I've been seeing more marketers push Patrick Hillenbrand's AdSense Decoded video series lately. (Actually, he's usually referred to as “Dr. Patrick Hillenbrand”, although I'm not sure what relevance his degree has to making money with AdSense. I guess it's supposed to make you trust him more. OK. I have a master's degree in computer science, so please call me “Master” from now on.) The videos look similar in nature to Michael Cheney's AdSense Videos. I haven't seen either so I can't compare the two, but I suspect that if you're the type of person that likes learning from videos rather than reading books, I'm sure that either series of videos is fine. Presumably, though, AdSense Decoded is more up-to-date.
The point of this posting, however, is not to review either set of videos, but to talk about some claims I see more and more often on the promos for these types of products.
Instant Traffic = Pay-Per-Click (AdWords)
When you see a product claiming that “no organic search engine traffic” is required or that you can “get loads of traffic 15 minutes from now”, you can bet that they're talking about one thing exactly: pay-per-click traffic, likely via Google's own AdWords program. Because it's true, if you have a credit card, a list of keywords, and a set of pages already prepared, you can sign up for AdWords and start getting hits on those pages in about 15 minutes.
Now, I don't see the sales page for AdSense Decoded say anything about using AdWords. But the author does put his “AdWords Qualified Individual” logo on the page. And later on he goes on to vaguely discuss his “AdSense brokerage” (not “arbitrage”, he points out) method. And notice how he says this:
I turned on the “Light Switch” on my AdSense Account on 11 May 2006, and BANG ! As Predicted I Made Massive AdSense Profits Overnight
I'm sure if we looked at his AdWords account for that day we'd see that's when he turned on the AdWords floodgate. Which brings us to the other part of this.
AdSense Earnings vs. AdSense Profits
Most AdSense books/videos like to show you “proof” of their AdSense earnings. Nice screen grabs from their AdSense account. OK, ignoring the fact that it's incredibly easy to fake that information, let's look at the wording they use. They never talk about “profits”, only “earnings” from AdSense. “Do this and your earnings will increase dramatically”, they'll tell you. The “this” part is what we've just discussed, use PPC programs like AdWords to drive traffic to your sites.
What they're leaving out, of course, is the cost of getting that traffic. Let's assume they are making $10,000 a month in AdSense earnings. But maybe they're spending $9,000 a month on “traffic acquisition costs” (that's how Google describes paid traffic in its own earnings reports). So really they're only making $1,000 a month in profit. Which is fine, don't get me wrong, a lot of people would be happy to make an extra $1,000 a month. But there's a big difference in making $1,000 a month in profits vs. making $10,000 a month in profits.
Again, look at the numbers on the AdSense Decoded sales page. When you go from less than 100 impressions per day to over 20,000 impressions per day and you have a decent clickthrough rate (over 50% is what they're claiming) then you're absolutely going to see large AdSense earnings. But again, how much did it cost you to get those 20,000 impressions? It's a tricky game to play, as anyone who's tried their hand at AdSense arbitrage will tell you. And don't forget that you'll have to carry those advertising costs for a couple of months before you see the first earnings payment from Google. Are you prepared to spend that kind of money?
It's alright to be skeptical when you read some of these claims. It doesn't mean that the techniques these products are teaching are bad, but they may require a significant investment in time and money for them to pay off, something that they certainly don't emphasize.
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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.