Follow me to $100 a day in Adsense in 3 months from 1 blog

[Oscar D]

Thank you. I am busy working on my own wordpress site, but it is not as easy as I thought it should be. I just want to get it up and running.

[Steve Crooks]

I think I know where you are at, as good as wordpress is it can also be very daunting. When you have a picture in your head of what you want but wondering how to get the right theme and making it look good.

I would suggest just get a theme that is close to what you want, do the basic on page SEO stuff as outlined in my previous post and start posting to it. You can always change the look and feel at a later stage. You will find as you start doing something the rest just slowly begins to click into place.

I am actually in the middle of creating my new guide in the "cash cow guide" series which will cover all aspects of modifying, creating and optimising wordpress themes.

Originally Posted by Oscar D

Thank you. I am busy working on my own wordpress site, but it is not as easy as I thought it should be. I just want to get it up and running.

[John34]

By any chance u r using "firepow" in this challenge?

[Steve Crooks]

No, I will be doing this the hard way initially. At a later stage I may transfer it into firepow but not until this challenge is done.

Originally Posted by John34

By any chance u r using "firepow" in this challenge?

[kah22]

Steve, would I be correct in assuming that one of your site promotion tactics will be Article Directories? The word out there is that they are good to use, even if only for links.

Why am I asking? Well at the moment I'm working on a new blog myself and decided to use Article Directories as a means of promotion but there seem to be thousands of them out there. I've spent the past three hours, registering with about five of them, getting a feel for each of them and tweaking my article ever so slightly for each one so it wasn't a 100 per cent copy of the original

So the question is: how many article banks should you submit to, and equally as important which ones?

I'm sure other followers of this thread will share thier experiences

Kevin

[Steve Crooks]

Hi Kevin, personally I just use ezinearticles, go articles and Isnare. I have never really seen much in the way of traffic or link love from other directories. Everyone has different experiences though so I am sure there are probably many other directories worth bothering with but I have yet to find them.

Originally Posted by kah22

Steve, would I be correct in assuming that one of your site promotion tactics will be Article Directories? The word out there is that they are good to use, even if only for links.

Why am I asking? Well at the moment I'm working on a new blog myself and decided to use Article Directories as a means of promotion but there seem to be thousands of them out there. I've spent the past three hours, registering with about five of them, getting a feel for each of them and tweaking my article ever so slightly for each one so it wasn't a 100 per cent copy of the original

So the question is: how many article banks should you submit to, and equally as important which ones?

I'm sure other followers of this thread will share thier experiences

Kevin

[Julia Andersson]

Originally Posted by kah22

So the question is: how many article banks should you submit to, and equally as important which ones?

Hi Kevin. My favourites are http://www.ezinearticles.com http://www.ideamarketers.com and http://www.goarticles.com

The good thing with ideamarketers is that they don't review articles prior to publication (though they will quickly remove articles that breach their terms). But as far as link love goes, ezinearticles is the best

[Steve Crooks]

Just checked the awstats for the blog and have had 4 visits today which is amazing considering I only posted the first articles yesterday. I have posted a screenshot on the 100 bucks challenge blog. One keyword phrase was used 3 of those times and according to googles keyword tool it gets over 500 searches a month in exact mode and has a CPC of $0.82.

This is better than I was expecting so early in the challenge. I am sure there will be some rocky roads ahead but I love it when it hits the ground running.

[Mike Long]

Originally Posted by kah22

Steve, would I be correct in assuming that one of your site promotion tactics will be Article Directories? The word out there is that they are good to use, even if only for links.

For what it's worth, and without trying to intrude on Steve's thread or promote myself, I'll be giving Unique Article Wizard a run-through on my blog over the next 90 days.

UAW approaches things a bit differently, and isn't for those who wish to take shortcuts, as you need three different versions of the same article for it to work effectively.

I have a friend who swears by it, but I'd like to see for myself.

[InternetMoneyStream]

Sounds like decent progress for early in. I am sure that you will keep the momentum going... Good Luck!

[mfurlong]

Steve,

Thanks for your response to my question.

Got another one! When you say the rest of the articles will be used for promotion, do you mean posting on other blogs, forums, ezines, etc.?

This blow-by-blow is extremely useful to us newbie wannabes!

>>> Mike

[Steve Crooks]

Yes to a large extent.. I will be going over this in detail probably tomorrow.

