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Feb 17 2009
Is Adsense Smart Pricing Killing Your Earnings?
I introduced the concept of Adsense Smart Pricing in the previous post; Adsense for Beginners . Today I want to explain the inner workings of Google’s Adsense program and how smart pricing is integral to your potential earnings.
Google’s priority when it comes to Adsense is in keeping its advertisers happy. A happy advertiser will continue to advertise and Google will continue to make money. Happy publishers (you and your sites) are not high in Google’s list of concerns. To this end Google goes to great lengths to ensure that advertisers get their money’s worth. In most cases this means charging the advertiser less money when they receive poorly converting traffic from a publisher. This also means that the publisher gets paid less as well. This process in known as Smart Pricing.
You are a new blogger. You are just dying to let the world know about your passion for writing and making some extra money online. You produce a boat load of wonderful content detailing your trials and tribulations online. At some point you learn about adding Adsense to your blog. You even learn enough to use Google’s Keyword Tool and find out that Advertisers are paying $2 a click for “Work at Home” ads. Hey - you have a work at home site - let’s sign up with Adsense and start getting paid $2 every time a visitor clicks an ad on your site.
So far so good… except…
Like most beginners - you don’t really have much traffic coming to your site. No problem - you’ve done a little reading, a little surfing and have come across several prominent bloggers in the make money online niche. You’ve seen John Chow’s site, Shoemoney’s site, Problogger’s site - yup, you have seen what the A-List is doing and by gum you can do it too. So you set up a site similar to the A-List and start pounding the social networks for attention. You leave comments on all the A-List blogs. You Stumble and Digg all your posts. You schmooze in all the social circles in order to make friends and even do a few guest posts here and there. This is how you get traffic. Right?
Sure - hey let’s say you even have some talent and all your hard work pays off. Traffic starts coming - you make some friends. You manage to accrue a few hundred RSS subscribers - things are just spiffy.
Except - you are getting a few clicks on those ads but you aren’t making $2 a click. In fact all you are getting is $0.01 a click. Maybe $0.05 a click on a good day. What gives?
Six months in and you have $11.00 in your Adsense account - $89.00 to go before Google will send out the check. Adsense sucks. You start plastering affiliate ads all over your site like the A list does. A few more months go by and you haven’t earned a dime in commission. Making money online sucks - it is all a scam. You quit blogging.
This scenario is played out daily and make no mistake - 99% of you new bloggers will follow this same path and hang up the keyboard in 6 months time. Thousands have come before you and thousands will follow you. The problem is that you are a blogger and not an internet marketer. The problem is that you think traffic is traffic. Get traffic, make a name for yourself and everything will be wonderful. The thing is - there are two kinds of traffic. There is social traffic and there is search traffic. Social traffic in a nutshell consists of other bloggers - people just like you. While you are commenting on their posts hoping to draw traffic from their site they are doing the same to you. The people you draw in from Stumble Upon or Digg are social readers - people who like to read interesting articles. They aren’t on Digg because they are looking to buy something.
People who are looking for something to buy use Google. They are the people who make up Search traffic.
Now lets look at that site of yours again - who are the people visiting your site? Yup - they are other bloggers - just like you. How many ads do you click when visiting their sites? How many times did you buy something on their site using their affiliate link? What’s that? None. You mean you don’t spend money everyday while going about your blogging duties? Well guess what - neither do the bloggers who are visiting your site. You can’t make money online from traffic that doesn’t click ads or buy products.
Now let’s talk about Search traffic. While you are busy chasing other bloggers the internet marketers are busy using SEO (search engine optimization) techniques to get their blogs and websites ranked on top of the search engines like Google - especially Google. They have a “Work at Home” site as well but they know something that you don’t - they know that people who sit down and search for the term (or keyword as we call it) “work at home jobs” in Google are on a mission. They want information and use the search engines to find it. They will click through to the first site listed in the serp’s. (the search engine results pages). If that site has what they need they will read it and possibly buy whatever the site recommends they buy or they may see an ad that catches their attention and click on it. They may also think the site is a scam and simply move on to the next site in the serp’s. Whatever they do - they will do it until they find what they are looking for. If someone is looking for info on Breeding Tropical Fish they will search till they find it. If the only info they can find is contained in a book - they will buy the book. If they see an ad that says “How to breed tropical fish” then they will click the ad. This is what search traffic does - they aren’t online to socialize - they want something. If you want to make money online then you have to provide something that people want or direct them to where they can find it. (for a fee of course - like an Adsense click)
Now that you understand the difference between social traffic and search traffic let me explain why you are getting those 1 cent clicks on your Adsense ads.
Google charges the advertiser based on clicks that convert or will likely convert for the advertiser. How this is done is complex but essentially Google knows who clicked on the ads, where they came from, how they found the ad, where they went after reaching the advertiser, what their surfing patterns are and combined with Google Analytics (used by most Adwords users (the advertisers) they can see which clicks convert for the advertiser.
In other words Google can ascertain what traffic is providing the advertisers the desired results from the traffic that just clicks an ad out of curiosity, lingers on the advertiser’s site for 2 seconds and then moves on. This is the difference between targeted traffic (people looking for something specific) and un-targeted traffic. (Bloggers and surfers just window shopping)
If your site provides the advertiser targeted traffic that converts Google will pay you top price for the click. Or rather Google will charge the advertiser the top rate for the click and split the money with you. If your site sends untargeted traffic that doesn’t convert to the advertiser then Google will only charge the advertiser a few cents for the click and give you a penny. That is smart pricing.
It gets worse though. If you have more than one site running Adsense and any one site (or more) provides un-targeted traffic then your entire Adsense account will be smart priced. This means that one poorly performing site will lower your earnings or CPC (cost per click) across all of your sites. If one site gets smart priced then all your sites get smart priced.
Why does Google do this? Simple. They are trying to protect their advertisers from paying for crappy traffic. If advertisers can’t get traffc that converts they will stop advertising and Google will lose money. To ensure quality traffic Google will penalize all your sites until you either remove the ads from the poorly converting site or start sending targeted traffic to the advertiser. Google has no shortage of publishers - they always want more advertisers.
If you haven’t put two and two together yet let’s look at how you can provide targeted traffic. If you optimize your blog for a keyword - let’s say “work at home jobs” and do things properly you should see “work at home” related Adsense ads show up on your site. If you have worked on your SEO and managed to rank well in the serp’s for “work at home” then you should see traffic coming from the search engines who typed in “work at home jobs” in the search query. They find your site - do a little reading - see the work at home ads and click. They may or may not buy anything on the advertisers landing page but from Google’s point of view you (the publisher) have done what was asked. You sent the advertiser a targeted visitor - someone specifically looking for what the ad was targeted too. Since they are targeted there is a good chance they will convert for the advertiser. Over a period of time you may send hundreds of visitors to the advertiser who found you in the serp’s for the same keyword. You will build up a track record - some percentage of these targeted visitors will convert and you will be paid top CPC for all the traffic sent.
On the other hand - you don’t bother with SEO and stick to using StumbleUpon to gain traffic. One in a hundred visitors click your ads - they aren’t targeted (Google knows they came from a social site) and spend two seconds on the advertisers site then leave. Over time you build up a track record of sending un-targeted social traffic to the Advertiser who don’t convert. The advertiser is upset - Google says “no problem”. We will only charge you two cents for the traffic coming from those clicks. They turn to you and say “hey bud - you only get a penny for those clicks and while we are at it we will only pay you a penny for all the clicks on your other sites as well until you start producing traffic that will convert for our advertisers.) Actually - they won’t tell you anything - they will just pay you pennies and let you figure it out.
I will get into all the details on how to optimize your sites for targeted traffic in upcoming posts. I will also detail the SEO process needed to rank on top of the serp’s. This post is simply to lay the groundwork first. You need to understand the difference between search engine traffic and social traffic before you can earn a living with Adsense.
Keep this “rule” in the back of your head from this point on.
Targeted traffic + targeted Adsense ads = top Adsense earnings.
The next post will deal will getting the targeted ads. You need to know how to optimize an Adsense site properly before we move on to getting targeted visitors.
