Review: "AdSense Arbitrage with Cash Cow Keywords"

As a follow-on to Graywolf's excellent mini-series on AdSense arbitrage (the art of buying traffic by placing AdWords ads in the hopes of making more money from the AdSense ads on a site) I thought you might be interested in this review of an e-book on that very topic. The review appeared in the March edition of my newsletter.

AdSense Arbitrage with Cash Cow Keywords

Back in the pre-AdSense days, I remember seeing a lot of ads
for a program called GoogleCash.
You probably remember the ads… a guy who spent his free time
on a yacht in the Caribbean, watching his money roll in… you
didn't even need to own a computer, just access to one… The
idea was simple: buy AdWords ads to promote affiliate products
with big commissions, i.e. spend a little money to make a lot of
money. You didn't have to ship anything to anyone, and the ads
were cheap — usually around 5 cents each. So as long as you had
one or two out of every hundred or so clicks convert into a sale,
you were laughing. Easy as pie, right?

Well, maybe back in 2002 or 2003. Things are a bit tougher now,
and making money from promoting affiliate products via AdWords is
much riskier and definitely more work. But if this kind of thing
appeals to you — spending money to make money — and you have the
time to do it, a new e-book by Roxanne McHenry will appeal to you.

The book is called AdSense Arbitrage with Cash Cow Keywords.
Roxanne is one of the partners of CashKeywords.com, makers of the AdSenseAccelerator keyword tool, which I reviewed previously.
But this e-book is a bit different.

Again, like GoogleCash, the idea is simple enough: you place
low-priced AdWords ads to direct traffic to a site you control
that has high-paying AdSense ads on them. If enough of the visitors
click your AdSense ads, you make money. Since AdSense gets its ads
from the AdWords program, this is really a form of arbitrage, a way
of taking advantage of pricing discrepancies in different but
related markets. Hence the term “AdSense arbitrage”.

Now, I must admit I've tried a little AdSense arbitrate in my time.
Only enough to dip my toes into the water and realize that I
wasn't willing to spend the money or the effort to do it properly.
Because it DOES take money, and there's a good chance you'll not
make ANY money doing it. Not without a system.

This is where Roxanne's e-book helps out. She's been doing AdSense
arbitrage for over a year, and this book describes how she does it.
It's a realistic book, full of warnings that you have to approach
arbitrage seriously if you want to make any money, and warning you
that you can easily lose money if you don't monitor and adjust
things on a daily basis. I like this statement she makes:

“In fact, in my case, for every 10 keywords I tested, 1-2 lost
more money than I made, another 3-4 broke even, another 2-3 made
100% profit (i.e. I spent $5, but made $10 for a $5 profit), and
one was fantastic and made 2-4 times more in profit over what I
spent (I spent $5 and made $10-20 or more).”

And she lists all the cons about doing AdSense arbitrage, including
the fact that you're going to probably lose money in the beginning
until you figure out the lay of the land. And that you want to get
involved in affiliate programs as well, because sometimes you'll
make more money promoting an affiliate product (shades of
GoogleCash!) than via AdSense clicks.

Roxanne's book stands alone in the sense that you don't need to buy
any software to get started — she tells you where to go to get free
information about keywords. She goes into extensive detail about
how to setup your AdWords campaign… I even learned a few things
myself here, such as how to use AdWords dynamic keyword insertion
to automatically build keyword-targeted ads, which I now know is
what eBay uses for its ads (ever notice how there's an eBay ad for
almost anything?).

What I especially like is the appendix that shows an actual case
study she did targeting the phrase “doors”. She walks you through
each step she took. She also goes over a sample budget for starting
an AdSense arbitrage business.

The book's not very long — less than 50 pages — but if this money-making technique interests you, I think it's well worth the $97
price. (She added the cost to the “one time spending” part of her
sample budget, BTW.) I don't think AdSense arbitrage is for
everyone, of course. It takes time at the beginning to get your
system going, and you have to closely monitor your ads from day
to day until you get things right. And each keyword you try is
something new and different. So there's lots of work involved
initially, which will turn off a lot of people immediately. But if
you're willing to stick with it, Roxanne's book will help you make
a success of the project.

So there's my capsule review, probably one of the first reviews
out there. The book includes a bunch of bonuses with it, including a list of keywords and some SEO tips, but buy it for the arbitrage advice more than anything.

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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