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How I make 15K a month at AdSense
- AndrewWarner 18y agoI posted it because I think some of his methods can be used by any site.
- JeremyChase 18y agoI totally agree. His article starts out feeling like a "get rich quick" scheme, but what he does is to create a reasonable quality site in a short time. All along he promotes it using low cost methods. The linking strategies he employs could be used by any website. I think one could use these strategies to start any number of websites. Edit: last sentence didn't make sense so I fixed it.
- jasonkester 18y agoNot really. The linking strategies he talks about will likely get your site removed from Google's index. That's part of the cost of doing business for guys like this, and it's why he maintains hundreds of Made For AdSense sites. He knows that he'll lose a certain percentage of them every month. This sort of thing would be suicide for a site you actually care about. As a startup, having your website de-listed by Google is pretty much guaranteed to kill you.
- tocomment 18y agoThe free blog one sounds like a good idea. Would that get you google-banned?
- jasonkester 18y agoI run one of those free blog hosting sites the author mentioned, and have to spend a few minutes each morning deleting a dozen new blogs from people that took that guy's advice. Please don't add to my workload. But yeah, linking from bad neighborhoods is pretty much the best way to get removed from Google's index. Blog hosts that allow spam are considered bad neighborhoods.
- llimllib 18y agoDoes it matter? If it wouldn't today, it might tomorrow. If you care about one site, you can't take that risk. He can because he has hundreds of sites to risk.
- run4yourlives 18y agoHe's just speeding up the ranking process with the free blogs though. His sites would get the traffic eventually because they are so tailored to the topics at hand. If I were to do this I'd measure the risk/reward of trying to speed up the growth rates, but everything he did previously is probably good enough.
- vulpes 18y agoReplace free blogs with tech buzz and publicity from established blogs and its exactly the same thing in eyes of google. This would never get you banned.
- critic 18y ago> it's why he maintains hundreds of Made For AdSense sites But doesn't Google know who the owner of each AdSense site is? Eventually, they have to send him a check, after all. And if someone owns a lot of these AdSense sites, doesn't this raise any flags?
- tptacek 18y agoThis sounds suspiciously like A Real Job.
- AndrewWarner 18y agoIt really is. That's why I don't understand why he wouldn't channel that creativity towards a business that has more meaning. Still, he he won't, you and I can by learning from him. Seems like a smart guy.
- cookiecaper 18y agoWhy would he? This is essentially passive income -- a more traditional business requires more traditional hours and workload. If you have an automatic moneymaker, you don't trade that in for something you have to tend to.
- fredBuddemeyer 18y agoyes but its putting considerable time and intellect into a very vulnerable asset. google inevitably changes the way it does things and then its time to start over. and with each keyword he is competing with passionate and dedicated people (the winning side of any war is filled with these) that view their efforts as something more than a hack or arbitrage.
- run4yourlives 18y agoWhile that's a good point, Google would basically have to remove adsense to have any measurable effects on this business. These aren't worthless placeholders, they're valuable collections of decent information. He is speeding the ranking process a bit, but that would come eventually.
- weaksauce 18y agoIt doesn't seem like he is spending that much time to accomplish this kind of income. He IS handling the interesting parts(data mining the google data.) and outsourcing the boring/time consuming bits of writing the actual content.
- johns 18y agoThe first part is interesting. The second part is lame (link sharing/spamming, albeit manual spamming, but still spamming) but necessary to pull it off.
- ObieJazz 18y agoSeems to me the second part is only lame because he's doing it strictly to make money. If he were doing it for a more creative project it would just be self-promotion.
- chmike 18y agoThis is basically what some paper journal or even book editors do. It is just a bit unexpected and new on Internet. As long as everybody in the ring wins, I've the impression that it is Ok. Thought if the rational is just to give what people are looking for and want, with just enough quality and pertinence to remain undetected from google's garbage detectors, where could this lead us ?
- sadiq 18y agoSomething I wondered... where do these adsense keyword lists actually get their data? Surely it's something google keep pretty close to their chests?
- gojomo 18y agoGoogle provides a lot of this data to advertisers -- so they bid for more word combinations. Even though Made-For-AdSense microsites are polluting the infosphere, in the short term they probably even make Google money. Overstuffing natural results with repetitive, poorly-written information? Great, you're more likely to click a paid ad instead! Making it so all the top 10 natural results are AdSense-holding pages? Great, no matter where you go, you might click a Google ad!
- run4yourlives 18y agoMaking it so all the top 10 natural results are AdSense-holding pages? Actually, that's probably the one area Google won't go for, but it results in a smaller pool of people to make money off of, as consumers can't get the right answers to their questions. The key needs to be high-quality content delivery. Without that, you leave yourself vulnerable to being banned.
