The AdSense Advantage - Day 4

"The Right Way To Really Make Big Bucks With Your AdSense System"

As you now know, the first order of business is to find the most profitable niche.  Then, to make the most money with AdSense, you need to get your Click-Through Rate (CTR) as high as possible.  It doesn't matter how much traffic you have or how high your Earnings-Per-Click (EPC) is if people aren't clicking on the ads.

In our last lesson, the only way that I know for certain that those optimizing strategies work best is because I’ve personally tested and tracked each one.  Since you’re reading this lesson, you’re obviously interested in building your online market stream to as large as possible. 

And if you’re in this game for the long-run, then you need to make sure you’re treating it like a true business.  In any marketing endeavor, there is one pinnacle rule that must be followed…

Track and test every marketing strategy that you implement. 

You've got to keep track of the results that ALL of your marketing endeavors bring you.  Do you honestly think Starbucks doesn’t test and track which promotions are out-performing others?  Of course they do – and you should to!  In your testing, you want to focus on those marketing events that are bringing you the best Return On Investment (ROI).

Even if you don't spend a dime on marketing your AdSense website, you still need to track click-through rates, which ad formats are out-performing others, how your visitors are coming to your site, which ad placements are working best, and even which content building efforts are working best for you.

So how will you go about testing and tracking your AdSense sites?  The way I look at it, you have two options.

1. You can use the reports that Google provides you inside your AdSense account to keep track of a few important stats.
   
   
2. You can use the reports that Google gives you AND use tracking software that tells you the statistics that Google won’t ever reveal.

The reports that Google provides will tell you what's going on.  They’ll give you information on page impressions (how many times your ads have been viewed), the number of clicks, your page click-through-rate, and your earnings. 

This is all VERY important information.  And you should definitely keep notice of it, but these reports don’t really show you how to improve and make more money. 

Personally, I prefer and highly recommend the second of the two options for testing and tracking your AdSense.  The reason for this is simple – you can still access Google’s free information whenever you need to, and you can track everything you NEED to know about the AdSense clicks and traffic you are receiving.

What do I mean, “everything you NEED”? 

Let me just say this… Google doesn’t give you everything you need.  They give you everything THEY want you to know.  Just like any other business, Google wants to earn as much money as possible. So the less money they pay their publishers (YOU), the more money they get to keep for themselves.

It makes perfect sense for Google to do this. By keeping you in the dark about their secret stats, Google continues to roll in millions of dollars every single year.  In Google's shoes, it's a no-brainer. There's simply no reason for them to release it to you.

But the good news is that there’s a way to get the information you NEED. The software is called AdSpyTracker.  It’s what I’ve been personally using for quite some time now, but I thought I’d go ahead and release it to the public. 

Remember what I said about testing your ad formats, colors, placements, etc…? 

If you didn’t use AdSpyTracker or another tracking software, you wouldn’t be able to easily test this.  You would have to go into your Google AdSense account, set up channel after channel for each domain and page you want AdSense on.  Then, you would have to manually keep track of which ads are running on each website.  Then, you would have to access the reports from Google and display your channels individually, and then try to make an ‘educated’ guess on which ads are performing the best. 

It sounds like there’s a bit too much guessing to me.  There’s not much solid substance there and I’m never a fan of all the manual, tedious work of keeping track of my AdSense channels through Google. 

So… that’s why I use AdSpyTracker to track my ads.  If I want to check which ads are performing best, I just open AdSpyTracker, look at all of the domains and pages individually OR all on the same page.  Then, I can track…

	The click-thru rates of every page on every domain that I have, which in turn tells me what kind of content is generating the clicks. So I build more of that content and I’ll make more money.
	Which ad-format, color combinations are getting the most clicks and highest CTR.  It will improve my bottom line by telling me the click-thru rates of all formats on your domains. If a particular format is working better than the others on a domain, then I change all my ads to the better format.
	Which search engines and keywords to optimize my sites for.  It breaks down my AdSense click-thru rates by referrer, by search engine and by search engine keyword(s).  It answers the vital profit-building questions: Which search engines should I optimize for? Which keywords should I optimize for on Google, on Yahoo, on MSN? What kind of sites should I make link exchanges with?
	The EXACT ads that are being clicked on my sites.  With this information, I can alter some of my content to optimize for the highest paying and most clicked ads on my site.

