How I make 15K a month at AdSense

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/adsense/42980-how-i-make-15k-month-adsense.html#

by AndrewWarner • 17 years ago

145 83 17 years ago

I posted it because I think some of his methods can be used by any site.

I totally agree. His article starts out feeling like a "get rich quick" scheme, but what he does is to create a reasonable quality site in a short time. All along he promotes it using low cost methods.

The linking strategies he employs could be used by any website. I think one could use these strategies to start any number of websites.

Edit: last sentence didn't make sense so I fixed it.

jasonkester2• 17 years ago

Not really. The linking strategies he talks about will likely get your site removed from Google's index. That's part of the cost of doing business for guys like this, and it's why he maintains hundreds of Made For AdSense sites. He knows that he'll lose a certain percentage of them every month.

This sort of thing would be suicide for a site you actually care about. As a startup, having your website de-listed by Google is pretty much guaranteed to kill you.

tocomment• 17 years ago

The free blog one sounds like a good idea. Would that get you google-banned?

critic• 17 years ago

> it's why he maintains hundreds of Made For AdSense sites

But doesn't Google know who the owner of each AdSense site is? Eventually, they have to send him a check, after all. And if someone owns a lot of these AdSense sites, doesn't this raise any flags?

tptacek• 17 years ago

This sounds suspiciously like A Real Job.

AndrewWarner2• 17 years ago

It really is. That's why I don't understand why he wouldn't channel that creativity towards a business that has more meaning. Still, he he won't, you and I can by learning from him. Seems like a smart guy.

cookiecaper• 17 years ago

Why would he? This is essentially passive income -- a more traditional business requires more traditional hours and workload. If you have an automatic moneymaker, you don't trade that in for something you have to tend to.

noodle• 17 years ago

why couldn't he do both? having a less meaningful job that you use to fund a more meaningful but lower paying one is a common solution.

vchakra• 17 years ago

I dont understand why you would call this a business that doesnt have much meaning. Hes basically a more modern version of newspapers, and magazines. They hire editors, and content producers, pick topics of interest, and make money off of advertising.

So from my perspective hes just a smaller scale Rupert Murdoch.

3ds• 17 years ago

It is a real job, but if he makes that kind of money every month it's quite alright. I assume that he could stop doing that and it would still pay off for quite some time.

russell2• 17 years ago

Sure makes sense to me. Spend a year or two building a business that returns $10-15K a month. I then have a choice of continuing to build my income, pulling a Tim Ferris, or putting it into maintenance mode and working on something for the fun of it.

abossy• 17 years ago

$15K/month * 12 months/year= $180K/year. Not a bad paying job, either.

greyman• 17 years ago

Yes. But there is one principal difference - the money will continue to flow even when he stops doing it.

run4yourlives7• 17 years ago

I think that's the kicker - he's providing a real service!

People are looking for this information. He's providing it for them. The fact that he's choosing both what topics to provide and is not personally an expect and outsources is really more a product of an intelligent business operation that it is a nefarious idea.

This actually sounds like something that could revolutionize modern media really.

cedsav7• 17 years ago

He's not providing any useful service. He's taking traffic and ad revenues away from legitimate sites while providing low quality content, which wastes people's time (hence they navigate away clicking the only links available: ads).

joe_the_user• 17 years ago

Remember the guy who was loudly complaining that google suddenly changed its algorithm and his site, which was nothing but an auto-generated directory, suddenly was excluded? Good for them.

Despite providing some ways for folks like this operator to partly game the system, Google has been on the for-front of forcing sites to have something of unique value in order to reach top ranking.

Ardit202• 17 years ago

Yeah, doing what he says might sound like a real job, but doing what he does is probably fun. Why would anyone who is making 15k a month tell others how to make 15k a month for free! I don't see business people going around telling others how do to business for free. I mean literally he is giving away "trade secrets".

Well, that is the illusion of course as most probably he does none of that but sit in his chair and think up ways of how making money through adsense may be done and turn it into awesome sounding language with plenty of cliche and then get plenty of posters saying ohh thank you you are my god I love you so much and most probably hardly any of them will implement what he said and if they do they will prob not make as much as he says cus the work sounds very time intensive.

wmeredith5• 17 years ago

"I don't see business people going around telling others how do to business for free."

Sure you do. Just look at this website. Or Signal vs. Noise or your local SMBA or Chamber of Commerce...

johns• 17 years ago

The first part is interesting. The second part is lame (link sharing/spamming, albeit manual spamming, but still spamming) but necessary to pull it off.

ObieJazz• 17 years ago

Seems to me the second part is only lame because he's doing it strictly to make money. If he were doing it for a more creative project it would just be self-promotion.

chmike• 17 years ago

This is basically what some paper journal or even book editors do. It is just a bit unexpected and new on Internet. As long as everybody in the ring wins, I've the impression that it is Ok.

