What’s this site about?

Hi, and welcome. I just wanted to take a moment to explain what this site is all about. Firstly this site aims to be a one stop shop to guide you on how to make money with Google Adsense. Google Adsense is an advertising programme that allows publishers to make money from targeted “in content” advertisements. If you have landed here, you probably already knew that, but maybe you want to know more, like what are the secrets? How do people make very good money using Google Adsense? These are the questions which this site will answer. I will also use this site as a model on how a good Adsense site should be set up, and when this site starts to gain the sort of organic search traffic, which I know it is capable of, I will also position Adsense ads on this site. I have been an Adsense publisher for a few years now, and time and time again, I find that there are a few keys to success. What are they?

Social Traffic and Organic Search Traffic

This is the first common stumbling block. When people decide that they want to have a go at making money online, they often have a romanticized image of it in their head. Making easy money well they sleep, playing with the kids while the cash comes rolling in. This can be a bad thing when this vision stops them from making the right choices from the beginning. The normal story I see is an enthusiastic go getter, buys their own domain, commonly something like their own name, or a random cool sounding word that doesn’t seem to relate to anything. They “blog” about topics they see on sites like Digg.com or any other social site. The idea behind this strategy is that if they create content that is interesting people will want to read it. As they haven’t really thought about traffic, the first step they might take is to submit an article to Digg.com. Because if an article is popular on Digg, it will make your lots of money right? Well probably not. This is a huge mistake. Not all traffic is profitable. Social traffic in particular is very hard to make money from, and is a waste of time for Adsense sites.

I have found the only way to make profitable Adsense sites is to get organic search traffic. This is where all the money is. Either you are buying it with PPC, or you are ranking for high volume keywords yourself. Ranking highly for profitable keywords is what I do. Traffic that comes from search engines for ranking for terms is called organic search traffic. The reason this sort of traffic makes you money is because it is targeted. The person has opened Google, or any other search engine, and typed their intention: “How to Make Money from Google Adsense”. If you landed on this site from searching for this term, I know you are after the sort of information I am giving. In the same way someone searching for “Iphone review” is looking for a review of an iphone, and someone searching for “Bad credit loans”, has bad credit and is trying to get a loan. All of these terms signal the user intention, so if we capture this user, we can make money from them. Simple. Social traffic is the opposite. You know nothing about the user coming to your site.

Keyword / Niche Research

Once you come onboard with the line of thinking that organic search traffic is the best traffic to get, you then need to think about what keywords are going to bring you traffic. You also need to think about if that traffic is likely to be buying traffic, or information traffic, and then how you will convert the traffic into money. Buying traffic is easy to convert. Sell them the product they are looking for. Information traffic can also make money, using either PPC ads, like Adsense, or via selling an information product like an Ebook. However, since the focus of this site is Adsense, we will just focus on that.

You need to decide on a niche for your new site. What will you write about? Do you know a lot about this topic already? Will you pay someone else to write the content? Once you have selected a niche which you think will be profitable, you need to find keywords that will bring you the most profitable traffic. A good starting tool for this task is the free Google Adwords Keyword tool.

Tips for using:

  • Do a quick search for a broad keyword in your niche
  • Change match type to from broad to exact
  • Turn on the average CPC column.
    … Now search again

How to read the results:

The higher the CPC, the more money the term is worth from an Adsense perspective. The value will be inflated as it is giving the average price someone will pay for a click, Google takes some of this, and this value is for ad placements directly on search engines, placements on your site are worth less. But the higher the CPC, the more the term is worth to you. Higher volume search terms will bring more traffic, so the more searches the better…however…

Keyword Competition

The more searches a term gets, the more competition for that term you are likely to find, and the harder it likely is to rank for. So the next step is to look at the competition, and decide which terms are worth your time. For most terms you can rank for eventually, however, the harder the term, the more effort, the less return on investment. So finding keyword terms that bring traffic, but have less competition are really the key focus here. The best way to judge competition is to open google and search for the term. Look at all the sites ranking on the first page. The most important factors for ranking are:

  • Keyword use in title tag of site
  • Keyword use in domain name
  • Substantive, unique content on page
  • Keyword focused anchor text in links
  • Quantity/quality of links
  • Diversity of link sources
  • Page specific trust rank
  • Relevance of link sources
  • Keyword specific anchor text from internal links

Now obviously you can easily go overboard here and kill hours looking at these details for every site, however this probably isn’t the best strategy. Time is money and we want fast results. SEO Quake is a browser plug-in which will quickly show you most of the above factors in a few seconds. Be warned it will slow down your browsing speed so it’s a good idea to install it on an alternative browser.

It’s hard to suggest what level of competition is worth going after for every individual. This is something you will get with experience. The more sites you set up, the closer you will get to finding what you are comfortable with. At first it is probably worth focusing on something that doesn’t have a whole heap of authority sites on the first page. Some key sites I like to see on the first few pages of a term are Squidoo lenses, Ezine articles, Hub Pages, or Go articles. These sites are free authority sites where people can set up content and articles. These sites rank relatively easily with little effort because they are on real authority domains. However they probably don’t have a lot of backlinks, so they can be out ranked with a little effort.