Cheers,
Griz
Frank,
In a way you are describing the best scenario for an Adsense publisher. If I send traffic (targeted) to a poor quality score landing page I get the best CPC. Google has no problem charging the advertiser a high CPC if they don’t optimize their landing page. Conversion doesn’t seem to play a role at all - basically Google tells the advertiser right up front; “if you want to advertise your “Green Widget” site for “Red Grommet” keywords that is fine with us but you will pay $2 a click instead of the 20 cents you’ll pay for “Green Widget” keywords.
This happens every so often on my MMOFB blog - a noob adwords user bids on all the wrong keywords and I suddenly go from $0.50 clicks to $2 clicks. Sadly it never lasts as the noob quickly blows his budget and pulls the campaign.
Hey Griz,
You’ve popped up again!
I have a question about how entry keywords effects the CPC. So if some one visits your site with the key term “brown widget” and you have targeted ads for “brown big widgets”(higher CPC). Does Google see that the person did not come in on the “brown big widget” keyword thus not giving you the higher CPC?
Smart Pricing. Say a keyword shows average CPC $4.00 I get some clicks for $1-$1.50 but a lot of clicks for .50cents. Is this because my traffic is not converting for the advertisers so I’m being “partially” smart priced? Or do you think it’s more because Google is not showing the ads that pay the most money?
Another question. A lot of keywords that have higher CPC actually have show less advertiser competition. Often these keywords show almost no advertiser competition but have a much higher CPC. Any Idea why this is?
Thanks Griz! Hope you’re staying warm!
Okay Griz,
Here is my contribution to getting you to the top 10 on today.com.
Looking forward to the post even if it is a lot of review. I was getting ready to start re reading your ugly blogger blog anyway! Man, I was just thinking about how many times you mention tropical fish. need to look into that
Frank,
Now if I were a programmer with your talents I might think of creating a program that could pinpoint just where the Adwords noobs are spending their money… just a thought.
GMoney,
If your ads are for “big brown widgets” and the search term was “big Widgets” or “brown widgets” or sometimes even just “widgets” not to worry - close enough as relevancy applies. “If the searcher was looking for “big brown grommets” not so good.
If you are getting $0.50 - $1.50 clicks then you aren’t smart priced. The discrepancy could be for a number of reasons; you aren’t getting the top paying ads, your visitors aren’t always clicking on the best paying ad ( when the ad block has more than 1 ad) or they are clicking on a lower paying ad block, some advertisers are bidding higher than others and you have a natural variety on your site. The top ad has bid $2 a click for content ads while the last advertiser in the block has only bid $0.50 a click and so on. You can get a wide range of clicks without being smart priced. Getting a range of clicks under $0.10 is usually a sign of SP but could also be a sign that you picked a low CPC niche. You really can’t tell you are smart priced until you have more than one site running adsense. When a site that has consistently made a certain range of CPC clicks suddenly drops to $0.06 a click from averaging $0.50 a click - you can bet you’ve been SP’d.
High CPC keywords with low competition generally means that there is little traffic or the entry barrier for the niche is too high for most people to compete in it. Usually it is just Adwords noobs targeting a term without having quality landing pages.
If you can find one that does have a lot of traffic and no competition and pays a high CPC then do two things. 1) Tell me 2) Don’t tell anyone else!!!
Carole,
I’m glad you are seeing the traffic and hope they are producing results for you. It’s not always easy going against the grain especially when it can take a while to see results but if you stick it out you will find that making money online is not only doable but becomes rather routine once you have a system in place. Once you know you can make $10 a day on a site you know that it can be done again and again - it’s all a matter of how much work you want to put into it. I’m just trying to get people to put in the right kind of work.
Thanks for the support and get back to work!
Matt,
Lol. My tropical fish sites were some of my first aha moments. Kind of fond of them. They don’t make a ton of money by any stretch but they are consistent earners that I haven’t touched in years. How could you not love something that brings in money every month and you don’t have to do a thing? They taught me what passive income really means - if I was any more passive with them I’d be dead.
Jeff,
You hit the nail on the head - my other sites are hard for beginners to digest as they are coming in half way through the movie. I need to update a lot of stuff anyway so I thought I would just start over from scratch and treat the reader as a true novice. This will be a bit monotonous for a while for all the vets but they can pay attention to the SEO aspect of it rather than the Adsense lessons.
Once this is done I’m hoping to do the same thing with SEO - new site, start from scratch etc.
Hey Griz,
Thanks for the response! I am noticing that am getting some geo targeted ads which I would think would be good for high cpc but they are ugly Dex Profile pages http://betterhearingus2.com/ Right now I’ve got 2 of these types of ads running in my block of 4.
Any experience with these ads that point to dex company profile pages?
Thanks again Griz!
Hi Josh,
You asked
“Using one adsense account or more? using one domain for multiple sites, blogger, or a site like today.com.
Can you avoid smartpricing by having multiple adsense accounts?”
Your question is exactly why I want to start over - people are confused because they start reading me from when they found the sites and are seeing advanced subjects like the ones you mention without all the prior baby steps that lead up to these questions.
I want to start everyone at square one - when we get to things like domains, multiple accounts etc I will lay it out then - talking about multiple accounts before people learn how to get their first Adsense site up will only confuse them or take them away from concentrating on the basics.
Forget all the details for now - first the basics.
(and yes you can avoid SP with multiple accts but aside from the fact that you aren’t allowed more than 1 account it would take several posts to really answer that question properly. An improper answer could cause many to lose their accts.)
We’ll get to that -
This Today.com blog - are those your adsense ads or theirs. Never heard of this platform but the links seem to be do-follow that you put in your post. Is this another platform like Squidoo worth pursuing?
Gmoney,
How is the CPC? That Dex landing page may be ugly - but it is probably very effective. Plain simple and to the point. It is SEO’d quite well actually. If you are sending targeted traffic to it you should do fine.
Hey Bruce,
Nope - the ads are Today.com’s not mine or you wouldn’t be seeing any at this point in the process.
Like Hubpages - this domain supplies the hosting and you supply the content and they try and monetize it. You get a paltry cut - $2 per 1000 page views I believe. I’m not here for the money. Lol. I just want to test this platform - we’ve talked about why using various platforms can be advantageous elsewhere…
I’ll yak about it over on MMOFB at some point - once I get some feedback… assuming they don’t toss me of course
Dawn of War 2,
You answered your own question - it is about not converting for the advertiser. Everything else is really just symptoms that can help you narrow down that 1) you have been smart priced and 2) what needs to be done to fix it.
One of the things that I should mention before everyone starts asking about smart pricing and how to find out if they are smart priced and what to do about it is that I am going to be showing you all how to create sites that will never be smart priced - you won’t have to know much about it because it won’t effect you. As we progress you will see how we avoid smart pricing by simply driving the right traffic. If you are ever in the position where the wrong traffic shows up then you simply don’t use Adsense on that site. You don’t kinda use it on every site - only sites that produce. If they produce they aren’t smart priced.
As to your direct question - yes you could just have a very low paying niche and 5 cent clicks don’t mean smart pricing. I will discuss how to avoid those low paying niches too.
Griz,
I’m trying to determine what ads are paying well. I’m fluctuating quite a bit in CPC. Two weeks ago I was averaging $10 a day with a high of $18 dollar day. Then last week I made $22 total. Traffic has been steady and so have rankings in the SERPS. My CTR is bouncing a lot too. 30% one day 2% on Saturday. I though I’d try banning some ads to see if I could improve things.
If I do a search in Google for the keyword I am getting ads for on my site the dex site shows up #3 on the side of the search results so they must be paying decent.
I’m am averaging about 50 visitors a day so maybe the inconsistency is just due to the fact that I don’t have enough numbers to normalize things…
Any secret way to find out what a particular ad is paying?
Gmoney,
No - no secret way. You would need a tracking script written to see which ads are being clicked and when just to begin to match clicks with amounts. The thing is G will ban you if you track the ads. Don’t.
Your earnings sound normal to me - until you start getting more traffic you won’t really see any patterns emerge. Once you are receiving 50-100 clicks (not visitors) a day things become much more uniform.
Thanks Griz!
More Links!!
Hey Griz!
This is tobiesmom from TAA! You are a mindreader! I have been wanting to learn more about correctly setting up an adsense site for ages!!
Been reading thru your old posts the past few days on your How to Make Money Online for Beginners website. Took lots of notes and copied important bits and pieces of your posts to save for future reference!