If you don't want to use the same AdSense tracking software that I use, that's perfectly OK. BUT... I highly recommend you use some kind of AdSense tracking software, in addition to the slim-pickings that Google already reports to you.  This will put you so much ahead of most all other AdSense publishers.  Without tracking your ads, you’re basically making guesses on why, how, and what is affecting your click-through rates.  There’s no reason to guess when there’s tracking software that ‘gives you the goods’. 

You should be vaguely familiar with this formula because I talked about it in an earlier lesson.  If you remember, the AdSense-Site Formula looks like this…

High EPC + High Click-through Rate + Content webpages + Tracking your AdSense stats = AdSense Profit

You’ll notice that we’re almost there.  The one thing we haven’t talked much about is generating many content-rich pages that will essentially make up your AdSense sites.

With AdSense, you don't want to sell a one million dollar "click"; you want to sell a million ONE-dollar "clicks".

Why? Because it's much easier to get somebody to click on an ad that pays you a little for each click than it is to convince somebody to buy an expensive product. But to make it big using this method, the AdSense formula, you need targeted, content pages.  

There are a few ways to go about this.

1.      You can write the content yourself.

2.      You can buy public-label-rights (PLR) content and rewrite it.

3.      You can ‘borrow’ content from article directories.

Ideally, the best thing to do would be to create a website with 100% totally fresh and unique content that you’ve written yourself.  This will ensure you will not get banned from the search engines for duplicate content penalties. 

It's good to write your own content (such as writing a regular column in your website's newsletter or something of that nature), but if you started writing all of the content for your targeted niche topics, you would drown the second you had to expand beyond 1 or 2 sites. So creating all of the content yourself becomes a major problem. 

So – what I recommend you do is use all three strategies. 

The key is to mix and match various content sources. You don't want to create hundreds of sites with just duplicate content as a long term goal, because even if it was OK today, it doesn't mean it will be tomorrow. Today’s myth can be tomorrow’s reality. 

John Reese (who earned over $500K in one year with AdSense…no joke!) recently said:

            “THE DUPLICATE CONTENT FEAR IS A MYTH.  Okay, let me clarify something else before people start freaking out.  No, I am not talking about just creating tons of spam pages or scrambled content or whatever crap.  But what I *am* saying is that you can get plenty of traffic using content that exists on other sites -- like articles, news stories, etc.  Some of the largest and most trafficked sites on the web are CONTENT AGGREGATORS.  They don't publish very much "original" content.  BUT... you should ALSO add your own unique content to your sites to add more VALUE to them.”

Use duplicate content and use it a lot, but just try to fold it into a big stew of other content sources. 

According to one of my successful marketing friends: 

“Duplicate content is like a powerful spice. It can easily add some quick flavor, but if you use too much it will overtake the taste of the rest of the meal.” 

You CAN make decent money with AdSense by following basic fundamentals of SEO.

Your first few AdSense sites will teach you a lot about the "what’s" and "how’s" of building your virtual real estate.

It is critical that you learn from your successes as well as your mistakes.  In time you will develop your own system of how to build VRE sites, based on advice you got here, elsewhere and from your successes. 

Obviously your approach will change if you're analyzing a site that's already up and running, but you get the idea, right? Use these keys to critically evaluate your niche.  I'm sure you'll find something that a) you can improve almost immediately and b) will result in increased profits.

That does it for today.  But before you put this lesson away, go back and review the AdSense formula and start thinking of some ways that you could automate some of your VRE-site strategies. 

Keep in mind while you review each lesson that a ‘true’ VRE site has multiple streams of income – and doesn’t just rely on AdSense.  From now on, think of your websites as ‘VRE sites’ rather than ‘AdSense sites’.  This will help you remember that you should incorporate more than just stream of revenue on your sites.  Rather than being simply ‘AdSense sites’, they are your virtual real estate.

Once you’ve developed your system, it’s essential that you discover a way to automate as much of the process as possible.  Obviously, you won’t be able to automate everything, but you’ll be surprised to find out what you can set on auto-pilot... And you’ll find out in our next lesson! 

All the best,

Matt Callen
Internet Marketer

www.HyperVRE.com