Why You Suck At Adsense

Here is the truth: There are very few internet marketers making over $5.00 per day in Adsense. Yes, you heard me correctly. Everyone I talk to seems to struggle to make money with Adsense.

#1 - Your Content Sucks - Seriously if you have duplicate content on your website, don't even bother trying to create an Adsense empire. I'm not saying that you can't make money using duplicate content, but use it on other people's websites. If you are autoblogging with Adsense without reviewing the articles, you are time time bomb ticking; you will get your Adsense account banned.

I had an autoblog about hosting which had an Alexa rank under 50,000. It posted every 5 minutes. Eventually it posted an off-topic article about Burger King. And then guess what, a visitor clicked an advertisement on the page and I was contacted by Google and warned that this was not acceptable. It’s not that the autoblogging was bad; it was that the click came from unrelated content. Yes, your WP-Robot software will eventually post an unrelated article. Now you can certainly use autoblogging for your affiliate only websites to increase your page total.

#2 - Your On Page SEO Sucks - Yes, seriously, so many people here are obsessed with backlinks that they forget that they can make their lives like 10x easier just by having good on page SEO. Now this means the proper title tag, h1, h2, h3, image alt, 2-3% keyword density and at least 500 words on the page. Also the worst thing I do every single day is write meta description tags. It sucks, but it is important for click through rates.

#3 - Your Template Sucks - I see people that are able to drive traffic but are unable to get clicks. This is because your ad placement and ad colors do not make people want to click. Your website is probably too busy and too flashy to interest the people in your ads. In general use a 336x280 Text Ad Only with Blue Font and 333333 for the URL and Description. This will get you clicks. Once you understand your website and the ads being displayed, consider adding another 336x280 and the bottom of the page or a skyscraper in the right sidebar. Don't be concerned with CTR at this point, but rather the amount of money you are making.

This is not a bad template/theme, just be sure to use Blue Links, Not Red: Home Loan Modifications

#4 - Your Keywords Suck - Don't even get me started on this. People are targeting some stupid keywords. But the biggest downfall of most people are they only target one keyword and try to get into the #1 spot. Taking over the #1 is not as easy as everyone makes it out to be. And if you are not in that top spot, your niche website is probably going to be a flop. And then when you finally hit that top spot, Google does an algorithm change and life sucks. Here is an example.

Website in #1 Spot makes $1000 per month. Cool. Suddenly it slips to a #2 and makes $250 per month. Then #3 and makes $200 per month. Suddenly your website that was worth $10,000 on Flippa is now worth only $2000. You just lost $8,000 because of an algorithm change. This is why you need to target multiple keywords. Another possible event is that you reach #1 and the traffic is no where close to what Google Keyword Tool suggested.

It would be better to have a thicker themed website that targeted multiple keywords rather than just a single keyword. Yes, this means you do need to backlink 20-25 pages rather than just a couple. But the reality is, you will get these pages to rank on the first page rather quickly and it will be less difficult than trying to take a keyword to the #1 position. With more pages you can increase the speed at which you build backlinks, which means you are less likely to get slapped.

Now there has been a lot of buzz about authority websites lately, but the truth is people are making these really hard. Don't build a themed website about Baseball that has pages like "How to Throw a Curve Ball" and "How to Hit A Home Run!" People will click at a 1-2% CTR. Instead make a website about Baseball Bats, Baseball Jerseys, Baseball Bases, etc which should have a CTR of 8-15%.

You should also be targeting keywords with a CPC of $1.00+ because you get a 68% payout from Google from revenue sharing and also on the content network, advertisers typically set their bids lower than they do on the main search. These keywords also suggest they are buying keywords and are worth targeting in the first place. This helps you avoid smart pricing because your leads are already semi-qualified buyers.

As you can see I am looking for a themed CPC > $1.00. Realize, you might not get ads specifically for Golf Ball Retriever, but you'll get a general Golf Store ad. Yet, you still know the Golf niche itself pays pretty well. All of the keywords are products!

