Instant AdSense sites reviewed

Yesterday I mentioned that purchasers of Understanding the AdSense Patent get the source code to some “instant” AdSense sites. Which brings us to today's topic — what exactly are “instant” or “pre-built” AdSense sites and are they worth the money?

First of all, an explanation of where these sites come from. To further my research, I join most AdSense-related mailing lists that I come across, just to see what people are offering. Sometimes I'll actually go and spend money to buy some of the products they're promoting. For example, I joined Secret Affiliate Weapon (only $10, luckily) and got access to a number of things including a set of screen captures showing how to build an AdSense site based on Traffic Equalizer, which was useful for dissecting the latter without actually buying it (because TE is not cheap). The latest one I joined was Mr. Over Deliver, which has both free and paid memberships available. It's actually not bad in terms of what you get, though the only thing they offer at the free level that might interest AdSense publishers is an e-book on AdWords and an e-book on article writing (but for article writing you might as well just start with my free article writing page). The pro level has some specific AdSense stuff, but at $97 it's a stiff upgrade from $0 (but I made the sacrifice just for you!).

Anyhow, at some point in my travels I managed to get ahold of the resale rights to 4 pre-built AdSense sites. So in theory I can resell these sites, but I'm not going to do that and am just throwing them in as one of the bonuses for customers who buy my e-books/reports. I was glad to get them, resale rights or not, because I always wanted to do a detailed analysis of what you got from these packages. I'm sure you've seen ads for them before, including on this site, and you're probably curious, too.

These “instant sites” are really nothing more than themed article directories. The articles comes from public repositories like EZineArticles or SearchWarp and were selected based on their topic, not necessarily on their content. They were then formatted into a set of web pages built around a simple template, with AdSense link and ad units as the primary revenue generator.

The sites you see in the links above are basically unmodified from what I received, though I changed the AdSense publisher ID and the URLs of the links as per the instructions they provide. But I didn't make any other changes.

So what are the problems with these kinds of sites? There are a number of issues to think about before buying pre-built sites:

Duplicate content. These are articles that others have access to. Even if they're private label rights articles, and hence not in public directories, you can bet a pile of them are floating around on other sites. So you have competition from these other sites and the search engines may be lowering your rankings because of duplicate content.
Uneven quality of content. You don't know where the articles actually come from (and you're never told). The quality can vary a lot.
Static templates. Making changes to the look-and-feel of the site is hard because you have to make changes on each and every page of the site. Yes, there are tools to do this, but I never build my sites this way, I always have some kind of templating system in place or build a dynamic site that lets me include headers, etc., on the go.
Unoptimized pages. The sites I've shown you could use some search engine optimization. For example, the title of each page is the same thing across the site — it should really be the title of the individual article on the page.
AdSense problems. Actually, I did make one other change to these sites. Before they had a label above the vertical link unit that said “Related Links”, but the AdSense terms and conditions only allow for “Advertisements” or “Sponsored Links”.

I could go on with more problems, but let's talk about the biggest one: you need traffic to make money with these sites. With any AdSense site. So how are you going to get that traffic? How are these pre-built sites going to attract visitors? Especially when there are dozens (maybe hundreds?) of almost identical sites out there all vying for the same traffic stream…

These sites seem mostly useful to me as examples. Examples of laying out articles, mostly. (Though I'd use a horizontal link unit instead of a vertical one.) If I were to build a themed article directory, though, I'd do it differently.

I'm not saying you can't make money with pre-built sites. I'm sure you can. But I bet the ones that make a lot of money are the ones that are highly customized. So you end up doing a lot of work anyhow, which in some ways negates the appeal of purchasing a pre-built site in the first place…

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.