Am still a bit confused about how you choose the keywords you are going to use for your site - I know you said that you let Google decide, when the site gets indexed and the visitors start to show up, you incorporate the search phrases that they used to find your site into your new and old posts, right? Eventually, all this ‘long-hanging fruit’ helps to boosts the ranking of your main keyword?
My question is: when starting a new site, do you only select ONE good long-tail keyword? And make ONE post? Wait for the visitors to show up, take a long-tail keyword that they used to find your with, and target it in your next post? And so on, and so on?
Thanks for all your help, wisdom, advice, and encouragement!
tobiesmom
Hi Mom!
If you watch what I do here you will see how I pick keywords to target. I know the main keyword going in - “Adsense”. I choose a few long tails for the first few posts that I know from experience I want to rank well for - “beginners” and “make Money” and then set about writing loooong posts with lots of relevant terms and phrases. When the traffic starts to show up I will find which phrases are worth pursuing based on their traffic numbers.
As we move on my Post titles may reflect the keywords I want targeted and not be exactly what I talk about in the posts - a problem I’ll have with this site as I want to talk about certain things in a certain order. This may be at odds with the keyowrds I want targeted but I’m sure I’ll work it out.
One of the other problems with this site is that I don’t have my ads on here so we won’t know the conversions etc - will will see how well I can trigger the ads though. The point will be to run through all the steps in optimizing an Adsense site for the right ads and then getting it to drive targeted traffic. This will become evident as we move along.
Hey Grizz! Been on your main website for the last few days been trying to get my head around all of this! So I’ve picked a main keyword, it’s something I know about as it’s a hobby, but won’t earn that much money imo =P. I’ve found some keywords that may be quite good, but am not too sure what I should do first.
I really appreciate all the help that you provide.
Thanks!
Crashin
Hello Griz,
I do really enjoy reading your updates and reading through suggestions you offer from your experience. However, I always feel like I come to a full circle when I get through it all. Not to say the advice is not excellent, but I seem to missing some of the key points that make this all the while.
I have been running Adsense on static sites for about 2 years now. I was brought into this arena by doing basic site builds and then just article marketing the crap out of them. Picking keywords (titles,on page,anchor text) and using those as means for someone to find my site. I have never been able to do well in the search engines though but maybe for a first couple of weeks after getting indexed (I heard this being called the “honeymoon” period with Google). Article marketing has brought me some good returns but can be very time consuming (even with software aid) and can cost a good bit for outsourcing.
For your blogs, as I understand it, your basically doing what I did but with blog posts. The part I seem to be missing is how all the “quality” back links get created for your post besides articles, and how much does each post get tended too? On top of that, I can’t get my tiny brain to see how its possible to push out several hundred of these to find which stick. With outsourcing, from experience, its easy to see but is very costly too just to test the waters.
I think I am just missing the process, the small details so to speak, that make your strategies superior to most others. Its a lot of work and I know that because I have been through it but I would definately love to have a grasp on what you did, especially when you first began, so that I can ease the mind on thinking that I have it correct instead of pushing the wrong idea/strategy.
Hefner
There’s something wrong here. This site is way too clean looking and organized. With all the people sending links over here I can’t believe it’s not indexed yet. Nice header, by the way. Is that one of those ice road things?
I can attest to the fact that your adsense account only getting pennies a click doesn’t always mean you are smart priced. Some niches only pay pennies. I happen to have about a dozen sites in a niche that pays pennies. Yes, I know, that was the part of the keyword research I didn’t do.
On the plus side, these sites rank well with virtually no backlinks at all and get hundreds to thousands of page views daily. How do you turn down a niche where your sites get a double listing at 1 & 2 as soon as they are indexed with thousands of hits a day?
How do I know I’m not getting smart priced?
My other sites are doing fine with adsense. In fact, I just got a $3 click today on a site that has been averaging .50 - 1.00. Actually, I’ve been noticing a trend toward a few abnormally high paying clicks every day for the past week or so. This has been happening in almost all my niches too.
I wonder if maybe I’ve stumbled into some of that “Google Shadow, et al” money
Have I made this wordy enough with enough keywords? I hope so, I’m tired
Griz, you have an amazing handle on Adsense…it’s really great to read how you have built your network of sites up and in so short a time period.
I keep getting hung up on the concept of using so many Blogger blogs to host these Adsense ads. I’ve always heard that Blogger blogs were risky in general since they could be ’snatched away’ by G at anytime for almost any reason…does that concern you?
Otherwise I see your approach as pretty darn brilliant…particularly your understanding of the difference between SOCIAL TRAFFIC and SEARCH TRAFFIC… this seems to be ‘key’ in all this.
Thanks for such a comprehensive roadmap for others to follow.
Ryan
Hi Griz,
Your comment to Tobiesmom brought up another keyword question. Say I started a site like court’s coloradolasiksurgery and intended to geo target that site sniper style.
Then you find out that the traffic at position one is poor, but the payout is good. Can you start to evolve the site to be more broad to the term lasik surgery, and start pounding it with posts targeting long tails?
Will it hurt the colorado lasik surgery traffic if the main index has posts related to lasik or eye surgery but not heavily geo targeted?
Crashin,
We will get into keywords and how to pick them in due course. For now get familiar with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and pay attention to the keywords with the most searches in your niche. Those will be the broad terms you will want to rank for. Those keywords will be the ones you use in your URL and Blog Title. The long tails will be used in your post titles and posts in order to build authority for your main keywords down the road.
Toolboxhero,
Good tip. I have a few consistent sites that serve as a “canary in a coal mine” as well. You are right - you know instantly that something is amiss with a new site when your stable earnings take a quick nosedive.
Thanks for mentioning that.
Hi again Grizz,
Never too late to make a change!
Mike Avenue
Hey Griz,
Thanks for answering my keyword question. I know this is probably one of the main areas that most internet marketers struggle with. I’m going to choose a niche and create a site as I follow along with your postings. I’m really excited about your new endeavor and SO want to Make Money With Adsense - would it be possible for you to put out a new post like. . .every hour or so?
Caro,
mom to Tobie, a sweet but fat 40 lb. Cocker Spaniel
OK Grizz is seems like you are confusing the old hands here! Guys - Grizz has little control over the layout here sidebars and header image is about it - think hubpages or squidoo not blogger or WordPress. The advertising is totally not in his control and he’s paid by impression not clicks!
Grizz it might be worth pointing out to the totally new that it is a non-trivial exercise to get an adsense account these days. People at hubpages are being rejected left right and centre and it seems that you need 3 - 6 months track record under your own name before they will consider you. Blogger - being owned by Google would seem the obvious place to create that track record.
Adam,
Your process is correct - the only thing missing is the ability to find those backlinks. You are not alone and are not missing anything. I won’t get into how I started out - back then SEO belonged to the black hats and everyone got a head start in building networks when it was easy to produce the links. While the techniques no longer work in most cases the smart people were able to convert all or at least a lot of the splogs into reasonably legit sites that continue to this day - with age, PR and most importantly keyword authority.
I have a lot of resources built up that beginners don’t have and won’t have until they begin building their own networks. Hundreds of sites are not built overnight and they don’t have to be continuously updated - bloggers think posting is something that has to be done because they are trying to keep readers coming back. Google doesn’t require you to post often or at all in order to rank number 1. Your rank is 90% dependent on your backlinks - I have sites on top of the serp’s that have as few as 2 posts and haven’t lost top spot in a year - no posts. Maintaining a large network is not as much work as you think. Creating backlinks is the most time consuming activity - not creating the sites.
I have kept costs to a minimum by taking advantage of all the free hosts I can find and optimize. I love blogger - I can test dozens of niches/keywords without spending a dime and they don’t have to be pretty because I’m not trying to get readers - I am only interested in search traffic.
Yes - there are short cuts to getting backlinks. I imagine we will touch on these in due course but I want to lay out the legit white hat methods that will create an Adsense income before we talk about methods that can increase productivity and speed up earnings.
John,
Yup - the road across the lake in front of the Lodge. My morning view…
Nicely keyworded comment - you guys kill me! lol I have trained you all so well!
Congrats on the earnings - sounds like things are chuggin’ along just fine.
Thanks for the laugh.
Ryan,
Search traffic is the key to Adsense and to selling online in general.
As for Blogger - I have asked this repeatedly over the years - Can anyone give me an example of 1 legit site that was removed by Blogger?
