href=”http://www.memwg.com”>{best~most fantabulous~super} AdSense blog</a>

You can even vary the link destinations if you want. You can also nest alternatives within other alternatives.

This is not the first content rewriting system I’ve used, but it’s more powerful than the ones I’ve seen so far because of its flexibility — it’s implemented the way I would’ve done it myself.

Note that article rewriting is non-trivial if you’re doing more than simple synonym substitutions. But if you’re concerned about creating unique content, it’s worth the effort and this system is quite flexible. (There’s also a more traditional wizard-style interface that lets you do rewriting if you’re not comfortable with inserting the special syntax into the content yourself.)

Conclusion

So far I only have a few articles in the system, but the results are encouraging, I’m seeing a bit of traffic already. I can track how many copies of each article have been submitted and published and over time I expect to have lots of links going back to my sites. This system is great for getting backlinks and traffic, and it’s all very whitehat stuff. If you’re looking for an article distribution system, this is the one I now recommend.

And I’m Back…

Actually, I’ve been back for a few days, but I’ve been busy. Some things to note:

Back to the real world…

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!

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.

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:

  1. Search for a keyword (or analyze a site)
  2. 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
  3. Go back to the top and hit the Get keyword ideas button again.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.

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:

cooking keywords

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.

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:

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:

DUI Attorney Finder Keywords

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.

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.

  1. 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.
  2. Go the AdWords keyword tool and select Website content under How would you like to generate keyword ideas?
  3. 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
  4. 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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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