Originally Posted by mfurlong

Steve,

Thanks for your response to my question.

Got another one! When you say the rest of the articles will be used for promotion, do you mean posting on other blogs, forums, ezines, etc.?

This blow-by-blow is extremely useful to us newbie wannabes!

>>> Mike

[Julia Andersson]

Hi Steve

Another question for you.

When building backlinks do you point to the main domain or individual posts via their permalinks?

[Steve Crooks]

Backlinks to every important URL and that includes posts and front page. I will try and get more links to posts which are targeting more competitive phrases as well.

Originally Posted by Julia Andersson

Hi Steve

Another question for you.

When building backlinks do you point to the main domain or individual posts via their permalinks?

[Oscar D]

Ok, my wordpress blog is live, but it still needs some work. I am going to change it a little but I do understand that adding content is vital.

I just wanna add that the blog is not being made with the intention to make money with Adsense as their is basically no ads on this niche. Instead I will try to make money selling and promoting Clickbank info products regarding the niche.

Thanks

[Steve Crooks]

Good luck Oscar, I hope it's a winner!

Originally Posted by Oscar D

Ok, my wordpress blog is live, but it still needs some work. I am going to change it a little but I do understand that adding content is vital.

I just wanna add that the blog is not being made with the intention to make money with Adsense as their is basically no ads on this niche. Instead I will try to make money selling and promoting Clickbank info products regarding the niche.

Thanks

[Oscar D]

I recently noticed that included a link in one of your posts to a Wordpress plug in for Analytics. I cannot find that post, please can you repost that link.

Thanks

[Steve Crooks]

Here ya go..
WordPress › Google Analytics for WordPress WordPress Plugins

Originally Posted by Oscar D

I recently noticed that included a link in one of your posts to a Wordpress plug in for Analytics. I cannot find that post, please can you repost that link.

Thanks

[Oscar D]

Perfect, thanks

[Steve Crooks]

I have just updated my 100 Bucks Challenge blog with an important post about getting quality backlinks. It involves finding the best link partners in google's eyes which has the benefits of increasing traffic to your blog and improving your ranking in google as well.

[misry]

wow ...

i read all 5 pages of this thread & it is very interesting , i use the same

way that you use on choosing akeyword that have good search numbers & high price then adomain with the same keyword & agood content
i learned this from matthew the owner of video cash mini sites .

i will follow you till the 100$ ....

i want to ask you aQ. ::::

how can i delete the date of the post in my blog ...?

thanks ...

[marktheonlinesurfer]

Great post Steve! Good luck with your project. Thansk for sharing!

Just two quick questions which would be very helpful if you answer:

1. How can you tell what the CPC of a keyword/phrase it? You said for European Cruises it is $6.51.?

2. What techniques do you use to ensure your website for a keyword/phrase appears on number in google if it has a competition of less than 500,000?

Originally Posted by Steve Crooks

Finding a good adsense niche

The criteria for a good adsense niche is:

1. Has high CPC associated with it.
2. Has low competition.
3. Has plenty of advertisers in adwords.
4. Has plenty of searches in google.

I can use various software tools that I own to help with this part but as I want to demonstrate this to the masses I will use the excellent free google keyword tool to help.

There has been some speculation as to the accuracy of google's tool in respect to number of searches but for me, I generally find it accurate having tested it with some adwords campaigns. It is a great tool for finding number of searches and cost associated with each keyword.

Before we get to this stage I need to decide on the topic of my blog first with half an eye on what are traditionally good adsense paying niches. Broadly speaking, we can say the following topics are traditionally associated with high CPC.

1. Legal
2. Financial
3. Web Hosting
4. Medical
5. Travel and tourism

As a believer in trying as far as we can to create a site about something we might be remotely interested in, I will pick travel and tourism as my starting point.

It is now time to dig into the travel & tourism topic to find a niche that satisfies my other criteria and that I can be interested in creating content for.

I then go to kwbrowse.com and do a number of searches starting with travel and then tourism. On the right pane of kwbrowse after each search is a list of related topics to your main one. I click on some of the topics that kwbrowse shows up and copy paste the results into notepad. At the end I have a long list of travel and tourism related keywords.

Time to open up google keyword tool.. I then paste this list of keywords into the keyword tool and click on "use synonyms". When the results are returned, I sort by "Estimated Avg. CPC" from high to low. I then look down the list looking for four things.

