Do you Adsense?

Google has build the strongest business model available on the net...for the pleasure and profit of thousands of Internet Marketers. But do we really understand the issues related to Adsense marketing? There is a terrible trend in the Adsense world these last months : - Some marketers just want to make you believe that you can throw hundreds of poorly computer generated sites on your erver to make 1000's of $. They sell terrific packages for a low price...(I've seen that one of these package : 150 sites for $97 is amongst the bestseller on clickbank). You then find these sites on ebay, and finally you've just bought useless sites shared by at least 1000 of "webmasters") - This makes this market an attractive market for every one : with all the tools on the market you can easily produce your own sites and resell them. There's nothing wrong with that, as we are all here to make some profit from our activities. We all know that Google is getting smarter, BUT in the same time we just add some easy food to Google : are they really getting smarter, or are we just giving Google easy stuff to de-index?! Of course there's a myth about Google willingness to ban sites for duplicate content : dup content is not good...but it's not really bad too. What Google want is to produce relevant search results. How do you want to be seen as an expert in your field, from the SE point of view and Visitors point of view, if no one publishes your articles? How will Google estimate the popularity of a site without backlinks. Articles are a way to do that, and one of the most important in the Adsense business models. What if there was just 1 site (could be 10) in each topic : no advertisement. Google needs a lot of sites, with a lot of traffic to catch advertisers and motivate publishers. Nevertheless, search engines and visitors are expecting high quality as their Internet experience grow, and this trend is not seriously dealt by marketers (even John Reese said that crappy sites are more converting that good ones!). Finally, if we mix these issues and these trends, we see that Search Engine will select the sites that really enhance the visitor's experience. Those with an added value : this added value can be build and should be thought and build from the beginning of an Adsense project : - Market selection : niche selection based on SE researches, competitors (yes, for Adsense, competition brings adverstiser and high bid...), typical consumer behaviour (is this a market where people are looking for free information, are zapping, are they looking for general, specific...), mulitple sources for the content. - Business model selection : we're talking about Adsense, but in fact, if you jut target Adsense, you loose a lot of your market potential. Some visitors are just looking for free information, some are looking for specific information, some are looking for products / services / ezines...Your site should include some of these business models (then you have to test to better fine tune your model) : contextual advertisement with Adsense, Affiliate with Clickbank, Amazon, CJ, Linkshare..., Ezine (add a subscription form offering a free report, and you will be amazed by the return, and by the cash potential), or your own product! - Keyword selection : this is critical and a key success factor. Those keywords have to be high paying keywords (not necesseraly the highes bid on the net). You won't get them with the free tools that will make a poor mix between keywords / phrases (Overture give "credit card visa" when we look for Credit Card keyword : for this keyword advertiser pay $6 ; BUT for "visa credit card" advertisers pay $20...this exercise must be done with every keyword). You have to choose 100 to 300 topic related keywords to cover a part of the market. These keywords should be also lateral keyword... This is the most important task, and the worst in all the pre made Adsense sites you can buy in packages : they are all made with Overture keywords (because it's free and you can have 100's of them) - Content selection : can you fill your site with articles, news from different sources ; can you write your own articles, can you add somePLR articles. This is less critical if your site is well designed - Site creation : this is where you can use automation tools! But then again, you have to design / use a good template to enjoy your visitors - SEO : you may have the right keywords, with the right content, you have to be sure that your keywords will be found by SE where they want them to be (headers, beginning of the page, bold, within H tags, within alt images, closing of the page, within the body with a given density : 3 to 10%) - Promotion : you have designed and build the perfect Adsense site but you don't have any traffic, so no $. This is also the weak point of Adsense packages (if you can find another webmaster willing to link to your newly bought 150 Adsense sites, let me know, I will interview him). Build some links with related sites, write some articles to promote your sites, start a blog, submit it to Directories (not SE), make some PPC (miva, overture) to play the arbitrage level... So, do you Adsense?