
How I make 15K a month at AdSense - AndrewWarner
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/adsense/42980-how-i-make-15k-month-adsense.html#
======
modoc
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).

~~~
wmeredith
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.

~~~
run4yourlives
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.

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russell
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
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.

~~~
wmeredith
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.

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

That, would be interesting.

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

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

~~~
llimllib
Does it matter? If it wouldn't today, it might tomorrow. If you care about one
site, you can't take that risk. He can because he has hundreds of sites to
risk.

~~~
vulpes
Replace free blogs with tech buzz and publicity from established blogs and its
exactly the same thing in eyes of google. This would never get you banned.

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tptacek
This sounds suspiciously like A Real Job.

~~~
AndrewWarner
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
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.

~~~
fredBuddemeyer
yes but its putting considerable time and intellect into a very vulnerable
asset. google inevitably changes the way it does things and then its time to
start over. and with each keyword he is competing with passionate and
dedicated people (the winning side of any war is filled with these) that view
their efforts as something more than a hack or arbitrage.

~~~
icey
I don't understand the logic that says you shouldn't do something because what
your doing today may not be possible a year from now.

In the meantime, this guy is pulling in a pretty healthy paycheck; I would
assume he will be better prepared than most to handle any changes that come
up.

~~~
fredBuddemeyer
think of it terms of option value. its relatively cheap to invest talent into
something with bigger (as a function of time) payoff. when you make the point
he is talented you are right, this makes the discrepancy in option value
larger.

~~~
icey
That clarifies it for me, thank you.

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

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

~~~
sidsavara
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
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?

~~~
sidsavara
On _average_ you are correct

For an _individual click_ it varies.

[http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/10/21/google-adsense-
givi...](http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/10/21/google-adsense-giving-
publishers-average-of-78-revenue-share/)

~~~
falsestprophet
Well those figures are the opposite of gp's. Google passes on between 75 and
79% _to_ publishers.

------
callmeed
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

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jasonlbaptiste
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.

------
imp
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.

~~~
wmeredith
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.

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imp
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
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).

~~~
emilis_info
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 :-)

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utnick
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

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chmike
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 ?

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wmeredith
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!

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

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johns
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
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.

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mcxx
_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.

~~~
cedsav
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.

~~~
gojomo
_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.

~~~
cedsav
CPU time may be cheap, but Google has billions of page and images to index. If
they were able to extract text from images, they'd probably use it for their
image search. I'm also not convinced that the header image is a good indicator
of relevancy.

~~~
gojomo
Tens or hundreds of billions of pages -- but many, many fewer images. Images
repeat across a site, and change much less often than text. Header and
navigational images are easy to pick out and also relatively easy to OCR.
(These images are not trying to be inscrutable, like CAPTCHAs.)

Further: Google has an intense interest in OCR, adopting the open-source
'Tesseract' project, spending millions on scanning first catalogs then books
and journals, and most recently announcing they are OCRing bitmaps in PDFs:

[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/picture-of-
thousand-w...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/picture-of-thousand-
words.html)

Finally: any reasoning based on Google being miserly with cycles is going to
be wrong. (They invest a lot in efficiency, yes, but that's so that they can
spend cycles freely to collect data.)

It's possible they ran an experiment and found text in embedded/header images
was no better than inline text. (I doubt they would find such a thing, because
generally indicators of sustained effort -- careful design, site longevity,
good writing -- are also indicators of site quality.) But there's zero chance
the CPU cost or scale deterred Google from testing the idea.

~~~
derefr
Just one additional reason, to add to your own: the original intent of
YouTube, as I recall, was to OCR _video_ for search indexing, which was a lot
more complicated and processor-intensive than even OCRing pictures. Google
_bought_ YouTube; obviously this tech, laying about somewhere in their
archives, came with the acquisition.

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fatbat
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.?

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cedsav
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
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
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).

------
weegee
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.

