Do You Have An "AdSense Will"?
My 7-year-old daughter asked me the other day who would take care of her if my wife and I were both dead. I don't know what prompted the question — perhaps the recent deaths of her grandfather and one of our dogs — but I knew the answer because it's explicitly spelled out in our wills. But it did make me think about a related issue: what happens to my AdSense sites when I die?
The sites keep running, of course. They'll keep making money, though over the long term I'd expect revenues to go down, especially those tied to (by then dormant) blogs. That's the whole point of creating a passive income stream with AdSense and/or embedded affiliate links.
The problem comes in managing it all. If I dropped dead tomorrow, my wife would have no clue what to do with my sites. Currently I use two different domain registrars and four different hosting service. I have umpteen different affiliate accounts. No one else understands any of it but me, and a lot of it isn't written down anywhere, just buried in various email folders. Even getting access to my email would be challenging because my mail client uses SSH tunnels exclusively to connect to my mail servers.
I don't think my situation is very unusual, either. If, say, Matt Cutts were to take out GrayWolf, I bet Michael's wife would have a hard time figuring out all the odds and ends of his business. (Especially his MySpace accounts…)
And that's the key word here: business. What I've jokingly called an “AdSense will” in the title of this post is more properly called a disaster recovery plan for your online business so that if (heavens forbid) anything should befall you, your partner/heir would be able to keep the business running if they choose. They might not understand how it all works or why you have 100 domains to your name, but with the right information they could always hire somebody who could explain or manage it for them. Or even sell it, the likeliest scenario.
You need to write down all the pertinent information — or print out the relevant emails — and put it in a secure location like a safety deposit bank. You might even go so far as to include a list of instructions as to what to do immediately after your death, such as logging into your AdSense account and suspending payments until things get sorted out. Just make sure all the right details are there — it can be as simple as a list of usernames and passwords for all your important accounts. Don't worry about being too geeky in your descriptions of what's what, they'll find someone to explain it for them.
It's not the happiest of topics to think about, but a disaster recovery plan will make you feel a lot better about what will happen after you're gone.
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Eric Giguere wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. His goal is to get his AdSense blog into Matt Cutts' blogroll.