Thought if the rational is just to give what people are looking for and want, with just enough quality and pertinence to remain undetected from google's garbage detectors, where could this lead us ?

sadiq• 17 years ago

Something I wondered... where do these adsense keyword lists actually get their data?

Surely it's something google keep pretty close to their chests?

gojomo4• 17 years ago

Google provides a lot of this data to advertisers -- so they bid for more word combinations.

Even though Made-For-AdSense microsites are polluting the infosphere, in the short term they probably even make Google money. Overstuffing natural results with repetitive, poorly-written information? Great, you're more likely to click a paid ad instead! Making it so all the top 10 natural results are AdSense-holding pages? Great, no matter where you go, you might click a Google ad!

run4yourlives7• 17 years ago

Making it so all the top 10 natural results are AdSense-holding pages?

Actually, that's probably the one area Google won't go for, but it results in a smaller pool of people to make money off of, as consumers can't get the right answers to their questions.

The key needs to be high-quality content delivery. Without that, you leave yourself vulnerable to being banned.

sidsavara2• 17 years ago

Actually, Google has an Adwords tools which allow you to estimate what it would cost you to run an ad.

IIRC, that has estimated Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Thousand (CPM) columnns, along with estimated impressions and a sweet API to pull it all together.

Many people estimate Google takes a 20-40% rip from the advertiser, and gives the adsense guy the rest of the payout. So from that you can estimate what the adsense ads pay.

alain94040• 17 years ago

How much Google takes is not confidential, you can compute it from their SEC filings. Would you believe that they take 70% of the advertiser's money, and give back 30% to the site owner?

jasonlbaptiste• 17 years ago

You can automate a lot of this once you get the hang of it down.

The spammy part kind of sucks. I would say, if you're going to do this, at least make sure there's useful content. There's nothing wrong with that. People search google for information, they click an ad or find you organically. If you've given them good information, then it's not spam, but actually something useful. Sadly, this ideology isn't the adopted norm.

russell2• 17 years ago

I was intrigued by the $8 for a 500 word article. Some commenters were complaining that it was too expensive, but when I compare that with my consulting rate for my writing, it's a real bargain. I wouldn't farm out a technical article, but it makes sense for consumer oriented ones. I would spend more than that on coffee while I wrote.

EDIT: does anyone know what the going rate for a well written 500 word consumer article from a US/CA/UK based writer would be? Back in the days when I was using PR firms, it was quite expensive.

coglethorpe• 17 years ago

Oh, they go lower than that, but you're not getting the kind of "quality" you might normally think of. It is more geared toward SEO and often in broken English. Using the acai berry theme, here's what you might get:

Acai Berry Supplement

When looking for an acai berry supplement for weight loss it is very important that you choose a good acai berry supplement. Acai berry supplements vary in quality so one might not supplement your diet with acai berry the way you expect. Look for a top-quality acai berry supplement that has acai berry taken from the Brazil acai berry trees fresh.

Ardit202• 17 years ago

Yes, but looking at the way some people behave in forums it makes you think people are really stupid :)

So probably someone reading that article, one of them stupid people, which seems to be many, will think wow that article was so amazing it really helped me out lol

wmeredith5• 17 years ago

Yeah, but that crap gets penalized by Google and it's no good at generating links organically because it is, in fact, crap. Laying down good money for quality content that will naturally attract long-tail links and traffic over time will pay off in the long run.

mikeyur• 17 years ago

I have a couple friends who are freelancers (as well as myself) that do consumer-based articles. For a good 500 word article you're looking at $25-40, depending on the writer and topic. With a tech/gadget article you may only need to pay $10 for 500 words, but if you get into health/sports/fashion/whatever other topic, the prices go up a bit.

modoc• 17 years ago

The key "trick" that he's using is to have unique, relevant, helpful content. That's the whole secret, imho, to good SEO ranking (obviously using the right tags, keywords, etc... helps).

He's just doing it backwards from what you and I would do, i.e. he's finding ad money, and building a site based on that, versus building a site, and then working on building traffic (ad based or not, you want traffic).

wmeredith5• 17 years ago

He's working smarter not harder. Finding a market and then delivering what they want, which is old news in business. He's just being tech savvy about doing it online. Most entrepreneurs build something they want. He's building a products that he has empirical proof someone else wants.

run4yourlives7• 17 years ago

I wonder if that alone is worthy of a home based business?

He's done all his real work in qualifying markets to attack. If you did this then sold it to the zillions of people who want to make money with blogs, you might be on to something, and save yourself the google rath.

axod• 17 years ago

Here's another you've probably never heard of.

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=345974

(Guy owns some websites you've likely never heard of, not getting masses of traffic, but he knows how to do PPC and make money).