There is also pretty good daily search volume for most of these keywords. Now you probably are wondering how the heck am I going to compete. I filtered out keywords and most are around 10,000 Title Competition or less. I then manually review the SEO competition in Market Samurai to see if I can hit the top 10 with little effort. If it seems like too much work, then I might skip that keyword. Now in the golf niche there are going to be some pages that you need to have on your website that you will never rank the keyword for. For example, Golf Balls. But any visitors coming to your website is going to expect to see a page about Golf Balls, so be sure to have it. People will visit multiple pages of a themed website and they will eventually click an ad.



#5 - Your Backlinking Velocity Sucks - OK, so you have your fancy site with 20-100 pages and you are excited to get this thing making money. So you unleash a backlink fury on the website and are confused why nothing is happening. In my experience it's better to let your website chill out for a few days until all of your pages are indexed. Ping your website or use an indexing tool. Don't use the 2500 backlink indexing tool because you'll just sandbox yourself right out of the gates IME, you really only need like a 5 backlink indexing tool.

A week will go by and you'll see your website is ranking in the SERPs. You are getting a boost right now because your website is new, this means it is time to start building backlinks. Start by building some contextual backlinks from articles and High PR blog comments. Don't use profiles or scrapebox spam blog comments, we'll use those later.

Over the month, keep a consistent effort of backlinks coming to your website. I usually use Article Marketing Robot to schedule a blast to each page of the website, which will drip out over the month. You can also build about 5 High PR Blog Comments to each page every week. Be consistent!

Month two is now starting. You should be making money with Adsense from your website and probably are getting 5-20 visitors per day. Now it is time to use some profile backlinks. Use these to increase your link diversity and also IP diversity. The key with these links is to link with your anchor text. So if you can find someone that can do 500-1000 profile blasts to each page, go for it. Don't worry about your link velocity, most of these backlinks will be lost in cyberspace, deleted or will take a while to be found. You can ping and index these if you want. I am still trying to decide if indexing backlinks is a good ROI or if it is just more cost effective to make more backlinks. Keep building those article backlinks and high PR blog comments.

Month three is now starting. Your probably getting pissed off with your website now because traffic is probably 10-50 visitors per day. You are frustrated and about to give up, but then something will happen. All of a sudden you will add a couple of new pages of content to your website and then your traffic will explode. It will seriously go up by 25-100% in one day. Many of your keywords should be popping up on the first page of Google.

Your goal is to keep ranking higher, while discouraging any competition from entering. Yes, you want to intimidate the competition when they are doing their research in Market Samurai or SEO Spyglass. The key is to build some spammy Scrapebox comments to get your backlink count over 1000. This makes it harder for your competition to assess what you are doing, even though these links won't help much. Wordpress no-follow links probably won't do much but seem to be picked up quickly by YSE compared to BlogEngine which are usually do-follow. These links will also increase your IP diversity. DO NOT go out and buy a 25,000 comment package, you probably only need 2,500 or so and spread them over all of the pages.

Your website should bust the $100 mark per month, now simply rinse and repeat and do multiple websites at once. In most cases homepage backlink subscriptions won't work because they won't let you target multiple keywords, also sitewide links can become quite expensive. You may consider doing these for just the homepage keyword. Most of your keywords should be low hanging fruit, that you get traffic just for having good on page SEO.

#6 - Your Suck At Outsourcing - You absolutely need to outsource some of the work. Otherwise you will get burnt out and you will hate being an Adsense publisher.



The top left box represents things that you like doing and are good at. This is where you want to devote your time because it will keep your "satisfied". This is recognizing your strengths. I am an excellent micromanager, I used to be a professional gamer and was able to create complex systems. This is essentially like reverse engineering a strategy. I understand how parts of a system works.

The bottom right box represents things that you don't like doing and are bad at. These are the first things that you need to outsource. They are your weaknesses. I am terrible at backlinking because I don't have the dedication to sit there and do data entry all day. I once had a Fortune 20 corporate data entry job and I quit within 3 months because it made me hate life. Backlinking is a lot of data entry, filling in Article Marketing Robot forms, creating accounts, etc. No matter how you look at it, backlinking can be summed up as data entry. My college roommate always told me I was the worst macro manager ever because I don't always the see the big picture as quickly as everyone else, but I was always able to perform well because my micromanagement skills were unlike anything he's ever seen.