The fact that they can do something doesn’t mean that they ever have or ever would - in fact it is not in Blogger’s interest to ever do such a thing. Blogger is Google’s best advertisement for Adsense - one of their income streams. Make a few legit blogs disappear and the blogging world would know about it pretty darn quick - nobody has given me an example yet. If Blogger did such a thing they would lose a large resource (bloggers) in a hurry.
No it doesn’t worry me using Blogger.
Chelle,
Thanks for the kind words and I hope I don’t bore you to death. Some stuff will be updated (most of it was originally posted 1-2 years ago and G has definitely changed a few rules) but the core will be the basics for the next little while.
I appreciate the support.
Greg,
You will likely find a substantial increase in the good sites if you eliminate the poor performers. Remove all the social traffic sites and see what happens - it really is a bit of trial and error trying to pinpoint the problem. Sometimes the easiest way is to start with just 1 site using adsense and then add sites slowly and watch what happens to your earnings on the earlier sites. If they suddenly dip you have a problem.
Of course if all your sites are poor performers you will never know. If you have low levels of traffic you’ll also have a harder time discerning a problem. In the end it is always best to only use Adsense on a site that is predominantly visited by search engine traffic. Your CTR will be better by far and as long as your site is optimized for the search traffic you will see higher CPC. You will never be smart priced.
Matt,
Yes - you can easily broaden the lasik site by adding long tails relevant to the main keyword. In fact in your example “Colorado lasik surgery” the site is really a long tail of the main keyword “lasik surgery”. It’s half way to the main keyword already - a little tweaking and it could rank number 1 for “lasik surgery”.
Think of my “Make Money for Beginners” blog. It was optimized for that long tail in the beginning but it didn’t stop me from optimizing it for dozens of other long tails and eventually dominating the main keywords as well.
The only real difference in Court and myself is that he likes to target a single keyword or tightly knit set on one site while I like to target hundreds (if possible) on one site. We do things the same way - just different goals. Both work.
Rich,
I tried to make this as ugly as I could
Today.com doesn’t give you many options when it comes to the layout. I’ll keep working at it though…
Costa,
Pimp away and thanks. Glad to hear things are looking up!
Andy,
Hey thanks for the offer - I would never say no
The blog title probably gives you some keywords to work with…
(was that subtle enough? lol)
Thanks Andy
Hey Norman,
Now you got me wondering how many times I used “their” instead of “they’re”… damn I really should do a read over before posting.
Leo,
You said it all - you can only read so much. In the end you have to try things, test, experiment and learn first hand. You will find what works and then you will learn to duplicate it and keep testing other ideas. Over and over. No real secret - just do the work.
Thanks for that great comment. well said.
papajoneh,
Hard to advise you as the site may be giving you the best CPC or they may be paying ecpm and you are getting short changed.
Just block them for a few days and see if your CPC increases or drops - you’ll know whether you want their ad or not soon enough.
Caro,
40lb Cocker Spaniel… hmmm I have a 32 lb black cat - his fat has its own fat. Huge bugger.
Not sure I’m up for that post an hour but I’ll try and keep them coming at some sort of pace - meaning more often than I usually do.
Lis,
Thanks for explaining the situation here at Today. I’m going to discuss the recent changes in Google regarding Adsense applications in the next post. This was the biggest reason I felt it was time to update my system - you can’t just start a blogger blog and slap adsense on it anymore - not if you are new to Adsense that is. It’s all part of G’s desire to eliminate splogs and sploggers. Glad you mentioned it Lis.
You are living proof that good blogs produce good readership. For the people who zip around socializing, the proof is right here. Good copy, good traffic. Thanks for the info.
Thanks for clearing that up with lasik surgery.
I forgot to ask, when you are looking for longtails, are you just typing in the main root “lasik surgery” into keyword elite, and then seeing what pops up?
Then picking long tails based on your gut feeling for a term, and or also doing some checking on traffic stats, then creating the post, and gathering links to it?
Thanks-Matt
BTW- So far I see your PR0 huge authority blogger blog on position 2 for make money with adsense, and this blog on page 3 position 7.
but who’s checking….
Grizz,
I too am starting a new blog to make money with Adsense following along with your methods here. I am going to start from scratch and do the things you suggest exactly as you lay it out here.
Adsense still eludes me as far as making a lot of money online.
I noticed your big jump in the serps on this blog too. I need more authority sites for backlinks.
Grizz you are #1 for traffic on the front page of todaycom - the only question I have -why did it take 3 posts before you got there LMAO!
Matt,
If I was to target the “lasik” niche I would run a keyword search using both keyword elite and Google’s keyword tool for the root term “lasik”. Then I would check the search numbers for the long tails and pick 4 or 5 of the highest searched and incorporate them into my first few posts. They would be long posts.
I would then send them all targeted backlinks until I get them some ranking. As soon as traffic starts to show up I would note any phrases used by the searchers that I hadn’t specifically targeted and then incorporate the new phrases into a new post - the best one in the post title. Again this would be followed up with more targeted backlinks and the process would keep repeating itself until I eventually rank on top for all the useful (traffic pulling) keywords.
By using my long post method I can usually get Google to show me the terms that are drawing the most searches. You would be surprised at just how inaccurate the keyword tools are - there are always phrases that draw traffic that the tools don’t pick up. At best they can give you the main terms but you have to flush out a lot of the others.
In a nutshell - for every post you write you will spend most of your time gathering anchored links to promote the various keywords in the post.
Craniac,
Very few people even know about smart pricing - even less realize that it effects your entire account.
John Tighe,
Lol.
a few corrections… we have no Grizzlies - the Polar Bears scare them away!
the ice is well past 6 feet thick so Costa couldn’t fall through unless he spent an hour or so with a chainsaw, ice pick and a long shafted auger.
Frank wouldn’t drink all the beer but he would create a random name selection script that would dispense the beer at regular intervals - and only his name would be selected - ok, yes he would drink all the beer but Terry might put up a fight.
the wolves wouldn’t eat your good leg until after you froze to death - otherwise they would just walk with you out of curiosity - they are really cool animals and I have made friends with several over the years!
what you and Lissie do is your business…
haha…
It has been a while John - so glad you dropped in. Haven’t snorted the morning coffee in a while… now I’ve got to clean the keyboard!
Carlos,
Absolutely use the social networks to produce backlinks. The only problem is that you will have to train your friends and acquaintances to use anchored text instead of the usual url or blogger name in the anchors. Otherwise you will rank really well for “Carlos” but not your keywords.
Just remember that social bloggers are quite clueless when it comes to “proper” linking so it can be a waste of time if you can’t get them to use keywords in the links.
Denise,
I haven’t checked the serp’s yet but thanks to you and Matt I won’t have to - please keep me updated!
(you know by now how lazy I am!)
Lis,
lol… I’m thinking Today.com doesn’t get much traffic if this is on page 1 already! 3 posts… oops I’m slippin’ - old age I think!
LMAO John T - hey where’s the mad Pommie bastard been (that’s a term of affection to our North American readers!) - you should know I was busy fighting Frank for the beer - well except I dont drink beer until the temperature is +33C not -33C ! now don’t turn Grizz’s blog into a dating site - he has to keep it on topic you know - this make money with Adsense thingy!
I’m showing 5 pages indexed in G with this site ranking at position 30 for both phrases, Make Money With AdSense and AdSense Smart pricing as well as position 53 for How to Make Money With AdSense.
Here they come!
Hey Gris
Just found your Blog looks like I’m going to learn a bunch, thanks
you say you earn about $40 per 1000 page imp
is that the same as the page ecpm column in the adsense report.
as we started building a few sites since about a year ago in our spare time for an experiment really. (after reading the claims of 10,000 and more per month etc but suppose never did quite believe them). But they have been slowly increasing each month and as of today 18th shows $150 for feb with 53 ecpm although since beginning shows 26 ecpm.
So maybe we are doing somethings nearly right. Anyway thank you very much for showing how to do it properly. looks like we should give it some proper attention.
Thanks
Grizz,
I didn’t know about this blog platform, thanks for the tip.
Thanks for that. So the nutz and bolts for me are those back-links.
Just something really quick. When you make your post that is targeted to a certain KW that you have researched in and out, do you use that “post” as the link in your anchor text and for the anchor text do you use the keyword that the “post” is targeting, when making backlinks? Or do they all need to just point back to your main homepage?