The thread is from 2005, and at that point he was spending $300k a month on adwords, and making a ton more from affiliate networks including adsense. (Attached bank statement screenshots)

I did the same for a while (Ad arbitrage), and got up to about $2k or so profit/month, but as odd as it sounds, it didn't really seem fulfilling. Probably the lack of contact with real users etc.

There's money in this 'advertising' thing though ;)

curej• 17 years ago

What's a good place to start learning about this, if you wanted to try it out? The site you linked to?

I have a suspicion I would suck at this or would not be willing to stick it through long enough to be successful - sounds like a lot of busywork - but I'm definitely curious to know more.

Shamiq• 17 years ago

hm...if it's "busywork" you'd think it would be computationally tractable.

That, would be interesting.

utnick• 17 years ago

sounds pretty shady... in the seo industry its impossible to know whats real and whats not

it wouldn't surprise me if this article is just a clever advertisement for this guy's article writing website

callmeed• 17 years ago

I think there's some really good lessons about SEO that startup founders can take away from this. Namely:

- Relevant, well-written, and keyword-laden content on your site is important

- Getting links to your site is important

- Getting links with good anchor text is even more important

- Having keywords in your site's browser titles is important

igorgue• 17 years ago

I like the "donate to an opensource project" thing :)

mcxx• 17 years ago

yes goglebots can read keywords with OCR in your site logo images

Can somebody confirm that? I have never heard about this before, seems cool.

cedsav7• 17 years ago

I was surprised too. I don't see why Google would spent cpu time on this, and I can't think of a way one would be able to validate that claim.

gojomo4• 17 years ago

why Google would spent cpu time on this

CPU time is cheap, and it could be useful ranking information. Compared to an H1 tag, a graphical header is harder to create, so it shows a certain level of investment.

If the words in the graphic aren't repeated elsewhere in the page, then the page author may be naive in the ways of SEO. But that could be good, because the savvy SEO people are all trying to pull one over on the GoogleBot.

weegee• 17 years ago

Sometimes I do a search on google, and roughly half the results are meaningless gobbledegook. Clearly these results are this kind of project. It makes me wonder what percentage of websites are just revenue-earning sites with absolutely no useful real-world content. Like a newspaper or magazine with 50% of its pages taken up by advertising.

cedsav7• 17 years ago

I can't really blame anyone for making money on what is essentially arbitrage, but the bottom line is that they add no value to the system and they make it harder for legitimate sites to get advertising revenues (by preempting traffic and ad $$).

hardik• 17 years ago

In theory, arbitrageurs will arbitrage away the gap until the margin revenue outweighs the cost. So, in a sense arbitrageurs are good for the markets as they bring them closer to "perfect markets".

As far as adding value bit is concerned, if the articles provided are worthwhile to users, then some value is created. (Although I feel very strongly against the idea of creating spammy blogs that he advocates.)

cschneid• 17 years ago

Meh, I don't even care about the spammy blogs. They aren't there for human consumption, and will never get enough links to be visible to humans.

The articles on the real sites are custom written, and he pays a small premium to decent content. (8-12 per it looks like), and in theory are researched a little bit.

He's creating value, then marketing it. A tiny bit spammy w/ the blogs, but it doesn't really hurt anybody (ie. humans won't see the spammy blogs).

imp2• 17 years ago

Just guessing, but this might be his Acai Berry website:

http://www.acaiberryproducts.org/

#4 result for "acai berry", lots of small articles, and tons of AdSense.

3pt14159• 17 years ago

If that is his site, then I don't really have a big problem with it. The information was semi-alright and it looked legit enough (although there were a-LOT of google ads).

mattm• 17 years ago

Google only allows 3 ad's per page and that is what is used. The page length is very short so it could be that a higher percentage of the screen is ads than other sites. Still, it comes nowhere close to magazines which are probably more than 50% ads.

emilis_info• 17 years ago

You know what's funny? I don't see a single Google ad on this site.

NoScript extension for FireFox is wonderful. I got so used to it, I forget how many ads I used to see on websites.

Sorry for offtopic :-)

imp2• 17 years ago

Is this a veiled advertisement for adsenseheaven.com? His whole strategy is based off of that data and you have to pay at least $10 for the list of keywords.

wmeredith5• 17 years ago

He's probably an affiliate, but he's not blowing smoke. This method works. I suspect he's not afraid to tell people about it, because it's a lot of work.

wmeredith5• 17 years ago

This is not "black hat." He's web developer. That's how he makes $15k a month with adsense. As a web developer outsourcing content creation and working his ass off on low cost SEM. You can do it, too!

fatbat• 17 years ago

Does anybody else see an opportunity from the interest of the other posters?

On a seperate note though, how does the top keyword provider mine the google trends data without Google flagging their IPs, etc.?

How I make 15K a month at AdSense

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