My opinion about Instant AdSense Templates and Private Label Articles

Whoops, looks like my postings about private label articles and Instant AdSense Templates is striking a nerve among my readership. I was actually going to cover some of this later in my private label articles series, but perhaps it's best to talk about it now.

There's no doubt in my mind that the quickest way to get yourself a big fat AdSense paycheque is to create site after site, or blog after blog, on a regular basis. It always goes back to what I say in my free e-book the two words that can make you rich — instead of one high-traffic site, build many lower-traffic niche sites. (Read the e-book for the justification, but it all comes down to basic mathematics.)

The problem, of course, is that it's hard to create new sites from scratch. There are one-time impediments to overcome:

• Domain names
• Hosting
• Templates

These are not significant barriers, though. A bit of work and you can have a system in place that easily lets you create new sites/blogs. This means hunting down the cheapest place to buy domain names (generally this means 1&1 in my case) or using subdomains. It means finding and learning how to use a reseller hosting account. It means creating your own site templates the hard way (by hand) or grabbing someone else's templates (like the free ones at Open Web Design). Learning how to install and customize WordPress blogs. It means using tools like FMPP to make the creation and management of static sites easier.

Do the above a few times and you'll find setting up a new site/blog can be done in a matter of hours. Maybe minutes!

But what's missing in all of this is… you guessed it, content. That's where people stumble. And that's why private label articles are so popular these days.

Think about it. If you want to build your “AdSense empire” to rake in the big bucks, you need dozens, hundreds, even thousands of sites. You need to be deploying sites on a weekly basis, possibly even daily. How are you going to do this and fill those sites with content? How are you going to post content to the fifty blogs you maintain?

You can hire writers to do it for you, of course. This is what blog networks do. But that costs money. Or you can use scripts/software to scrape content. But the quality of scraped content is pretty iffy. Or you can use someone else's prewritten content.

So you buy a set of private label articles for a given niche and create a site/blog around them. You do some minimal work to get them into the search engines or to drive traffic to them via pay-per-click advertising. Then you move on to the next site/blog.

Churn is the name of the game for the real masters. It doesn't matter if a site gets banned/dropped/whatever, you'll soon have another one set to take its place. Even better, you can take your old sites and sell them as turnkey AdSense sites — so they still make you money.

When I first heard about Joel Comm's Instant AdSense Templates product, my first thought was that it was a great idea, putting together a bunch of optimized AdSense-friendly templates together, along with instructions on how to use them. I wish I had thought of it myself!

It wasn't until I got my sneak peek at the product that I realized it had private label content in it. That disappoints me, I'll be honest. As a writer, I really can't seem myself using someone else's writing — without credit or compensation — to build my site and pass it off as my own work. But I'm picky that way, I know people who feel they can't write (which probably isn't true — if you can send semi-literate emails to your friends, you can write articles) look for other sources of content.

And as I've argued before, I don't think article compilations are bad in and of themselves. The key is whether the compilation adds value to the original material. Compiling material, organizing it, editing it… these things all take time and effort.

When it comes right down to it, I'm a big proponent of the write-your-own-content method of making money with AdSense. Those of you who have read Make Easy Money with Google will know this to be true. I do think AdSense is a great way for individuals to make themselves some money by creating content based on their interests and experiences.

But part of the way I create original content is by talking about the issues and challenges that AdSense publishers face. I get questions from my readers about things like private label articles. Or I see famous Internet marketers jumping on the same bandwagon. These things motivate me to write about the realities of AdSense in today's world. I try to be as objective as I can and avoid moralization. My job is not to tell you what's right and what's wrong. My job is to explain to you how things work and to give you ideas for new ways to approach things. Or what to avoid. Or what to be careful about. I will not get rich doing this, I can assure you, at least not with this site. (Let's face it, AdSense publishers rarely click ads.) But I find it all extremely interesting, and I hope you find it useful.

Please feel free to leave a comment about the job I'm doing. Do you find this blog valuable? Are there topics you'd like to see discussed? I'm always willing to listen to my readers. Realize also that I can't please everyone and that I'm just one guy with one set of opinions. Go easy on me…

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.

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