I feel like if I can get over this hump of quality backlinks, I can get somewhere. Thanks again.
Hefner
Lis,
I’m thinking “make money with a dating site” might be my next target - after reading the Marcus Frind article on newsweek I think there might be some money in that niche.
John,
Not bad for a 5 day old blog - need a few more backlinks yet…
Stephanie,
I will explain my niche selection process soon but because of how I select a niche I don’t really worry about individual keyword CPC - just the overall search estimates for the keywords.
I don’t really target an individual keyword - I target a niche that provides me with hundreds of related keywords. Some will have no traffic and the CPC can be anything really as I plan to dominate the whole niche (all the keywords) and I know going in that I will pull in a lot of traffic. If I can get 2000-3000 page views a day I know I can make some cash - even in a 30 cent per click niche. I basically look for niches that have enough keywords that will provide a few thousand visitors a day. (Could be from only 1 keyword or from 20 pulling in 50 page views a day)
I know that I’ll average 8-12% ctr (from experience) and 10% of 1000 visitors will get me 100 clicks. If the CPC turns out to be low - 10 - 30 cents per click then I have a $10 - $30 per day blog. If the CPC is higher so much the better.
I guess I’m saying that I don’t really care what the CPC of the niche is - I only care about finding niches that will produce enough traffic. If the traffic is there you will always make money - always! How much? You’ll find out once you dominate the niche.
BK,
Thanks - I’ve got so many keywords I don’t check them very often anymore. lol. When the traffic slows down I tend to take a peek though.
Thanks for the update.
Good point RT.
I always target the USA - never even think to mention that your target area will definitely cause fluctuations in CPC. My niches all do better CPC from N. American clicks. Right or wrong the bulk of Advertisers are targeting N. Americans and pay more for those clicks.
Iain,
ecpm is earnings per 1000 ad impressions - I work out my earnings per page views. Just to give me a guideline that is easy to figure out. I have no idea how G counts it’s ad impressions but it doesn’t add up to my stats so I just use page views.
Glad to hear your income is rising - proper attention couldn’t hurt.
Medic,
You’re welcome - so far so good. It’s indexed and climbing the serp’s pretty quick so the domain does have a little clout. Finding a new platform never hurts.
Goodluck
Adam,
Target both the posts and homepage randomly. Also use a variety in your anchored keywords so that the same keywords aren’t used over and over. Your linking should always look natural.
If your post was “Red Widgets” then send backlinks anchored like this;
“how to make red widgets”, “widgets”, what are red widgets”, “what is a widget”, “cooking red widgets” lol etc
All those anchors will build up authority for the main term “red widgets” and “widgets”. If all your anchored keywords/phrases are the same it looks a bit suspicious. Adding a few “click here” and “url” anchors isn’t a bad idea either. Everyone has a backlink that says “here” in the anchor.
Just use common sense when creating links - if it doesn’t look natural to you it won’t look natural to others.
Raymond,
Analytics is nothing more than a stat package - it does have some useful stats for people using adsense. If you fail it won’t be because of G’s analytics.
I will discuss backlinking so much you will all get sick of me mentioning it - let me set the stage and we will get to everything you need to know for making money with adsense.
Splork - nice to see you drop in - you’re late!
and… yes you got to the heart of the matter lickety split. (as usual)
The domain has some clout too - indexed quick and rising in the serp’s pretty fast. (with a little help from my friends… I get by with a little help from my friends… Damn now I have Ringo’s voice in my head! )
I’m sure you’ll have your first post up before I finish this comment
Griz, lets say a marketer (me) totally buys into your ’search vs. social’ approach, linking and everything else including Blogger blogs.
BUT he feels better about monetizing through Affiliate sales and even own product rather than Adsense?
Say I’m a very experienced copywriter and approach it that way instead.
Would there be anything radically different you’d do in that case?
I’m also thinking it would give me a little more freedom as far as page layout and content go. …I’d be interested in your thoughts.
Thanks! (i agree with some others - thats a great looking header!)
Ryan
Griz,
You said:
“I’m thinking “make money with a dating site” might be my next target - after reading the Marcus Frind article on newsweek I think there might be some money in that niche.”
If I didn’t know better, I would think that you have a weird obsession with trying to “make money!”
One of these days, we’ll all do a keyword search for “make money” and the phrase, “Make Money Online With Griz” will show up! LOL!
P.S. - 32 lb cat?! Zowie! Yeah, but like Tobie, the weight is all fur, huh?
You mentioned something that sort of clicked with me… if you earn overage $40 per 1000 impressions, then whether you do it with one site, or the overall aggregate over a bunch of sites it boils down to getting targeted traffic to the ads.
And probably better to keep one site per top level keyword phase.
To your point, the only difference between you and sniping is you target tons of keywords that are niche specific.
When you say you don’t care about cpc when targeting the traffic to a niche, then as long as the niche shows promise, when you average the highs and the lows, that is how you come out ahead then? I am so paranoid about the cpc I avoid certain keyword combinations.
I’m going to start targeting new keywords on some of my sniper sites that get good cpc, and ctr, but don’t have the traffic.
Is this also why you can get authority with PR0 links? you can rank well for the long tail with crappy optimized links, and then all the ranking individual pages that are then linked back to the home page start to have authority and get ranked for the main keyword?
Oh yeah, do you even care about or check the competition for the long tail when you target it….or does the traffic just matter?
I feel like such an idiot. I knew that Today.com was looking for search engine traffic because it would make us money. I did what other people were doing and went with the social traffic.
5 months down the line I need a new plan and should have stuck with SEO from the beginning. I’m a little confused though. Should we be targeting the keywords that are getting millions of hits a day or the ones that are getting thousands a day?
I’ve seen some sites say to focus on the keywords that get a couple hundred a day. That’s a lot of work when my goal is to get 550K hits a month.
What? Only a hundred measly comments!
Slackers!!!
Ryan,
What I’m really teaching is SEO - that’s what I do and Adsense is just one form of monetization I use.
My process for optimizing a site for Adsense is synonymous with optimizing a site for the search engines.
What I’m going to show everyone is how to rank on top of the search engines for whatever keyword you choose - if it’s for an affiliate product or to capture leads - it makes no difference - like Adsense, you have to dominate the serp’s in order to get the traffic first. Once you have traffic you can tweak your site for whatever monetization model you want.
Caro - Mom to Tobie,
Actually it’s not the money - I have authority for the term and as with any niche, once you have some authority you should use it to keep building more authority. There are 10 spots on the front page of Google for every keyword - who said you just have to own 1 spot? Why not control all ten?
Once you rank 1 site on top of the serp’s for a term you can easily rank several more sites for the same term. More sites = more traffic. (and yes - more money! lol)
WordVixen,
aaah… another victim succumbs to the endless comment tunnel - be thankful this hasn’t hit the 250 mark - that’s a lot of readin’ and writin’
Matt,
Your own PR has nothing to do with how well your site ranks. PR doesn’t really count for much of anything these days - ego mostly. I rank well with a PR0 site simply because I have better backlinks than the competition - meaning I have more anchored links from relevant sites than any one else. (including links that come from all my pages - they have huge authority of their own)
As for CPC - yup - I don’t really care what it is. As long as I can find a niche that has traffic I know I will make money if I rank on top.
I don’t pay attention to the competition but you should so as not to bite off something bigger than your resources will allow. I basically only go after the most competitive phrases now - why not - that’s where the most money is. I can take my time and wait 2 years to see a campaign through - most of you will want to see some coin sooner than that.
cmaher,
You might want to start out a bit more realistic. 550K a month is a lot of traffic and will take a while to reach. You should start out targeting keywords that you can dominate in a reasonable amount of time.
The term “money” gets 3 million searches a month - I’m now targeting it but won’t be anywhere near the first page for a year or two. You can start targeting very competitive terms at any time but you should also work on less competitive terms as well - if you want to see money quicker that is.
In General I can make $50-$100 a day in niches that can provide 1000 - 3000 page views a day. I can do it with less but this is a good estimate of the kind of traffic you should be looking for. Whether you can get the traffic with 1 keyword or 100 it doesn’t matter - just get the traffic.
In setting up my blog, I am trying to figure out how to optimize my title and description boxes on my site. I know that I should put my main keyword in my url which I’ve done. How would you suggest, I optimize my title and decriptions of my blog if I am attacking the less competitive keywords that I might be able to have succes with sooner?