Writing Quality Articles

Writing content for your Adsense sites is a key step. Some people mess around with PLR content, and other rubbish like that. The truth is PLR content, as it is, is a complete waste of time. So many other sites have the exact same articles on their sites, so the content is not seen as original by Google. Substantive, unique content on the pages you are trying to rank is important. So you are either going to have to write good original content yourself or pay someone else to do it. If you buy articles always thoroughly proof read them, and use Copyscape to check to see if the articles are 100% original. Using your keywords in your articles at least a few times is worth the effort. Some people suggest this now has little effect on ranking as it is too easily manipulated, however, having your keyword on page a few times is a good idea. Make sure your articles have your keywords in their titles. Your site name should also have your keyword in it.

Targeted Domains

Top search engine rankings can be achieved without keywords in the domain name, however, for smaller Adsense sites it makes sense to aim for exact domain names where possible. What I mean by this is if you are trying to rank for the keyword XYCABC, you go a buy the domain XYCAMC.com. You will notice that the domain name of this site is an exact match for my main keyword phrase. Exact match domains mean that we can rank much more easily with less backlinks. This is true particularly for dot com domains. A dot com domain will always rank much more easily that other domains on Google.com, and this is where most of your traffic will come from. A dot net domain for a good keyword also has some value. Geotargted domains have value if targeting local niches, however, for Adsense sites you probably want to stay global.

You probably realise that most of the great dot com domains are already gone, and to a certain degree this truth. However, there are always new trends popping up making new terms profitable, and old domains expiring. For example in 2005 an iphone was unheard of, so iphone related domains would have been unclaimed, now it is a huge consumer product and there are plenty of profitable terms that involve iphones. If you had got on board and scored a domain when it was first announced you could find your self a goldmine of domains.

SEO and Quality Backlinks

I have already listed the important factors for ranking above. These are the key focus of any SEO campaign. However, the most important factor, that is also the hardest, is link building. Every link aiming at your site is like an endorsement of your site. If that link is anchored with keywords, “How to Make Money with Google Adsense”, for example, it is like an endorsement for your site being a good page about that topic. So building lots of backlinks that have your keywords in them is the main key to your success. Quality, quantity, and link diversity are all important. More links, links from authority sites, and links from plenty of different sources.

How to get links

Getting links needs to become your bread and butter if you are to become successful at creating profitable Adsense sites, but where should I get these links you ask? Here is a proven list of link building methods. Some require more effort than others.

Writing Articles for links: There are a few real authoritive domains that allow you to write articles on their sites for free, and they allow you to get a backlink or two back to your own site. These include: Ezine articles, Go articles, Hubpages, and Squidoo + others.

Posting Comments on blogs: Blogging is very popular. There are millions of blogs out there. All these blogs have comment forms that allow you to get a link back to your site. Some have the no-follow tag applied to them, which make the links worth very little, however some have this disabled to encourage more comments. These blogs are called Do-follow blogs. They are well worth your effort for writing a relevant comment on someone’s article. On standard Do-follow blogs you have to leave your name as the link anchor and this isn’t ideal, however if you search for Keywordluv blogs, these sites allow you to get a targeted do-follow link back to your site. Similarly Commentluv blogs also give you a link back to your most recent article, and assuming you use your keywords in your article headings this is worth the effort too. So finding a good list of Do-follow, Keywordluv, and Commentluv blogs to post meaningful comments on is a good way to build backlinks. Don’t bother writing small short generic comments like “Thanks for the post”. The authors of these blogs know you are just trying to get an easy backlink and they will delete your comment. Read the post and write a meaningful comment if you want a free backlink.

Submitting your site to directories: This is pretty old school now in 2010, and most site directories have very little value. There are a few good ones, but they mostly are very hard to get accepted into or cost. Still this is worth the effort, particularly if you can find niche targeted directories.

Social Bookmarking: There are plenty of sites out there which basically allow you to bookmark sites and articles you like. These then become public links on your profile. These links are of pretty low value but are worth the effort if you find ways to automate the process. Onlywire is a site which will help you with this, plus there is a huge range of software packages out there for this.

Forum signatures: There are forums all over the net. If there is a big one relating to the niche of your site, posting a few posts on the site and including your link in the footer will help you out. These links don’t have much value, but may bring you some direct traffic. As your signature will likely be displayed on your public profile page for the forum, you also get a link from that page. Some high profile marketers make a living out of selling forum lists that have public profiles for you to add your link to. I am not a huge believer in this method, as it takes a lot of time to manually add all the links, and so many other people are doing it the sites often block your efforts by making profiles private, or blocking new signups. However lots of people use this method to build their links.

Link exchanges: I don’t recommend participating in link exchanges until you actually have a well indexed site which has page rank, age, and a good amount of backlinks. If you do, the only sites you are likely attract are other new sites, and links from these sites have little value and come with a whole heap of draw backs I won’t go into. However, once you have all of the above, you should likely attract a few good link partners. Site wide links aren’t that great, but they are easy to add, and they do help as long as they are from a good site.

Guest posts / articles: This is a very good method at gaining high quality backlinks, but it does take a lot of effort. You need to find another site in your niche preferably a real authority site that is has good page rank and lots of backlinks. Send them an email and ask if they would like you to do a guest post. Write a quality article for them and include a backlink to your site, with your keyword. The article will need to be good and be original content, and not an article on have used anywhere else.

Ok, so that was a brief overview of the methods I use to make money with Google Adsense. I will be updating this site from time to time with more articles on the topic that will go into more depth in certain areas discussed above. Feel free to ask questions or leave a comment using the comment form. Cheers.

Tagged with: • • • •

Filed under: Google Adsense

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!