Once you get rid of bottom right corner you need to decide if you are going to outsource the top right or bottom left corner. I typically go for the top right because although I enjoy it, I am not good at it, which means it could negatively affect my business.

Finally outsource the bottom left corner. For me I now have all my articles written unless I really need to be an authority on something or it's sales copy. I can't outsource my meta tag descriptions because I am uncomfortable giving other people passwords to my websites.

I use oDesk.com for most of my projects. Be sure to give people a small test project before hiring them for a larger one. You will probably need to try 5 contractors before you find one that you want to keep working with. Another popular place is Elance.com.

#7 - You Only Work On One Website At A Time - You really do need to work on multiple websites at once, otherwise you will just end up building one website and flipping it to raise more capital to build another site. You will enter a vicious cycle. Work on your websites in batches:

1. Find 5 sets of 20-25 keywords.
2. Find 5 domains with your themed keywords in the domain name.
3. Have all the articles written for your websites.
4. Find images for every page.
5. Write the Meta descriptions for every page.
6. Add the header tags and Adsense code to each page.
7. Launch your website with 20-25 pages
8. Backlink

#8 - You Don't Know Where Your Income Is Coming From - You also want to be sure that you have sensitive ads enabled on your website. Another user let me borrow this screenshot. This person doesn't have any get rich quick products or ringtones, yet Google says that 11% of their impressions and 19% of their income comes from these ads. This is because of the user's history on the computer. Google is displaying something that they might be interested in.

This is why your website sometimes displays ads on Niche 2 website related to Niche 1 website if you were just working on it. This would be like Dating ads displaying on a Car website.

You also need to comprehensive Analytics on your website so you can see what are your most popular pages. Some people think you need to use Google Analytics to track what pages are getting the most clicks and generating the most income. Instead you can just enter the page URL into the Adsense interface. It is important to know what pages and keywords are making you money.



#9 - You Have Ads That Suck - Also be sure to ad these URLs to your competitive filter. This will help you avoid getting smart priced and will help you get a higher payout. These advertisers are notorious scalpers.

blogspot.com
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12-bestsites.com
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bittorrentreviews.com
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bittorrentsoftwaredownload.com
bloghog.biz
borondirectory.com
click-here-4-best.info
cohit.com
creditmoneymachine.com
creme-de-la-web.com
datamarksystems.com
dbmoz.biz
dealtime.co.uk
degreeconsultant.com
dieselsecret.com
digg4it.com
dmipartners.com
dnastudio.com
download-it-free.com
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ebay.com
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educationengine.com
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filesharingcenter.com
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getbestinfo.com
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globalinfoexchange.com
go-4-best.com
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greatinfo.biz
grokster-download.com
guide2biz.com
guideya.com
he4lth.com
health-answers.org
hgh-facts.com
hosted4me.com
hot4sites.com
icreatereality.com
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industrial101.com
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info-zap.com
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infobeagle.com
infoforyourhealth.com
infoscouts.com
ipesquire.org
iwax.com
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k-lite-legal.com
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law-helpers.com
legalfundinggroup.com
legalmusicaccess.com
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lifepeaks.com
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limewire2005.com
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medical-central.org
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yahoo.com
zptech.net

#10 - You Didn't Read The Adsense TOS - If you are going to use Adsense as part of your income, at least take a few minutes and read their rules. This will help prevent most of the account banning issues.

You can read the TOS here: https://www.google.com/adsense/localized-terms

Also be sure to include a privacy policy on your website that is Adsense compliant. As long as you are doing that, make sure to put an FTC Disclosure on your website, so that if you convert your Adsense site over to an affiliate website it is already there. Just make it explicit. The owners of this website get paid for reviewing or recommending any of the products or services on this website. Then just hide the links to your Privacy Policy and Disclaimer in your footer.

I also prefer to have my websites on multiple C-Class IPs. It just gives me peace of mind, even though Google knows a lot about your website just because you have Adsense on it. But if you convert your Adsense to an affiliate website, then it is on a different IP than your other websites. Then you don't to risk moving it to a different IP and having a SERP drop.