It doesn’t seem on blogger that you use the description box but an additional text box. Does it matter?
Also, how much overall search volume would a keyword have to have to generate me 1000-3000 page views per day if you are on the first page, what’s the conversion ratio to your site if you are number one?
The last thing I am wondering is how to link my pages. I link the title of the post to the home page like you recommend. I was considering taking the major categories I want to rank for and make a post for the best keyword and link to it from the main page. Then I was going to make some long tail keyword posts and link it to that particular page. Any link to any pages I was going to use the anchor text that I want that page to look for at least once in my post if that makes sense.
One last question, your conversion ratio of 8-12% is great but I am averaging like 1% using a similar format and so I am scratching my head a little considering I’ve tried to copy your blogs format exactly…
Lot’s of questions…lol;)
Griz,
Thank you so much for taking the time to share your insights with the rest of us. I have been following your other blogs for some time now, and I think I have learned more, than on the rest of the make money online sites combined. I look forward to your future posts with the hope they will fill in some of the “missing links” for me and your other readers.
I really should just get off the pot and get moving with this system. I’ve played around for about six month now, and made most of the usual noob mistakes. (Although I’m only out about $70 or so) Oh, I have made around 1 (ONE) affiliate sale for $90 and about $4.37 in adsense. I know, pathetic, but got to start somewhere.
Again thanks.
Oh, and it looks like you already have a “copycat” right here on today.com. Someone already has another make money with adsense blog up, just simply rewording the content from your first post or two here and passing it off as his. (I’m not going to help him out by posting a link. I’m sure he’ll see this comment though.) Lazy * is trying to get by with only about 1/10 the word-count.
Oh, does us nice posters including your keywords in the comments really help?
JD
Griz,
Thanks for the response. It’s been a lot of help. You post has been a wake up call on what I need to work on.
:blushes: I didn’t mean 550K right now. Just a goal.
OK so I have this great site - which is now regularly one page 1 for the keywords that I targetting
I have now proven that there is hardly any traffic to those keywords 
So I have got my sh**t together and now have a list of 8 kw phrases which do in fact get traffic! The total is around 330 broad match searches a month. These keywords are related to my original kw (which is 2word phrase in my pre-owned domain name) so I am thinking that all is not lost!
The competiton isn’t that great - dominated by people who DO the business not SEO so mainly anchored by their company name.
Question - is it worth it for that sort of traffic - I should point out that if I can get even $20/day consistently from a site I would be over the moon, hell I’d be happy with $10! I figure if the Adsense is crap - I could always pretty up the site and sell advertising to the real-world businesses I am out ranking!
Also should I deep link to the posts which feature each of the keywords I am targetting and then link each post back to the top level url - to boost that page?
Very interesting post and site with good info. I am not setup for Adsense since I have a Today.com blog. What I am curious about as if my blog which is education orientated on the theme of science will draw any traffic for advertisers that are looking for sales. My blog does not show in the search engines unless I key its name in to google search.
LOl. Turns out I have already signed up for Today.com months ago but now that I go to start a blog it says “Public Registration Closed”
Griz, I have a handful of blogs that I’ve had up for about 1-2 weeks. I have yet to see them indexed on G. Could you take a peek and tell me what you think? I do not have adsense on them yet as I want them to get traffic first, per your instructions.
Is the link juice from a blog at #1 SERP position for a keyword that nobody searches with the same as the juice from another blog at #1 for a keyword that gets many searches? Assuming that the two blogs are equal in everything else.
-kenth
“I’m thinking “make money with a dating site” might be my next target - after reading the Marcus Frind article on newsweek I think there might be some money in that niche.”
Seems to me the niche that is just begging to be dominated (and would make a fine offshoot to Make Money Online For Beginners) is “Make Money Online Dating For Virgins”.
There ya go Griz. After all the helpful advice you’ve given me, I’ve finally returned the favour. Happy to help and we’ll call it even.
Hey Griz, your new site isn’t ugly enough! Pretty sly of you to make this one handsome, since the AdSense belongs to Today, not you. I love the ice road pic.
Readers, if you’re new to the World o’ Griz, try to be patient. This stuff is complicated and trying to answer all questions at once will just turn the material into soup. Think of it as a college course, only there’s no exam at the end.
Griz, what’s this I’m hearing about Google only allowing AdSense on sites older than six months? If I had only heard it one place, I’d blow it off, but even Frank said something about it on the Warrior Forum. I’ve gone through the terms of service with a fine tooth comb and can’t find anything about it. If it’s true, is it for new accounts only? I can’t imagine Google telling a publisher who’s had an AdSense account since 2003 that they have to wait six months before putting AdSense on a new site so they can make money online, but I guess stranger things have happened.
I am glad I found your site.I am completely new to blogging.I have a blog on beauty which ranks well for the keywords.I have not added much content but get good organic traffic.Now I have some idea what kind of key words to target.I like your concept that I don’t need to spend a huge amount to start earning online.But what really confuses me is how to get back links without spending money.
Yes it is true.Every where I had read that you start a blog and then put adsense from day one.Alas …….. It is not possible.
Stephanie,
Use your URL, Blog Title and description to target your “main Keyword”
Use your Post titles, Sub Headers and content to target your “long tails”.
The additional text box on Blogger serves as my “description”.
If you do things right your description should show up in the serp’s - write your description in a way that will draw clicks in the serp’s - you want to entice the searcher to click on your listing and not one of the other 9 on the page.
To get the page views mentioned (1000 or more) you need enough keywords ranked well enough to generate 1000 visitors or more a day (could be less if you can get them reading multiple pages but then you have a reader and not a clicker) For my purposes let’s assume page views and visitors are one and the same. To get 1000 page views you need 1000 visitors. (This isn’t exact but go with me for the sake of simplicity)
You could rank well for one keyword that has a lot of traffic or it may take 10 different keywords to generate 1000 visitors. Doesn’t matter - just target enough keywords to generate the traffic. This is why I like niches that have lots of keywords that drive traffic - even keywords that only get 50 searches a day will work if you get 20 of those kinds of keywords ranked. What you don’t want is a niche that only has one or two really good keywords and nothing else that gets searched for. (These keywords would be highly competitive and not for beginners - no money until you dominate the main term - it could take a while.)
When you rank number 1 for a term you will get roughly 40 - 70% of all the traffic. It does vary a lot from niche to niche but you will get the most hits compared to the rest of the top 10.
General linking structure is as follows. Link every page/post to the home page using the post page anchor (the long tail). This will give the home page authority for all the long tail terms that the post pages eventually receive. (assuming you send anchored links to the post pages from elsewhere)
Link all related post pages together - ie. all “cat” posts should be cross linked, all “dog” posts cross linked etc. Your home page “pets” will then rank for “cats” and “dogs” if all the post pages link to it using “cats” and “dogs” etc.
If you are getting a 1% ctr then you may not have enough traffic, or the wrong traffic, or you aren’t leaving the searcher with a question that the ads will answer, your ads aren’t in their face, your site isn’t ugly enough or it is too ugly etc. There are many reasons for low ctr - unfortunately this is where every niche is different and you really need to experiment with layout, content, colors, etc. The first thing is to make sure it is a niche that has people searching for something specific and not just browsing. If I knew your niche I could probably give you a few pointers. It usually comes down to the type of traffic you have coming in and what options you have given them for leaving.
JD,
I have so many scrappers all over the net - if this one is re-writing the posts at least they are doing it right. Lol. I don’t get hung up on it - comes with the territory and I haven’t had a scrapper outrank me yet!
Comments definitely help - the more content you have - the more terms G can index you for.
cmaher,
If you are going to pick a goal then go big! Nothing wrong with that - just have the patience to get there.
CD Rates,
We will be talking about backlinks more than anything else - it is the grease that makes all this work.
Tom G
Lol. Nice use of keywords! What stuffing?
Lis,
Yes.
You answered all your own questions. If it doesn’t pan out you have a nice farm blog that can be used to target a related niche. And you may even sell a few ads or try and convert it to leads if the “businesses” in that niche are looking for traffic - they are
Remember my lead trick - I send some free traffic to a legit business for a week and then contact them - “how much is my traffic worth to you?”
If they want it they pay - if not oh well… back to the farm.
mpaulin,
Start working on backlinks that use your keyword in the anchor and not your blog’s name or url. This will get you ranking for the keyword instead.
