Reality vs. Fantasy
A lot of marketing is built on fantasy. Look at all the “pre-built AdSense sites” that are available for sale for low prices. Sometimes ridiculously low — you can find many of them almost for free on (of all places) eBay, for example. Yes, they've done all the dirty work for you alright, from scraping. But you gotta ask yourself, if these sites are so good, why are they selling them so cheaply instead of continuing to make money with them? In fact, they're probably still running the sites themselves, but they're probably not making a lot of money from them that way. Because there's nothing original about the sites, and they're in competitive areas, and they just don't get the traffic needed to rake in the money. I'm sure there are a few sites that make significant money this way, but most won't. The ones that are making money are run by smart cookies who know the tricks to get the good rankings necessary to drive traffic to their cookie-cutter content pages.
This picture from the “booth babes” controversy illustrates the concept better than I can describe it:
There's no easy path to becoming rich from AdSense. Or any other online scheme. The people who are in that position have all worked hard to get where they are. Keep your expectations in line with reality. Write good content. Get targeted traffic. Rinse and repeat.
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.