What would you ask an AdSense genius?
January 25, 2007
Okay, so Joel Comm is a much better looking guy than this dude, but he is certainly a "mad scientist" when it comes to AdSense! Joel has come up with some fantastic programs for skyrocketing his AdSense income, and he doesn't mind telling you that he cashes $25,000 checks from AdSense every month.
Since AdSense was the second biggest subject requested that I talk about in 2007, I thought it only fitting that I bring Joel in and let him answer all of your questions about the subject.
I'll be interviewing him Wednesday, January 31st, at 2 PM CST / 3 PM EST. Since my last chat was a bit chaotic when people had an "open mic" to ask whatever they wanted, I'm limiting this chat to just the questions I collect ahead of time. So get your questions in now if you want them answered.
What do you want to know about AdSense? Post your questions in the comments to this post, and I'll ask Joel as many of them as I can in one hour next Wednesday.
I'll announce the chat instructions to my list, so be sure to join if you want to be a part of the chat.
What marketing subjects concern you most for 2007?
January 16, 2007
I need your advice. I need to know what you think I should be researching and writing about in 2007. What are your goals? What traffic-building or sales-building subjects interest you the most?
Is it video? Articles? Traffic building methods? Product creation methods? AdSense? Search Engine optimization?
Post a comment with your response so that I can be sure and research, test and post information that you, my reader, are interested in.
Once all of the "votes" are tallied, I'll be putting together a chat-session for the most popular subjects. Everyone who wants to join in and ask questions or make comments about them will be welcome to do so. I've got the chat software installed and tested, so it will happen soon. Your thoughts count! Post them now.
Should you hire people to write your articles for you?
November 20, 2006
My ongoing article case study has established that writing articles is a great way to get traffic to your web site. If you're not writing articles, you need to be. Or do you?
That's the question I asked myself. Is it really necessary for me to write my own articles, or is it worth paying a ghost writer to write the articles for me?
Up until I asked this question, I had never hired anyone to write any of my content for me. I'd always used tools I've created to help me do that (such as my Instant Article Wizard). But I got to thinking: if I can pay somebody a few bucks to write some great articles for me, then I can focus on creating the sites that those articles will point to. That would save me a lot of time.
So I decided to give it a try and see how it went. I registered at ELance.com and posted a project. I wanted 5 articles written on 5 separate acne topics (teen acne, adult acne, severe acne, cystic acne and acne scars). I wanted each article to be between 650 and 850 words, and I wanted 100% rights to claim those articles as my own.
The Good News
Within 24 hours I had 3 bids on the project. One bid for $140, one for $85 and a third for $50. The first two didn't have any feedback or ratings at all, so I chose to go with the third one, who had a lot of good reviews and a very high satisfaction rating (4.9 out of 5). Besides, for $50, the price was dirt cheap! That's only $10 an article.
So I accepted their bid and paid the 20% up front via PayPal. Within 48 hours all 5 articles were written.
If it sounds like it was a wonderful experience so far, it was! Within 3 days I had a complete set of 5 articles I could use, put my name on (or a pseudonym for tracking purposes) and start distributing to build traffic to my web site.
The Bad News
The downside was clear when I actually read the articles. The articles were well researched and offered professional information on each of the keyword sets I created the project for, yes, but…
The English used to write the article had a lot of little problems.
Now, don't get me wrong, the articles weren't terrible. They were of decent quality, and as I said, the research was great so the information was good. But the articles were clearly written by somebody who did not speak and write English as a first language, and so there were little grammatical issues that I would have to go in and fix.
Having to go in and fix these grammatical errors takes time, and the whole purpose of hiring a ghost writer is to save time, so this extra step took away some of the value of hiring out for the job.
However, as the saying goes, you get what you pay for, and I hired the cheapest group to write the articles. At only $50, perhaps it was worth the $35 - $90 I saved from not hiring the other bidders. After all, in about an hour all five articles could be polished to make them perfect.
It Costs Money
Of course, the other problem is that hiring out costs money. If I wanted to create a full content site of 100 articles, with the bidders I hired I'm looking at $1,000 up front plus twenty hours of solid editing work to get the articles polished enough to post them to a web site.
So on the one hand I can see the benefit of hiring out: it still saves a lot of time since you don't have to do the research, and if you get a good bidder the articles are pretty good.
On the other hand I see the drawbacks: if you go cheap you will have to edit the articles into "real" English, and if you don't go cheap it can be pretty expensive to get them written.
So Is It Worth It?
The real question is the bottom line, isn't it? If I can make those five acne articles result in $1,000 in product sales over the course of a year, it was certainly worth the $50 and hour of my time to go in and edit the articles.
I'm not sure yet if it's worth it, but believe me that I will be distributing these articles and watching the results. When the results are in I will post them to the blog so you can see for yourself whether or not it paid off to hire other people to write my articles for me.
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. 
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