If you are talking about your today.com site then drawing advertisers won’t work - I don’t think today.com lets you monetize your sub-domain? Not sure as I’m new here but that seems to be the norm for these free hosts.
Use your Today.com blog to create keyword authority (anchored links) for another site that you can monetize and you can funnel traffic to it as well.
Bruce,
I have no idea what that means re: “Public Registration Closed”
Perhaps are resident Today.com expert… and Hubpage Queen
could help with that…
Lissie….
RG,
I can take a peek - drop your url’s in a comment or email them
brears@mts.net - use “take a Peek” in subject. (There will be a delay in getting back to you - the inbox exploded ages ago)
Mark,
I’m glad to have you with us - welcome and I hope this will help you out.
Kenth,
Real link juice comes from authority sites with keyword relevance to yours.
In other words a PR5 site that ranks for “problogger” has a lot of juice for sending out “blogging” keywords but not much for “cat” keywords. A PR0 “cat” site ranking anywhere would give you a better link for your “cat” site than the PR5 Blogger site.
Think in terms of relevancy and keyword anchors - any link that uses your keyword in the backlink is great. If it has PR even better. If it is relevant to your site, uses your keyword and has PR - Bingo - the best link of all.
You don’t need perfect links though - I can get any site to the top as long as I have enough keyword anchored backlinks regardless of their PR or relevancy. Anchored keywords are King.
Damien,
Even it is! Lol
Thanks Darren,
Welcome and put your reading glasses on - there will be more, more and more… if we ever get out of the comments that is.
Lorecee,
As Frank mentioned G’s new policy is recent and they haven’t really publicized it. Those of us with accounts haven’t been effected so I have no first hand knowledge. I can only pass on what others have told me. If you are a new applicant for Adsense then you need a legit self hosted site with some age - the six month term has been used but I don’t know if that is carved in stone - they may do a manual review and if your site is legit (and not monetized) you may get accepted faster. (just a guess as this would make sense if reviewed manually)
I have not had any problem adding adsense to brand new sites so it appears those of us with existing Adsense accounts have been grandfathered.
Neil,
You can start getting backlinks by joining our Niche Support page (it’s free) and getting to know all your new friends…
Thanks Frank!
This entire post has helped me to understand a lot more about Adsense. I agree that search traffic is a big deal when it comes to your blog. Putting out content that people are searching for and will read is the best way I have found to keep my blog afloat. No matter how many stumbles, diggs or other social networking sites you belong too, search engine traffic trumps them all.
Hi Robin,
If using adsense then you don’t want stumblers and diggers. Search traffic only. Most bloggers want to use Adsense on their “I’m going to get famous” blog and then gripe about it not making them money. There is a reason…
Thanks for the link on your WAH blog - appreciate it and I will be repaying my debts once we get a little juice flowing here.
Thanks again Robin and nice meeting you.
Howdy Griz,
Just thought I’d contribute to the happy throng already gathered and bust the bank with the comments total LMAO!!
Good idea starting from the beginning on a subject that flummoxes many starting out and vexes the best of us from time to time!
Now who said Frank was going after all the beer? I don’t mind sharing 50/50 but that’ll mean none for anyone else…
Terry
Hey Terry,
Man are you late to the party - lying on the beach in sunny Spain huh?
I believe Lis has her eyes on the beer as well - something about waiting for warmer temps though…
Nice of you to drop in - the comments have been a bit sluggish - new site and all.
Griz, this is already turning into an awesome blog, overnight.
I’m planning to use your seo practices for my Blogger blogs so I’m wondering about something.
I want to do affiliate marketing instead of Adsense as I mentioned in earlier post. In your reply to Stephanie, you used an example of needing to get 1000 VISITORS PER DAY to hit certain dollar numbers, etc.
I’m thinking I could be monetizing the sites with with well UNDER 1,000 visitors per day.
In fact, a few hundred would result in pretty good sales if the copy is strong. (and assuming it is ’search’ traffic).
Does that make sense to you? Thanks
Hi Diane,
Yup - I recommend connectcontent. I’ll let RT report on its progress once he sees this comment.
Ryan,
My figures are only for Adsense - and just averages I use to find those $50/day niches.
You can run affiliate products or lead gen sites on a lot less traffic. Every form of monetization does better with more traffic but you can start out with relatively little traffic and grow it.
I’ll vouch for ConnectContent. For $12.00 a month it is a bargain and it is very will managed. It is easy to understand and once you join you will be so busy you probably won’t bother emailing the individual people on Griz’s niche page. I have a reasonable number of blogs but I was able to get about 180 links (and give out that many) in around 2 months.
Griz,
Thanks for the detailed response as that cleared up several things I’ve been wondering about. That’s appreciated alot;) Thanks so much!! And that helps a ton with keyword research to know how much search traffic to get to convert.
More questions…??
I’m reviewing the search terms that people are accessing my sites too and read that you look at those to flush out all the long tails by optimizing posts you didn’t optimize for.
Let’s say I write a post titled: “best cats for kids” and then I see a lot of searchers finding me for “best fun cats for kids” should I then write a post titled that way? Or in that particular case, am I optimized enough? Or would it need to be significantly different?
Can you talk a little about how you target the label in blogger. I noticed that for the most part, it’s narrowly targeted. Is that on purpose? What guidelines do you suggest?
I’ve also wondered about article marketing to my backlinks instead of my main site as well as socially bookmarking them instead of my main site to raise the backlinks authority. Would you do that or do you target all of your backlinks to the main money site?
I’ve learned a ton and am facscinated by the techniques you recommend. Keep it up!
Steph
Stephanie,
Read my new post SEO 101 - Backlinks - just wrote it. It answers most of your questions. Leave a new comment if I missed anything.
Hey Griz,
I still can’t figure out how you have time for your ‘real’ work when you keep starting sites which draw so many demanding readers ;-).
Speaking of which, I have a question about ’search traffic’ … I have an adsense site which gets a good amount of its traffic directly from a few ezine articles which rank in the serps than the adsense site itself. I am guessing that they found the article through a google search … but since my site with adsense is one site removed from the original search, will the traffic be seen by google as targeted search traffic, or is there something I should be thinking about changing so that I don’t jeopardize revenue potential (which is small at the moment, but it’s easier to experiment when the stakes are low
Thanks again for putting in the time to redo adsense theory from the beginning.
Grizz,I want to follow your method of monetization with adsense.
Do I need to post in the “Niche Support” to get back links?I had sent an email to one of them for three way link but got no response.How do I begin? If I get a few links and reach at least PR3 I will be in a position to provide useful back links to other members.And another thing.Since adsense requires a blog to be at least 6 months old before one can use adsense do you think I should open a few blogs on related niches so 6 months down the road they can be used for back links as well as for adsense?
Griz, RG here. FYI, I sent you an email (brears@mts.net) with “take a Peek” in subject….
Griz, I thought you’d get a kick out of this.
I just ran across a thread in a big marketing forum about how to turn your blog into a business opportunity and produce big revenue.
I just copied some of the posts from these blogging ‘experts’.
- Content is king, The more great content, the better.
- At least 4 good, quality posts per week. Also, try having other bloggers guest post once in a while.
- Hosted blog only - You have no control over a free one. It’s like building your business on squatted land …
- Make sure your posts are readable by actual humans, not just SE spiders. People will only come back for things they enjoy reading.
-Make sure you burn feeds so it makes it easy for others to keep up on your blog and subscribe to it.
- Use blog carnivals to increase your exposure and back link count.
- One blogger ‘expert’ ends by saying “Thats my 02 cents”
After reading and absorbing lots of your great stuff, I just had to laugh at how the blind can lead the blind, and so confidently. LOL
Maureen,
I tend to generalize a few things in order to avoid confusion. I say that you only want search traffic but this isn’t the only traffic that converts well and is targeted. I say “search engines only” because you can’t go wrong with it.
Some social traffic is targeted (bookmarks to an extent), some referral traffic is targeted (your article traffic for instance - people using keyword anchored links on other sites as well) and you will do fine if drawing traffic from the right social sources. The problem is mostly with stumbleupon, digg, entrecard, sphinn etc. This is the worst traffic for getting you smart priced - useless for making money.
