"AdSense is dead" is DEAD wrong.

September 15, 2006

I've been getting a lot of emails from my readers about a new report proclaiming the death of AdSense as a revenue maker. Since it's made such a stir I figured I should respond to it.

The short answer is that the report is bunk. Joel Comm, an AdSense guru, made a great response that refutes the report as well.

I'll quote part of his response, since I couldn't word it any better:

AdSense IS dead…

… if you focus on building garbage sites
… if you put no effort into creating your own original content
… if you expect to get rich quick

The author of the report says that he created 3,000 web sites, slapped AdSense on them and expected to make a huge amount of money.

He didn't say anything about doing any search engine optimization of those sites.
The speed in which the sites were created makes me think he was putting up spam sites.
He attributed his lack of revenue to people being able to bid on AdSense clicks separately from Google search clicks.

If you want search engine visitors, you need links. You can't just throw up thousands of sites and exepct to make money. And with trash sites, even if you get links, the engines are much smarter about kicking you out of their indexes now.

As for advertisers being able to bid separately on AdSense clicks, I guess the author of the report didn't read my post about my very high dollar clicks.

So yeah, AdSense is dead for those who were building trash sites and dumping them into the search engines. Those sites did really well for about two years, and many people made a lot of money from that fact. But that method just doesn't work anymore.

For those of us who are building quality sites with quality content, AdSense is alive and well.

Posted by Jonathan Leger | Filed Under AdSense, Blog | 22 Comments

Like what you see? Then subscribe to Marketing Insiders and reap big benefits!

By subscribing to my free Marketing Insiders email list, you will regularly receive special member-only insider information, discounts and freebies. You will also be notified when new articles are posted here at the blog.

It's absolutely free to subscribe, and you can leave the list at any time.

For subscribing today, I will give you a valuable free gift as well!

Stop emailing articles to your list!

September 13, 2006

If you're sending out articles to your email list, you need to stop right now, this instant, without delay! Yes, yes, I know everyone is telling you to email information to your list regularly, but let me show you why you need to change all that.

I used to do what everyone else does. I would research the latest happenings in my subject area, write up what I felt was a good informative article on the subject, and email it out to my list of opt-ins who like to get that kind of information from me.

But then I signed up to receive information from a search engine guru that I felt knew his stuff. The next day I received an email from him that didn't contain an article, but merely a short description of an article and a link to where I could read the whole thing on his web site.

So I clicked the link and landed on an article page with AdSense on it. That's when it hit me.

Why You Should Post Your Articles to Your Web Site Instead

You should never email a full article to your list. You should always send them a description of the article, or a short excerpt, along with a link to the web page where you have the full article. There are many benefits to doing this:

You get additional AdSense revenue from your list.
This one is obvious. If you send your list to your web site, and you have AdSense on the site, you can generate more revenue from the clicks.
You can link out to recommended products from the articles.
AdSense is really a tiny piece of the pie that you can earn by sending your readers to a web page. By having links to related products that you recommend inside the article itself, you are more likely to get your readers to click and buy.

Of course, you can also have a list of recommended products alongside every article as well.
You're building a content site that search engines can find and people can link to.
If you're posting all of your articles onto a web site, then the search engines can find those articles and send you traffic, and people can link to the article from their own web sites, from forums and in emails. This generates more AdSense revenue and product sales.
You can grow your email list.
If your articles are all on your site and you include an opt-in box on each page, then visitors who follow links or find your site through the search engines can join your email list and continue to earn you more money.
Your list has a place to go to find all of the articles you've posted in the past.
Sometimes I wish I hadn't deleted that article from that guru that I just didn't have time to read at the moment. I wish I would have saved it so I could look back at it.

Have you ever thought that? I have! And chances are so have many people on your email list. By having all of your articles posted to your web site, they have a place they can go back and find that information. New subscribers have the benefit of being able to go back and read the articles they missed as well.

And again, these extra visits to your archives generate more AdSense revenue and more product sales.
Short article description emails are less likely to trip SPAM filters.
Thanks to Jack Spirko's comment below this article, I've added this very powerful benefit. A long email article has a much greater chance of using words or phrases that trip email SPAM filters and cause your readers to never get your email in the first place. A short description with a link is far less likely to trip those filters. Fewer SPAM filters triggered, more readers, more clicks, etc. etc.

How well has this method worked for me?

