In my last posting, Instant AdSense sites reviewed, I mentioned the potential problems you can have when you buy themed article directories. You know, packages like AdSenseReady – 150 AdSense Web Sites, Instant AdSense Empire, AdSense Business in a Box, AdSense PowerPack… hmm, I'm apparently on the wrong end of this business.
Anyhow, there's a reason so many people are selling AdSense sites like this. It's because they can work as income generators. The key, though, is that you need volume.
Let's look at some numbers. Say you have an article directory that averages $0.50 a day in AdSense earnings. Assuming there are enough articles in the directory and that you've done a half-decent job with search engine optimization and getting traffic to the site, this is probably not unreasonable. It's not much, really, only $15 a month. If this was your only site, you'd be waiting several months to see any money from Google because of the $100 minimum for payments.
But what if you do more sites? If you have 10 sites, that $15 a month becomes $150 a month. With 100 sites, you're looking at $1500 a month — hey, that's not bad income. Get your average per-day earnings up and you'll see even more money. Now you're starting to see why these sites are so appealing…
What about the expense of hosting all those sites? Well, it's probably not as bad as you think. Most article sites are static sites — the pages never change, they can be hosted anywhere. They won't use a lot of disk space and — unless you luck out with traffic — they won't need a lot of bandwidth. So you look for the cheapest reseller hosting package you can find. Reseller hosting is what hosting companies offer to people like web designers who want to offer hosting to their customers but don't actually want to maintain the servers and all that stuff themselves. So they “resell” someone else's hosting. The web designer gets a mega hosting package for a low price and then divides it up however they want — at the prices they want — among his or her customers.
Well, the article directory folks use the same reseller packages. For example, I have an account with ResellerZoom that gives me the ability to host 50 websites for only $4.95/month. That's basically $0.10/month per website. And that's just one service. There are tons of hosting services that offer reseller plans.
So the hosting is basically free. It's the domain names that will cost you money. I've been getting my .com domains lately from 1 & 1 for $5.99 each. (You can get them cheaper in bulk from various registrars, but I tend to do things incrementally…) So that's $0.50 a month for the domain name.
Total monthly cost for running an article directory, not counting your time, is thus $0.10 + $0.50 = $0.60 a month. So it really doesn't take much in the way of AdSense and affiliate earnings to turn a profit on these sites.
But setting up a site does take time if you're doing it from scratch. Time to find or create the content. Time to create a layout. Time to do some search engine optimization. Time to create and submit sitemaps. Time to create blogs that link to the sites. Time to create articles that reference the sites. The pros have tools that help them automate much of this. Someone with experience and tools can easily deploy one to five sites a week.
The key to making this work is to do it continuously. Not ever site you make will work out, either the pages won't rank highly enough or else they'll be dropped from one or more search engines. But you combat this by deploying new sites to take their place.
And then you package up the old, underperforming sites for sale…
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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.