Neil,
I think that was you I’ve added to the niche support page. Just keep emailing others and respond to those contacting you. Some will agree and some won’t.
It looks like you need an aged site to get an adsense account. Once you have the account you won’t have to wait six months for each new blog to age - just the first one. I add adsense to new sites all the time but I already have an account.
Ryan,
Thanks. Lol.
I see the same noob comments over and over again. Blogger’s teaching other Blogger’s how to get worthless traffic. Six months later they quit - no money.
I avoid forums as they are full of confident know nothings…
Yes ,Griz………..That was me. Thanks.How can you give away so much information free and answer each individual comment?You are awesome Griz.
Thank you Griz, you’re entirely right. I was thinking about my question again after I posted, and I realized I was asking the wrong thing. Of course, as far as traffic is concerned it doesn’t matter where it comes from as long as they click, and in the end they convert. If that’s the case, then it was targeted. So that’s something that I can test and figure out on my individual sites.
Here’s what I think I was trying to figure out, but asked the wrong question … whether the cost you are paid for a click on a particular ad can be affected by the relevance of what the user was searching for in relation to what your posts are targeting. ( I think I need to go back and re-read your post on properly optimizing for your keywords).
So if it does make a difference - ie if the search term, post keywords, and ad relevance all match perfectly you get paid the most, but if the search terms and the ad relevance don’t match up, you may be paid less for exactly the same ad … then the question about ezine traffic is, can google figure out the relevance if they came from an article? Might this traffic, even though they have a good CTR and/or conversion, might it affect the cpc because there was no clear search engine term?
Sorry for rambling. Hope this makes sense. You know, I take the ‘don’t over analyze, just do it’ advice to heart … but during those times when I can’t get my fingers on my keyboard to type more articles or get more links (like when I’m supposed to be sleeping) these questions just haunt me.
I just found this site from a link that Lis put up on the Today.com forums. I went back to the beginning of your site and have been reading each post, including ALL of the comments, and already my head hurts, LOL!!! I’m glad I am starting with this site instead of your “big” one, because if this one has an overwhelming amount of information, I can’t imagine what your well-established site has got.
Actually, I should clarify - the posts themselves are not overwhelming, it’s all of the comments asking questions using phrases I’ve never heard before. I’m trying to suck it all in. ::thinking sponge thoughts::
But what you are saying makes ABSOLUTE sense. I had honestly not thought about social traffic vs search engine traffic before. I have spent a lot of time working with social traffic sources like Digg, EntreCard, and Reddit, and I realize now what a waste of time those are.
I have been blogging for several years and even managed a small blogging network for a company for a while, but I have to say that you’ve taught me more in the last hour than I learned in all of that time. Wowsers!!!!!! I feel like my head is going to explode, LOL!
Thanks again for the great information, and I will be back. I have already subscribed to your site so I get an email when you post (yes, I am one of those darn readers instead of clickers. ;-))
Can’t wait to keep learning,
Havs
PS Bruce, if you really want to start your Today.com blog up again, send an email to support@today.com and ask them pretty please. They would probably do it for you, especially if you came up with a good reason as to why you got sidetracked and didn’t start with them right away. They kick people out of the system who do not blog for 30 days straight, FYI…
Havs
ah ha … (to save you some typing, no need to repeat what you’ve already covered very well)
From adsense optimization tips:
“The ad says “Make Easy Money Online”. Most of my traffic - about 75% find my blog searching on Google for the term “make money online” or a long tail version of that term. If one of my visitors clicks on the ad they are most likely looking for what the advertiser has to offer and even if they don’t buy, Google can charge the advertiser full price because the visitor left a “make money online” trail.”
I’m guessing the answer is that google can’t as clearly see the trail if most of the traffic comes from ezine. So, my next job is to get my site bumped up above the ezine articles so they get the direct traffic.
is it possible to only have adsense within certain posts instead of on every page on a blogger blog? I’ve tried changing the code to work inside a blogger post maybe 20 times and I’m stuck with adsense on the main template so it appears on every single page which sucks bc most of them don’t get any organic traffic.
Hi Maureen,
Sorry for the delay (too many threads on too many posts and of course I’m lazy!)
Yes - the more targeted the traffic the better the CPC. If the traffic is from Ezine Articles there is still a trail. If the article was about cats and they found your cat site then all is good. If the article was about cats and your site is about “Arctic Cat” snowmobiles - not good. G can see the trail the visitor took to find you - as long as every thing is copacetic regarding relevancy you should be fine.
Hi Hava,
If there are terms you aren’t familiar with just ask - we tend to take things for granted and need a reminder to clarify once in a while.
I’m glad the site has struck a chord and hope you find it useful. Social traffic is fun to have but it rarely pays the bills.
Thanks for the kind words and don’t be shy if you need help.
Artur,
Nice to hear from you and thanks for the support. Hope you find this site useful!
Mark,
I’m afraid Blogger isn’t the same as a self - hosted site. One of the limitations is that it really is only 1 page and therefore whatever is added to the template will show up on every post page. ie. No you can’t remove ads from 1 post page and leave them on others.
If the posts are not getting any traffic you don’t have a problem - if they get lots of social traffic and no search traffic then you do have a problem and will likely be smart priced if the social traffic is clicking ads. (They usually don’t though) If it is a lot of social traffic remove adsense from the blog and see if your earnings improve on your other sites (assuming you have more). If the traffic is minimal I wouldn’t worry about it. (or if that is your only adsense site - don’t worry about it either - a little CPC is better than none)
Thanks for the great information. I am a beginner to blogging and this is very useful to me. You have made it clearer for me to understand. I have an Adsense account, but have never understood it fully. I feel I know a lot more now.
I look forward to your future posts.
Christianna : )
Mark,
It is reasonably technical, but you are able to display/not display widgets on certain blogger pages depending on their type (ie home page, archive pages, post pages). I haven’t found a way to limit the display for specific post pages, but I’m still looking
This post describes it well … http://www.bloggerbuster.com/2008/06/display-elements-only-on-home-item-or.html .
Not exactly what you were looking for, but perhaps you might find it useful.
ps - that’s my .02 cents for configuring blogger … you should still listen to Griz for advice about what you should do to make money on your site
Thanks Maureen,
Coding is not my forte - lol
I have an adsense account that I got in summer 2008 to be in Vic’s contest. So it was used at that subdomain and now adsense has been removed from that subdomain. I don’t have my adsense account in use at all right now. I do have a couple of indexed blogger blogs that I was going to build into adsense sites but got sidetracked and they have only a few posts on them but they are long posts and full of related keywords. Should I just throw adsense on one of them to keep my account alive…..maybe G will deactivate me cuz I dont use it?
DianeS
Hi Griz, i have a question for you.
Say i’m running several pages on the same subject to promote some site with backlinks.
What would be the effect of adding adsense on those sites in addition to the ads displayed on the main site?
Is this something normal to do?
PS: i’ve been reading your sites for a while now, just never posted, you already have tonns of people asking you questions, so i figured i’d spare you some time
PPS: Thank you very much for all of the information you provided, i hope your income keeps to a steady (or exponential!!) increase
What about sites like hubpages or http://forums.digitalpoint.com/ that offer an adsense revenue share program? Do my own sites get smart priced if these sites get smart priced? Thanks,
Hey Grizz,
Still getting used to you having a blog over here now and haven’t had a reason to join in the discussion until now. I have recently experienced what I am convinced is smart pricing on my adsense ccount and when I searched for some insights into it guess which result was ranked #1 on page one of Google? Yep this post, so I thought ‘heck, why not maybe ask about it here since this is where such searches were intended to go, right?’ (saying that, however I will understand if you think that my query is too far ahead of what you are dealing with here right now)
I was wondering, if you are smart priced and realize this and pull adsense off the offending blogs, how long before your other blogs stop suffering from it? I ask this because for me pulling adsense off all my blogs and waiting before putting it back on only my ’safe’ one a couple of days later seems to have not made any difference; I am pretty sure my remaining blog was only guilty by association but is still smart priced. So, would aweek without adsense be long enough to wait or will it take longer to shake this effect?
Any thoughts on this are appreciated.
Hello again.
I just came across your advice to someone about how to deal with smart pricing on their account over in the comment section of your flagship MMO blog; you suggested waiting a week after pulling adsense and then adding back the more reliable blogs one every few days to see how it goes. Guess that is what I should try. (fingers crossed)