1. High CPC
2. High Searches per month
3. Consistent searches through the year
4. Could I create content for that niche?

I also make sure that my "match type" is set to "exact". This should give an accurate result for each particular phrase.

In my case, I dug down into the cruise vacation niche and was presented with a few possible candidates which fit my criteria laid out. I then made another list with my possible niches on.

The next step is to find out the level of competition for each niche. I do this by typing into google each niche keyword phrase in inverted commas. I then made a note on my list of the number of search results returned. I am looking for anything that has competition of less than 500,000 because I reckon I can nail a page 1 position on google with that level.

While I do this I will also be looking at the quality of sites that fill the top 10 positions on google just to see what I could potentially be up against.

Okay, I have made my decision..

I have decide to go for "European Cruises" for the following reasons..

1. It has a CPC of $6.51 associated with it.
2. It has approximately 6600 searches per month.
3. The search volume is reasonably consistent through the year.
4. The competition is 181,000 in google.
5. I can create content for this niche.

My next post will be how I chose a domain name for it and a WP theme. Until then...

p.s. You don't have to copy the niche I chose, there are literally thousands of them if you do the same research and it only takes about half an hour.

[stiggs]

Originally Posted by Steve Crooks

No, I will be doing this the hard way initially. At a later stage I may transfer it into firepow but not until this challenge is done.

Thankyou for that, I checked out the firepow site and simply can not afford to pay for more software etc at the minute. I'll have to do things the hard way too allthough its even harder as I'm new to IM and not quite sure what the "hard way" is yet!

[Steve Crooks]

I use googles free keyword tool and the answer to number 2 is being discussed on my 100 bucks challenge blog.

Originally Posted by marktheonlinesurfer

Great post Steve! Good luck with your project. Thansk for sharing!

Just two quick questions which would be very helpful if you answer:

1. How can you tell what the CPC of a keyword/phrase it? You said for European Cruises it is $6.51.?

2. What techniques do you use to ensure your website for a keyword/phrase appears on number in google if it has a competition of less than 500,000?

[meadow.c]

Hi Steve, Just quick question, you mentioned that you got the from dynadot, but I am just wondering about your blog hosting?

[Steve Crooks]

I have hosting on several different servers inclusing SLHost, Hostmonster and dynadot is just one of the places I buy domains.

Originally Posted by meadow.c

Hi Steve, Just quick question, you mentioned that you got the from dynadot, but I am just wondering about your blog hosting?

[pixelcrafter]

Dear Steve,

I am a newbie around here.
I have difficulties to find a niche which suits all your suggestion.
Please guide to answer these basic questions

how did you get the keyword?
i mean where did you get the inspiration which bring you that keyword?

Thanks a lot Steve.

-Pixel-

[BGold]

Sounds fascinating. Does this take over yoour entire day? Or are you doing this on the side?

[Hyaku_Man]

Thanks for this thread, Steve. The part I find most interesting is how you first do the niche research and then later do the specific keyword research. Until now I`ve been doing these at the same time and choosing a niche based on how useful the long tail keywords look. I`m looking forward to trying things exactly as you do them.

[Yogini]

Steve,

Thanks for an interesting thread. What criterion do you use for the competition for the articles you'll be writing and the content on site. I know you said that the niche itself has 181k competition in google but will you be doing longtail for the articles to ezinearticles and the posts with less competitors?

Debbie

[man_easybizx]

Thanks steve, i will follow this thread

[creativemark77]

Thanks for the great informationj.

[Steve Crooks]

If you go back to one of my earlier posts on page 1 of this thread I mention several subjects that traditionally have good CPC associated with them. You can use these for starting your niche research. I do also say that if you have a burning passion for something it is easier to build a blog on that hopefully it will fir the 3 criteria.

Originally Posted by pixelcrafter

Dear Steve,

I am a newbie around here.
I have difficulties to find a niche which suits all your suggestion.
Please guide to answer these basic questions

how did you get the keyword?
i mean where did you get the inspiration which bring you that keyword?

Thanks a lot Steve.

-Pixel-

[Steve Crooks]

I have many different projects on the go at any time. However this particular challenge is starting to consume a lot of my time but it is good fun.

Originally Posted by BGold

Sounds fascinating. Does this take over yoour entire day? Or are you doing this on the side?

[Steve Crooks]

I will look at competition for the main keyword used in the title but my main goal for sending articles to directories is the SEO benefits. Choosing a popular title that would hopefully get the article syndicated on lots of other blogs will also increase the backlinks.

