It’s All About The Traffic, Stupid!
Time for me to fess up. Midway through February, I did something really stupid. Without going into the details, most of the pages from my best-performing site were summarily dropped from the Google index. Oops. My attempts at fixing the situation got two other sites banned completely. Triple oops! So much for quickly paying off the new car! As the traffic’s dried up, so have the AdSense earnings. At this point I’ve resigned myself to the situation and I’ll just have to build some new sites to take their place… it’ll be a long process, of course, because traffic doesn’t happen overnight.
Losing organic traffic is a common complaint among webmasters, and it’s not always their own fault. It’s something to consider, however, when your earnings make it past a certain level. Which is why in some sense it’s better to follow the create-many-sites-with-small-traffic model than the one-big-site-with-all-the-traffic model (see the AdSense Crapshoot for what I mean).
I’ve been experimenting with using the AdSense Resurrected model (we probably need to come up with a better name for it given the negative association with the ebook) on a single small site in a non-IM niche. To recap, the model involves sending low-cost PPC traffic to a squeeze page. Subscribers are then sent a new message every 2 or 3 days asking them to read one or more articles on the site. Some percentage of those visits will result in ad clicks, making you money, and possibly even affiliate sales, making you even more money.
So far, the clickthrough rates on the site are quite high. The average for the month just past is about 32%, with average per-day earnings around 60 cents. That doesn’t sound like much, but there are only 40 or so subscribers so far.
There are two major gotchas with this method, however:
- You need a good squeeze page. You’ll definitely get traffic to the site (but see the second point), but a lot of that traffic won’t sign up for your list. This is a perennial problem with list-building, of course. You need to come up with an excellent reason for people to join your list (a great freebie) and ad text that makes it clear a signup is required. These are non-trivial things to do.
- Don’t pay too much for subscribers. Currently, I’m in a loss situation with respect to my ad spend vs. my AdSense revenues because I didn’t pay too much attention to my spending in the first few days as I was trying to deal with my traffic situation (see above). My per-subscriber cost is therefore $1.40, which is way too high given my squeeze page conversion rate.
None of the subscribers have made it through the complete set of emails yet, however, so it’s still too early to tell what the ultimate result of this experiment will be. The niche I chose was perhaps not the best niche, too. So many variables to test…
I’d love to hear others’ experiences with that model, since I know some of you were planning on implementing it. In the meantime, I’ll keep working on getting free traffic to my sites. It takes time, but the price can’t be beat! 
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
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10 Responses to “It’s All About The Traffic, Stupid!”
I’ve had a week to work with this model but because the documentation is thin regarding keyword research and SEO practices I’ve been assembling my own document that shouls speed up the step-by-step process of building an adsense site. After 10 or so sites I may release it.
You’re right Eric, the niche makes the difference. I have one that pays me $1 per click and another that pays $0.04 per click on average and is seasonal in nature.
I’ll let you know when I get the first one up and see how it converts. Just for fun folks, I bought a copy of Eric’s software. I figured if I am doing research for one site I might as well write a set of documents for a second in the same genre and generate it very quickly with PLR builder.
Yes, I’m using PLRSiteBuilder myself, of course. Found some bugs and added some new features, too, because of this, so I’ll be releasing an update later today to registered purchasers.
Now if only I could create a module for PLRSiteBuilder that would auto-generate the perfect squeeze page for me
Eric
I can appreciate the pain. I have one large site that generates the bulk of my income and am having a terrible time updating it because of the fear of breaking it.
I wonder if the need for a high quality squeeze page is a place to consider hiring an experienced, expensive copywriter? It seems to me, you, I, and many of those introverts you mentioned a while back, will NEVER be able to write a good one ourselves.
OK, here’s an idea for an article for you Eric.
Are squeeze pages effective?
If so, why? I personally find them distasteful and if I come across one I know immediately it is a marketer wanting my email and usually to further sell me something. Thank goodness for disposable emails.
So all the marketers who are using this method, is it the most effective method? The long copy is more than I want to read, particularly when I find it on site after site. Would love to hear some stats on the squeeze page and the long copy versus short copy method.
Squeeze pages obviously work in general, otherwise they wouldn’t be used so much. But I’m the wrong guy to talk about this, I think.
I think that as time goes by and more and more people get fed up with this obvious marketing method then they will become less and less effective. And to use PPC to steer people to such a page will not be financially stable in the coming years. You already see this in many niches. I don’t see this a long term business model.
I can tell you that one site I experimented with – I put it up based on my experience and it has 8 pages. It is a very obscure niche and has a fairly long keyword phrase. Currently I think Google is showing 1 backlink.
I put it up in 2004 and it took one year to earn $100 in Adsense. It took another year to earn the next $100. Was listed in AskJeeves and that disappeared. Was getting traffic from Yahoo for a while and that disappeared. All of a sudden Google decides I’m a trustworthy site and I’m getting traffic from them, it makes about $100 in 3 months now, and it gets about 30 visits a day I believe. It is also #1 in the niche with Google SERPs. I haven’t updated anything significant in the 3.5 years it has been up.
So I guess my lesson from this is that age of a site is just as important as backlinks, PR, etc. I know it’s only $2 a day, but picking stronger niches, doing better SEO and paying attention to conversion, a static site could be a good part of the “many sites” strategy.
I’m going to take that road for a while and see what it produces, because the “age” card has been playing well for me, and there’s nothing better than not having to update a site every day.
Thanks for posting this Eric, it reminds me to spread things out for long-term health.
[...] Eric Giguere reveals in It’s All About The Traffic, Stupid! that building a list and sending subscribers to web pages containing Adsense has averaged 60 [...]
Speaking of updating websites…
Instead of having dozens (or even hundreds) of AdSense sites, why not just have a single site that acts like a hub. You know, something like HowStuffWorks.com.
It would be a lot easier to manage and you’d save a ton on domain names (and maybe even hosting). If Google ranks pages and not sites, as I’m told, it could be a good plan. I’m thinking about doing it — what do you think?
I’d like to hear what Eric thinks on this one.
First, I didn’t think about it but it is possible that Google ranks pages I suppose. Eric will know this. I have noticed that I can place a page about software problems on a genearl topic blog, quote the error from the software exactly, and get tons of people searching for the same error.
But in general I’d have to assume that this is an “all your eggs in one basket” problem. Sure you don’t have to update tons of niche sites, but if Google pulls your site because of any reason, you’d lose everything, all the mini-sites, niches or topical pages in your site.