Using Keyword Elite as an AdSense Site Generator

Yesterday, after my little epiphany, I mentioned that I was going to look at how well Keyword Elite worked as an article generator. I'd seen the facility mentioned before, but I'd never tried it out and the KE documentation isn't that great so it took me a while to figure things out. So here are the results.

Step 1: Build Your Keyword List

The first step is to build your keyword list using KE's “Project 1″ tool. Your keyword selection here is very important, since one article per keyword will be generated. You're going to want to focus on a particular niche, obviously, but you'll have to decide if you want to go broad with lateral keywords or narrow with drill-down keywords, and that will determine which keyword sources — Ask.com, Overture, Google Suggest, etc. — you use for the keyword generation. Let's use spyware as our niche and get the top 100 related terms from Ask, Overture and Google Suggest:

After a bit of quick pruning I end up with a list of 147 spyware-related keywords:

The list could use more pruning, actually, but I'm being lazy here.

Step 2: Start the Create AdSense Pages Wizard

I then press CTRL-A to select all the keywords, right-click to open up the context menu, and select “Create AdSense Page(s)”:

Up pops the article creation wizard, which immediately starts chugging away on the keywords you've given it:

The article gathering step takes quite a while, as KE throttles its requests to the article site so that you're not banned by the site.

Step 3: Select the Template

After you've gathered the articles you tell KE what template to use for the generated pages and how the AdSense ad and link units are to be inserted into the article. (Note that prior to doing any of this you have to configure KE with your AdSense publisher ID.) You also specify an output directory for the generated files:

The template functionality is VERY limited, however. The default (empty) template generates a very simple but full HTML page, including a proper title. A user-specified template is a skeleton HTML file where you place the special token #ARTICLE# in the body somewhere. KE will then insert the article, including the AdSense code, into that location. It will also find and insert the article title into the <title> tag, which you'd normally leave empty in the template.

I created a simple template based on my Single-Page AdSense Template and used it to generate my spyware site. You can download the template I used from here.

Step 4: Generate and Fix Up Your Site

Now you're ready to generate the site using the articles that were gathered:

Now you'll have a bunch of .htm files in a directory. There's no index file generated, but there is a sitemap.htm file generated that links to all of the generated articles.

At this point you should look carefully through each article. Some of the articles that KE chooses are way off-topic. In this batch of spyware articles I was given articles on:

• Egyptian cotton blankets
• MP3 players
• liver disease
• air filters
• credit repair

And many articles were duplicated. I was quite disappointed with the article selection.

Also, some of the HTML it generates isn't quite write. Articles from EZineArticles, for example, are missing some HTML end tags that really screw up my template. I fixed the template to adjust for it, but that just ends up messing up some of the other articles. So you really have to go through each article by hand and fix it up.

Step 5: Deploy Your Site

Once you've fixed up the files and added a home page, all you do is upload it to a folder on a site. I've uploaded them for you to synclastic.com/spywareinfo so you can see what a generated site looks like. I've done no editing other than generating the pages with my template and creating an index page that redirects to the sitemap.htm file. I would not actually deploy this site as-is, of course, I'd want to make many changes to get it looking right.

Final Analysis

I'm glad I didn't buy Keyword Elite for its page generation capability, it's just not a very good feature on such a capable tool. I don't like all the editing and pruning required, I might as well go and get the articles myself by hand.

Also, when you're building an article site it's important to consider the value-add factor: what value are you adding to the articles? Are you selecting articles by quality? Are you adding in your own commentary/reviews? Why would anyone want to read your collection of articles? If you're going to depend on natural search engine traffic to make money from such a site, you have to give people a reason to visit the site and you have to give the search engines a reason to list your site. Just duplicating content with no value-add isn't going to get you anywhere.

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Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

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