Originally Posted by Yogini

Steve,

Thanks for an interesting thread. What criterion do you use for the competition for the articles you'll be writing and the content on site. I know you said that the niche itself has 181k competition in google but will you be doing longtail for the articles to ezinearticles and the posts with less competitors?

Debbie

[he_august]

Sound insteresting... Maybe i'll try to follow your instruction and try my luck with my website... Hopefully can earn $100 as you said WIsh me luck...

[Steve Crooks]

You make good luck when you take action so I wish you and everyone, good action!

Originally Posted by he_august

Sound insteresting... Maybe i'll try to follow your instruction and try my luck with my website... Hopefully can earn $100 as you said WIsh me luck...

[DeanJames]

Steve,

This thread is on fire! Good luck with achieving $100 a day! I'd just like to chime in on the article submission front:

Ezine Articles is the best one to submit to bar none.

Other ones to look at : goarticles.com, buzzle.com ( you can only submit 2 at a time and make sure you follow their TOS or they will delete your article in pending state ), amazines.com, articlecity.com and isnare.com as already pointed out. There are more but that's more than enough to begin with.

Hosting: So many options but Hostgator is a great one to choose to begin with. They are a reliable hosting service and you can get the first month for 1 cent last time I checked ( just do a search for a coupon code online ).

- Dean

[Easy Cash]

To put that much effort into Adsense is madness.

Google has the power to pull the plug at anytime.

[Steve Crooks]

Yes they could, but then you could say something similar for every online business model. I have had affiliate programs that I have devoted a lot of time and money promoting only to not get paid by the product owner.

Maybe you haven't read the whole of this thread and you probably haven't realised that the strategy I am promoting here goes hand in hand exactly with what google and google's users want. That is why this strategy works, pure and simple.

Why choose adsense? This model can, with a few tweaks, be used for anything from affiliate selling to selling your own product so it isn't exclusive to adsense. However, adsense can make you very rich when done correctly. The beauty of adsense is that you don't need someone to come to your website with credit card in hand, they just have to have an interest in what you are writing, that is why it is still a great business model.

No offence intended, but saying "why put in so much effort because google could pull the plug" is so negative and it's the sort of attitude which keeps people intrenched in procrastination. If for some crazy reason they did "pull the plug" and I lost my adsense account, so what? I would adapt the site to selling something else. The point is, I would have a site with tons of backlinks, ranked in all the search engines and probably be able to sell for a good sum of money.

This challenge is madness, I agree. But if this madness can prove what CAN be achieved when action is actually taken, then surely that is better than letting the madness of procrastination and negativity take over.

Originally Posted by Easy Cash

To put that much effort into Adsense is madness.

Google has the power to pull the plug at anytime.

[debtfreehispanic]

Steve, great thread. I am following along. I'm sure we are all curious as to the outcome of your challenge. Keep up the good work and the good info coming.

[ManAbout]

Originally Posted by Easy Cash

To put that much effort into Adsense is madness.

Google has the power to pull the plug at anytime.

What a ridiculous comment. First of all, why would Google "pull the plug"? Everything that he is doing here is above board, white hat stuff. No one could question it. Based on the method he has outlined, his site would withstand any scrutiny.

Second, anybody could pull the plug anytime. You could be working at a job 8 hours a day, five days a week for five years, and one day your boss could get up and fire you. What are you gonna do? Sit there and do nothing for five years cos one day your boss "might" fire you?

Anyway, if you are so smart, do tell us what alternatives you have.

[Glowing Face Man]

Hey everyone,

I never knew about Warrior Forums until I was linked to this thread by a blogger friend.

I love this place And I love this project you're doing, Steve! I've already learned a lot.

I've been running my blog for about a year, but only recently started getting serious about it. It's currently making around 20 cents a day and I want to ramp that WAY up. Though, I'm trying to do it without compromising on the content-- I don't feel like writing about any of the "big targets" you mentioned (legal, medical, finance, etc.) except maybe some occasional travel articles relevant to my own travels.

Good luck, I'll be keeping an eye on this project and hopefully learning a lot from it

[DeanJames]

@Glowing Face Man - Travel is a good subject to pick. On your ad blocks I would recommend you remove the borders and get rid of the green url ( when used in conjunction with the blue ad headline ).