- gojomo 18y agoYet: there's an inherent tension. Unless there's a credible threat people will go to another engine for natural results, for Google to degrade their own natural results slightly can improve Google's quarterly revenues! Let's say Google is A/B testing a ranking tweak. Option A results in more searches (because people don't find exactly what they're looking for on the first try), and more clicks on ads (because they look relatively better). Option B results in one click on a natural result and nothing further. Are we sure they'll always choose option B? Maybe Google can add a new advanced operator: [-src:googlesyndication.com]. That is, don't return results that 'source' (as in <SCRIPT SRC="">) Google ad units. I won't hold my breath.
- sidsavara 18y ago
- jasonlbaptiste 18y agoYou can automate a lot of this once you get the hang of it down. The spammy part kind of sucks. I would say, if you're going to do this, at least make sure there's useful content. There's nothing wrong with that. People search google for information, they click an ad or find you organically. If you've given them good information, then it's not spam, but actually something useful. Sadly, this ideology isn't the adopted norm.
- russell 18y agoI was intrigued by the $8 for a 500 word article. Some commenters were complaining that it was too expensive, but when I compare that with my consulting rate for my writing, it's a real bargain. I wouldn't farm out a technical article, but it makes sense for consumer oriented ones. I would spend more than that on coffee while I wrote. EDIT: does anyone know what the going rate for a well written 500 word consumer article from a US/CA/UK based writer would be? Back in the days when I was using PR firms, it was quite expensive.
- coglethorpe 18y agoOh, they go lower than that, but you're not getting the kind of "quality" you might normally think of. It is more geared toward SEO and often in broken English. Using the acai berry theme, here's what you might get: Acai Berry Supplement When looking for an acai berry supplement for weight loss it is very important that you choose a good acai berry supplement. Acai berry supplements vary in quality so one might not supplement your diet with acai berry the way you expect. Look for a top-quality acai berry supplement that has acai berry taken from the Brazil acai berry trees fresh.
- Ardit20 18y agoYes, but looking at the way some people behave in forums it makes you think people are really stupid :) So probably someone reading that article, one of them stupid people, which seems to be many, will think wow that article was so amazing it really helped me out lol
- wmeredith 18y agoYeah, but that crap gets penalized by Google and it's no good at generating links organically because it is, in fact, crap. Laying down good money for quality content that will naturally attract long-tail links and traffic over time will pay off in the long run.
- mikeyur 18y agoI have a couple friends who are freelancers (as well as myself) that do consumer-based articles. For a good 500 word article you're looking at $25-40, depending on the writer and topic. With a tech/gadget article you may only need to pay $10 for 500 words, but if you get into health/sports/fashion/whatever other topic, the prices go up a bit.
- modoc 18y agoThe key "trick" that he's using is to have unique, relevant, helpful content. That's the whole secret, imho, to good SEO ranking (obviously using the right tags, keywords, etc... helps). He's just doing it backwards from what you and I would do, i.e. he's finding ad money, and building a site based on that, versus building a site, and then working on building traffic (ad based or not, you want traffic).
- wmeredith 18y agoHe's working smarter not harder. Finding a market and then delivering what they want, which is old news in business. He's just being tech savvy about doing it online. Most entrepreneurs build something they want. He's building a products that he has empirical proof someone else wants.
- run4yourlives 18y agoI wonder if that alone is worthy of a home based business? He's done all his real work in qualifying markets to attack. If you did this then sold it to the zillions of people who want to make money with blogs, you might be on to something, and save yourself the google rath.
- axod 18y agoHere's another you've probably never heard of. http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=345974 http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=345974 (Guy owns some websites you've likely never heard of, not getting masses of traffic, but he knows how to do PPC and make money). The thread is from 2005, and at that point he was spending $300k a month on adwords, and making a ton more from affiliate networks including adsense. (Attached bank statement screenshots) I did the same for a while (Ad arbitrage), and got up to about $2k or so profit/month, but as odd as it sounds, it didn't really seem fulfilling. Probably the lack of contact with real users etc. There's money in this 'advertising' thing though ;)
- curej 18y agoWhat's a good place to start learning about this, if you wanted to try it out? The site you linked to? I have a suspicion I would suck at this or would not be willing to stick it through long enough to be successful - sounds like a lot of busywork - but I'm definitely curious to know more.
- Shamiq 18y agohm...if it's "busywork" you'd think it would be computationally tractable. That, would be interesting.
- utnick 18y agosounds pretty shady... in the seo industry its impossible to know whats real and whats not it wouldn't surprise me if this article is just a clever advertisement for this guy's article writing website
- callmeed 18y agoI think there's some really good lessons about SEO that startup founders can take away from this. Namely: - Relevant, well-written, and keyword-laden content on your site is important - Getting links to your site is important - Getting links with good anchor text is even more important - Having keywords in your site's browser titles is important
- igorgue 18y agoI like the "donate to an opensource project" thing :)
- mcxx 18y agoyes goglebots can read keywords with OCR in your site logo images Can somebody confirm that? I have never heard about this before, seems cool.
