How AdSense Publishers Make Money With Duplicate Content
Darren Rowse (aka ProBlogger) left this comment about my tutorial on using Keyword Elite's AdSense page generation facility. Let me republish it here because it makes for an interesting discussion:
I really wonder what the point of this type of thing is. Republishing what other people have said and what others are publishing over and over and over again on other sites seems quite pointless to me.
Search engines are getting better and better at filtering such content out and in the end they don't really add value to anyone's lives from what I can see.
If people actually put the same sort of effort that they put into setting up sites like this into creating a few interesting, useful, unique and valuable articles of their own I think they'd build a site that was much more valuable over the long term.
What Darren espouses — and what I've always said — is the “quality” approach to content monetization: write good, focused and unique/different content to attract both the search engines and a persistent readership. That's exactly what he does, of course. It's not the only approach, however.
The other main approach to content monetization is the “quantity” approach, and that's where the page generators — especially dedicated programs like Traffic Equalizer — come into play. I've alluded to this before in postings like 172 AdSense Sites = $5000 per month but it bears further explanation.
In the quantity approach you make money by deploying as many sites as possible across as many money-making niches as possible. It's strictly a numbers game. Each site (and I use the term loosely here, because the “site” may exist on a subdomain or just as a folder on a larger site) may only make 50 cents a day in AdSense earnings. But multiply that by (say) 200 and suddenly you're making $100 per day.
What does it take for an individual site to make 50 cents in earnings? Let's say the average per-click payout is low, only 5 cents. Then each site needs only 10 clicks. Remember, that's across the entire site, not per page. You don't need a lot of traffic to generate 10 clicks. Assuming a very modest and easily achievable 5% clickthrough ratio, you only need 200 visitors per day to make it work. That's just 2 visits per page.
But where do you get those 100 pages for each of those 200 sites? Very few people are going to sit down and write 20,000 pages of content. What they're going to do is fill the sites with content from other sources: Wikipedia, private label rights articles and books (rewritten or not), EZineArticles, etc. etc. Creating these content-rich sites is quite easy. You can even buy pre-made AdSense site packages like this one, this one, or this one.
So creating the sites is easy, even if it takes you a few weeks to get everything in place. The traffic is key, and the most profitable traffic is the “natural” or “organic” search engine traffic. But it's not the only way. Right now there's a free report going around the Net showing how someone makes large AdSense cheques each month strictly using pay-per-click traffic to get visitors. That can be a tricky game to play — you're doing arbitrage, after all — but it's definitely doable if you've got the right niches.
But even organic traffic is doable. Yes, the search engines work hard to week out duplicate content. But they won't necessarily weed out all the content, and the different search engines all handle duplicate content differently. All it takes is for a few pages on each site to rank high — think “long tail” rankings — and you're set. You may not keep those rankings for long, but adding content regularly to your sites will ensure that some of your pages are always getting traffic.
Also, you can drive traffic back to your sites by writing (or, more likely, rewriting) articles with bio boxes that link back to your sites. Submit enough articles to various article directories and you're bound to get traffic and improved rankings.
So that's the quantity approach. Search engines and users generally don't like them, this is true, because most such places provide no added value to the content. Duplicate content or not, you can definitely make money with these techniques.
Oh, and when you have a site that's no longer raking in the bucks from AdSense, you can just package it up and sell it as a ready-built AdSense site to squeeze even more money out of it.
And that, my friends, is how AdSense publishers make money with duplicate content.
Sponsored Link: If you're taking the quality approach, my book Uncommon AdSense has lots of advice to help you build better and more profitable sites.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
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