- Dean

[Mrs S]

Originally Posted by bgmacaw

In WordPress this is a global setting in the Options|Discussion section of the Admin Panel and you can set it in each individual post. Unless you're doing a lot of social activity (blog commenting, Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, etc.), which you shouldn't do for an Adsense site anyway, virtually all the trackbacks will be from spam sites.

Are you suggesting that we should do social marketing for adsense sites as the visitors are less likely to click on the ads? I usually blog comment for traffic and backlinks and I wouldn't put them in the ad blind category with Digg and SU users. Or is there another reason?

[Steve Crooks]

You have got it right.. I always say, if you have a passion about something you are blogging about then you will probably have a great blog because the content will be good. A good blog will always give you options for monetizing..

Originally Posted by Glowing Face Man

Hey everyone,

I never knew about Warrior Forums until I was linked to this thread by a blogger friend.

I love this place And I love this project you're doing, Steve! I've already learned a lot.

I've been running my blog for about a year, but only recently started getting serious about it. It's currently making around 20 cents a day and I want to ramp that WAY up. Though, I'm trying to do it without compromising on the content-- I don't feel like writing about any of the "big targets" you mentioned (legal, medical, finance, etc.) except maybe some occasional travel articles relevant to my own travels.

Good luck, I'll be keeping an eye on this project and hopefully learning a lot from it

[Nick.A]

Hi Steve,

Wow, what a great idea. Very inspiring!

I will be following along with great interest.

Thanks.

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by Mrs S

Are you suggesting that we should do social marketing for adsense sites as the visitors are less likely to click on the ads? I usually blog comment for traffic and backlinks and I wouldn't put them in the ad blind category with Digg and SU users. Or is there another reason?

You don't want to do anything that would bring in a lot on social referral traffic in order to avoid non-converting clicks and smart pricing. This is what you'll get if you do things like heavy Digg/SU/Twitter promotion such as you would want to do for a primarily social or schmooze marketing blog.

Some blog commenting to get followed links is fine but you want to avoid heavy comment socializing. You'll also want to do social bookmarking at less popular sites where links are followed. But, at the end of the day, you want 90% or more of your traffic to come from Google/Yahoo/MSN from searches on your buying keyword terms.

You can use plugins like "who sees ads" or ad delivery systems like OpenX to control the display of Adsense. This will allow you to only show the ads to search engine visitors and allow you to pursue social traffic if you want. These can be a little tricky to setup correctly for the novice though.

[Steve Crooks]

That's good advice, although for me only about 5% of traffic comes directly from the social network sources but the SEO benefits are very evident. For that reason you should certainly pursue getting backlinks from social media sites like stumble and squidoo but it might be worth taking a look at these plugins mentioned. I haven't really seen any problems with smart pricing or at least I haven't seen evidence of it but maybe I am just not aware of it. Time to do some testing for myself I guess.

Originally Posted by bgmacaw

You don't want to do anything that would bring in a lot on social referral traffic in order to avoid non-converting clicks and smart pricing. This is what you'll get if you do things like heavy Digg/SU/Twitter promotion such as you would want to do for a primarily social or schmooze marketing blog.

Some blog commenting to get followed links is fine but you want to avoid heavy comment socializing. You'll also want to do social bookmarking at less popular sites where links are followed. But, at the end of the day, you want 90% or more of your traffic to come from Google/Yahoo/MSN from searches on your buying keyword terms.

You can use plugins like "who sees ads" or ad delivery systems like OpenX to control the display of Adsense. This will allow you to only show the ads to search engine visitors and allow you to pursue social traffic if you want. These can be a little tricky to setup correctly for the novice though.

[bgmacaw]

Smart pricing is one of those things that you won't always notice unless you've found a good high paying niche.

For example, let's say you found a good legal niche with a few 100 unique search visitors a day where you were getting $7-15 a click with around 5 clicks a day. Now you put Adsense on your social personal blog where you get a lot of 'helpful', non-converting, traffic. Your Adsense there gets 1 or 2 cents a click. Suddenly, you notice that your once profitable legal blog has also gone from $7+ a click to 25 cents a click. Ouch! That's because Google will smart price your whole account, not just the site with lousy traffic.

Now, if you flip that around and you have a personal blog that gets cheap clicks already you may think your legal blog is doing great with 25 to 50 cent clicks but, in reality, you're leaving a lot of money in Google's pocket.