- cedsav 18y agoI was surprised too. I don't see why Google would spent cpu time on this, and I can't think of a way one would be able to validate that claim.
- gojomo 18y agowhy Google would spent cpu time on this CPU time is cheap, and it could be useful ranking information. Compared to an H1 tag, a graphical header is harder to create, so it shows a certain level of investment. If the words in the graphic aren't repeated elsewhere in the page, then the page author may be naive in the ways of SEO. But that could be good, because the savvy SEO people are all trying to pull one over on the GoogleBot.
- cedsav 18y agoCPU time may be cheap, but Google has billions of page and images to index. If they were able to extract text from images, they'd probably use it for their image search. I'm also not convinced that the header image is a good indicator of relevancy.
- gojomo 18y agoTens or hundreds of billions of pages -- but many, many fewer images. Images repeat across a site, and change much less often than text. Header and navigational images are easy to pick out and also relatively easy to OCR. (These images are not trying to be inscrutable, like CAPTCHAs.) Further: Google has an intense interest in OCR, adopting the open-source 'Tesseract' project, spending millions on scanning first catalogs then books and journals, and most recently announcing they are OCRing bitmaps in PDFs: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/picture-of-thousand-words.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/picture-of-thousand-w... Finally: any reasoning based on Google being miserly with cycles is going to be wrong. (They invest a lot in efficiency, yes, but that's so that they can spend cycles freely to collect data.) It's possible they ran an experiment and found text in embedded/header images was no better than inline text. (I doubt they would find such a thing, because generally indicators of sustained effort -- careful design, site longevity, good writing -- are also indicators of site quality.) But there's zero chance the CPU cost or scale deterred Google from testing the idea.
- weegee 18y agoSometimes I do a search on google, and roughly half the results are meaningless gobbledegook. Clearly these results are this kind of project. It makes me wonder what percentage of websites are just revenue-earning sites with absolutely no useful real-world content. Like a newspaper or magazine with 50% of its pages taken up by advertising.
- cedsav 18y agoI can't really blame anyone for making money on what is essentially arbitrage, but the bottom line is that they add no value to the system and they make it harder for legitimate sites to get advertising revenues (by preempting traffic and ad $$).
- hardik 18y agoIn theory, arbitrageurs will arbitrage away the gap until the margin revenue outweighs the cost. So, in a sense arbitrageurs are good for the markets as they bring them closer to "perfect markets". As far as adding value bit is concerned, if the articles provided are worthwhile to users, then some value is created. (Although I feel very strongly against the idea of creating spammy blogs that he advocates.)
- cschneid 18y agoMeh, I don't even care about the spammy blogs. They aren't there for human consumption, and will never get enough links to be visible to humans. The articles on the real sites are custom written, and he pays a small premium to decent content. (8-12 per it looks like), and in theory are researched a little bit. He's creating value, then marketing it. A tiny bit spammy w/ the blogs, but it doesn't really hurt anybody (ie. humans won't see the spammy blogs).
- imp 18y agoJust guessing, but this might be his Acai Berry website: http://www.acaiberryproducts.org/ http://www.acaiberryproducts.org/ #4 result for "acai berry", lots of small articles, and tons of AdSense.
- 3pt14159 18y agoIf that is his site, then I don't really have a big problem with it. The information was semi-alright and it looked legit enough (although there were a-LOT of google ads).
- mattm 18y agoGoogle only allows 3 ad's per page and that is what is used. The page length is very short so it could be that a higher percentage of the screen is ads than other sites. Still, it comes nowhere close to magazines which are probably more than 50% ads.
- emilis_info 18y agoYou know what's funny? I don't see a single Google ad on this site. NoScript extension for FireFox is wonderful. I got so used to it, I forget how many ads I used to see on websites. Sorry for offtopic :-)
- imp 18y agoIs this a veiled advertisement for adsenseheaven.com? His whole strategy is based off of that data and you have to pay at least $10 for the list of keywords.
- wmeredith 18y agoHe's probably an affiliate, but he's not blowing smoke. This method works. I suspect he's not afraid to tell people about it, because it's a lot of work.
- wmeredith 18y agoThis is not "black hat." He's web developer. That's how he makes $15k a month with adsense. As a web developer outsourcing content creation and working his ass off on low cost SEM. You can do it, too!
- fatbat 18y agoDoes anybody else see an opportunity from the interest of the other posters? On a seperate note though, how does the top keyword provider mine the google trends data without Google flagging their IPs, etc.?