Catchy title, eh? Our TV went kaput suddenly and so we've had to go shopping for a new one, an unexpected dent in the old budget. It got me thinking, though, about how quickly someone could make money online using AdSense and other content monetization schemes. You know, the stuff that programs like The Rich Jerk advertise anyone can do.

Mostly I'm thinking out loud here, because up to now I haven't really concentrated on anything other than slow, organic growth through good content and natural traffic. (Which is what I still recommend for long-term monetization.) But if you're willing to take some (*cough*) shortcuts then I think it's possible to quickly make a few thousand dollars online. I need to cover some of this for my own upcoming book, since I get asked about it often enough, so here's my untested recipe cobbled together from analyzing various schemes.

First, though, the prerequisites:

• You're a moderately experienced webmaster.
• You have some programming skills. I don't think you need much, but you need to be able to tweak scripting code appropriately.
• You're willing to spend some money to make money. You'll be buying domains and hosting services. Look into reseller accounts to reduce costs.
• You have the time to do all of this. Because it will take time, don't kid yourself on this one. Several hours a day initially, I'd think, until you master the steps in the system.

What makes this at all possible is that there are money-making programs out there that pay you on a fairly quick basis. Programs like AdSense and Chitika pay monthly. ClickBank pays out twice a month. Programs like Amazon Associates aren't as good because they only pay out quarterly, but they still might be OK for your target market.

Now to the details. As I explain in the two words that can make you rich, you need either a high-traffic site or a bunch of low-traffic sites. Since the former is hard to do in normal circumstances, it'd be almost impossible to do in a short period of time. So the latter is the basis of the strategy. You should also re-read The AdSense Formula to get in the right mindset.

The basic strategy:

1. Choose a niche. But not just any old niche, a niche related to something that people pay money for. This is where a lot of people trying to make money online fall down — you have to follow the money. For example, don't try to sell something to webmasters, who are notoriously cheap.
2. Build at least one site devoted to that niche, preferably more. Don't spend too much time making it fancy. You'll need to find content, of course, and here's the dicey part — if you want to do it quickly you probably can't do it all yourself, you have to get some semi-generated or auto-generated pages using “scraping” techniques:
• The best solution is to write some code to generate the pages yourself. Then you get complete control over the content. This requires some programming skills, though. If you're uncomfortable with that, you can use programs like Traffic Equalizer, AdSense Empire and various others to generate the pages for you — but if you do, don't use the standard pages that they generate, make sure you modify the templates they use.
• Content gets pulled in from various sources. RSS feeds and article directories are the most obvious sources. (RSS in particular is very easy to parse.)
• You can also scrape search results from Google and the like to build pages like this that aren't actually content but serve strictly to attract random search engine traffic. (See here for more pages from that site — or check out their sitemap for the complete list.) Funneling search engine traffic is an important part of the strategy, because you can't compete against the big guys for the main money-making keywords… but you can easily get good rankings for less-popular-but-still-searched keyword combinations.
3. Use good SEO techniques. Basic stuff, really: keywords in URL, title, h1, bold, italics, watch the keyword density. Submit the sites to the search engines for good measure, but don't spend much time on that. Basic SEO should get you ranking high enough on Yahoo!, MSN and (eventually) Google for at least some of your pages.
4. Make sure the content pages are well-formatted to prominently display AdSense/YPN ads, Chitika eMiniMalls (if appropriate), and links to related products that are sold through ClickBank or other affiliate programs.
5. Create a simple blog (be sure to use a different hosting service, you want the blog on a different IP address). Post content on the blog related to the niche site's topic and have the blog link back to the niche site. Use one-way links — don't have the site link back to the blog. You're trying to drive traffic to the content site.
6. Register the blog with the various blog search engines. Claim it on Technorati. Subscribe to it on Bloglines. Submit it to Google's blog reader. Ping the various blogging services whenever you add content. Get the crawlers coming to the blog.
7. Now go back to step 1 and repeat with another niche.

That's the money-making strategy in a nutshell. Be prepared to “lose” sites once in a while — getting banned by a search engine or losing rank is one of the costs of doing business. Hence the need to not link sites together except to funnel traffic.

For bonus points, do the same kind of thing with email:

1. Choose a niche.
2. Sign up with a mailing list provider like AWeber.
3. Set up autoresponders for your sites and/or products you're promoting (affiliate-based products, i.e. most ClickBank products, are good things to promote this way).
4. Get people to sign up for the autoresponders.
• If you actually have a useful digital product (e-book, software) that you can give away, participate in promotions with outfits like ZeroCostPromotions.com to grow your mailing list.
• Advertise your list with AdWords and other PPC programs. (But it's going to cost you.)
• Place signups in various spots on your different sites.
5. Have the autoresponders send them multiple mails about a topic. You don't have to be pushy, though, you can go for the soft sell.
6. Now go back to step 1 and repeat with another niche.

Work hard at it and I'm sure you can make a ton of money. Will you like doing it? Do you have the time to do it? Can you afford to flub up a few times while you hone your technique? Do you feel comfortable with this kind of selling? These are all questions you'll have to answer for yourself.

Above all, remember that the steps I've described are all still work. There is no “flip a switch and make money automatically” program out there. I think you can hone your systems and get it down to an art, yes, and probably put out new sites/autoresponders with minimal effort, but it'll still take you a lot of effort to get to that stage. (At which point you can make even more money by telling people how you developed your money-making system.)

If any of you reading this decide to try this, please let me know, I'd love to hear about your experiences. I'm going to be writing more about this in my next (FREE! SUBSCRIBE TODAY! BONUSES!) newsletter.

In the meantime, back to my writing…

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

• Previous Entry: Spam fatigue
• Next Entry: AdSense complements: Chitika, MotionMall, AffiliateSensor, Amazon, etc.