We'll continue the arbitrage discussion later today, but first an aside.
One of my readers (both of this blog and of Uncommon AdSense) contacted me yesterday looking for some SEO (search engine optimization) advice for his friend's travel site. No, it didn't really have to do anything with AdSense per se, because AdSense isn't usually suitable when you're selling products and services — the point, after all, is to convert visitors into buyers, not to send them to a competitor's site. Adding eBay auction listings to your site and mixing in AdSense ads make sense because you're not actually selling anything in either case. But when you're selling your own things, you want visitors to linger as long as possible.
Travel is a very competitive field to be in, so optimization of on-page elements — the things that are completely in your control like page title, page URL, links to other pages, headings, body text, meta tags — isn't enough to rank well in the search engines. You also need links to your site from other, relevant sites, ideally with good keywords in the anchor text of those links.
One of the easiest ways to get quality links back to your site is to write quality articles for distribution via article directories like EZineArticles and SearchWarp. You can also place free ads with links back to your site on places like USFreeAds and Google Base. I devote a chapter of Uncommon AdSense to this and call it “Write Articles for Karma”, because that's what you're doing, essentially. You don't get compensated for those articles. But you can link back to your site(s) in the resource box at the bottom of each article. Write enough articles and you'll start accumulating a critical mass of links.
I'm not the only proponent of article writing. The controversial affiliate marketing book Affiliate “Project X” recommends article writing as an easy to get traffic to an affiliate pre-sell page.
In this reader's particular case it should be easy to write a series of travel-related articles that link back to the site in question. People are always looking for travel advice, so there's a good market for travel articles. Definitely worth the effort.
One of the things I'm going to be doing soon is writing more articles to promote Uncommon AdSense. There's already an article out about high-paying AdSense keywords. I have an old article called The AdSense Formula For Making Money that needs a bit of minor updating. I've even done the odd article promoting some of my other sites, such as one on debt-free living (someone took me to task about that one recently, stating that debt for investment purposes makes a lot of sense tax-wise, but that's not a topic for here). You can even publish different variations of the same article in different directories, such as this one on making money via eBay's affiliate program.
If you're a subject matter expert — which is what you're going to be if you're building quality AdSense sites — writing articles shouldn't bee too difficult. If you've got a blog, for example, go back and re-purpose some of your earlier writings. Don't just copy them as is, rewrite them a bit and then submit them as stand-alone articles to article directories.
Article writing does take work — time, if nothing else — but it can really pay off over the long term. Get started today!
Sponsored Link: Get more great AdSense tips and techniques from Uncommon AdSense, my new ebook about AdSense.
P.S.: I've just used a specific technique I described a couple of days ago right here in this blog. Do you know what it is?
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.