As you may have figured out by now, this blog is exactly what I've been describing in this article. It's the place I send all of my readers to when I post new articles. I often link out to products I recommend from within the articles. I have a list of recommended products alongside the articles, and I have an opt-in box on every page.

How well have I been doing with this blog? Well it's only been up a month, but so far it's earned me over $200 in extra AdSense revenue, more than $2500 in affiliate product sales (that does not include sales of my own products, which have been at least as much), and has gotten me 70 new subscribers to my email list.

Keep in mind–it's only been a month. Word is just getting out about the blog, and already I've gotten 70 new subscribers and made thousands of extra dollars from the blog.

All this because I stopped emailing articles to my list.

P.S. When you're ready to start posting your articles to your site instead of emailing them to your list, I highly recommend using Semiologic Pro for building your site. It makes it easy to have a list of related products showing at all times, and makes it easy to have AdSense on every page. It makes my list building easy as well and optimizes the layout for the search engines. So when you get serious, get Semiologic Pro!

Posted by Jonathan Leger | Filed Under Internet Marketing, Blog | 14 Comments

Like what you see? Then subscribe to Marketing Insiders and reap big benefits!

It's absolutely free to subscribe, and you can leave the list at any time.

For subscribing today, I will give you a valuable free gift as well!

Three reasons why AdSense doesn't work well on forums.

September 10, 2006

If you had big dreams of making a mint with AdSense on your very popular forum, you were probably weeping after looking at the actual bottom line once you did so.

The fact is, AdSense doesn't work so well on forums. In fact, none of the AdSense Case Studies are about forums.

Why do forums do so badly? There are 3 main reasons.

Visitors in the Wrong Frame of Mind

If someone is doing research for a particular product or service, and they land on your article regarding that product or service, they are likely buy minded. They are actually looking to buy.

With forums, however, most people are interaction minded. They're not looking to buy something. Rather, they are looking to discuss something.

Those two frames of mind are very different. In the first case the visitor may click on an AdSense ad because they are shopping around and want to explore the options. In the second case the visitor isn't paying attention to anything on the page but what people are saying. They might follow a recommended product link posted by a user, but they are far less likely to click on an AdSense ad.

Repeat Visitors Make For Low CTR

Another reason why CTR on forums is low is because most of the visitors to a forum have been there dozens of times before. They've either already seen and visited the ads they were interested in, or they're so used to seeing them that they start to ignore them (read: "ad blindness").

Besides, you may show 500,000 page views on a forum for the month, but if the average repeat visitor views 10 pages a day reading threads, then your actually number of visitors is far lower. So your stats themselves may be deceiving.

Ad-Targeting is Tough on Forums

Finally, it's tough to target ads on forums, because discussions tend to wander around and around, touching on this and that as the main topic is discussed. Any human could tell you the basic topic of a discussion like that, but it's a lot harder for computers to figure out–even if it is Google's computers.

So you often get mis-targeted ads on forums, and that, too, brings down your click-through rate.

What Can Be Done?

Google offers a number of forum optimization techniques for AdSense on their adsense blog. They will help, but don't expect miracles.

Also, AdSense guru Joel Comm's AdSense Secrets ebook has an outstanding chapter on how to make AdSense work with forums and Internet communities. If you haven't read his ebook yet, I recommend you do so.

Here's another method you may want to try. Remember that your forum visitors are usually very interested in the subject matter–interested enough to go through the registration process for your forum and discuss it!

What you can do is leverage those visitors by adding a place to your site for articles and product reviews related to the forum subject. When you post a new article or review, let the forum members know about it: post a thread requesting feedback on the article, or better yet, email your member list requesting that they read and review the article.

This accomplishes two things:

1) It reminds people who haven't been to your forum in a while that it exists (see this related post about email list building). It's easy to register for a forum and forget about it. But a friendly request for an article review can reactivate some inactive members, which creates more content on your forum when they post and can generate more revenue from clicks.

2) It gets your members out of "interaction" mode by pulling them away from a discussion and into an article, which increases the likelihood that they will click on the related ads.

Summing it all Up

There's no reasons why forums can't be profitable with AdSense, though their click-through rates almost never achieve the double-digits. Most forum owners would be happy to have a low single-digit CTR. But following the techniques above can help you improve that bottom line and find new ways of leveraging your user-base.

Remember, too, that all of the forum content is created for you for free by your members, so it's really all free money anyway.