I have had a lot of people asking me questions about my Adsense flat since I posted the pictures a while back.

It should go on the market at around £90,000 in a few weeks so we are just getting it ready for sale.

New carpets due in, hall to be decorated and some cosmetic work left to do.

Heres a quick video of what it looks like, not much of a place but a nice little flat for someone retiring to the seaside here…

Adsense Flat by SEOidiot from seoidiot on Vimeo.

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A few times recently I have mentioned that I am preparing to sell my ‘Adsense Flat’ to friends and people always seem surprisingly interested in what my ‘Adsense Flat’ actually is.

A few years ago it was possible to create a decent amount of money from Google Adsense adverts simply by automating the creation of websites and because it was automated you could work out ways to scale the whole thing.

How it all worked

Register lots of .info domain names

Regfly at the time had their ‘Super Fridays’ where you could buy domains in bulk via their API for just $0.99 a piece – we used to get between 2-500 each time

Shove them all on one or two VPS hosting accounts

They were in fact all served by a single index.php file on the box, we dynamically determined the requested domain and then served the cached content into a set theme

Create a system that goes and gets content from somewhere

It doesn’t matter how we got this content but it was pretty poor spider food at best if I am honest

Get it indexed

All sites in a batch were cross linked and just 1-3 inbound links from elsewhere would be enough to get the sites crawled and the majority indexed

Place Adsense on the sites

The clicks were tracked and any site that we sent enough traffic to got contacted for a direct relationship

Await the site being de-indexed

I used to track ‘burn rate’ as a KPI of how long the domain remained indexed for (My KPI was the time between full crawl and 75% de-index)

Then repeat this again and again using the keywords that worked well

Heres a post from 2007 showing some stats from one batch

Why it stopped working as well

Well Google decided that the lack of value in the sites they were allowing us to make was in fact more harmful than profitable so they embarked on a tirade of banning people for spurious reasons (I eventually reached account number 7 and Google still owe me £8.5k that they will never pay)

How much did people make and what did they use it for?

Here is where I am different, many people made good money. Here is a screenshot of one of my Adsense accounts from the time (NB its actually a scan of a printout I made and kept on my office wall for a while – That account is banned now like so many others….)

As you can see thats $9,000 in 30 days

Most people spent the money on better computers, cars, gadgets and in one memorable case a year long holiday across the globe

I however invested some of mine in a flat in the nearby coastal town of Cleveleys

Here is the listing from www.houseprices.co.uk showing what we paid for the flat (There is no mortgage on that property)

And here is a screenshot of where it is – handy for a paddle in some brown freezing water

Its a one bedroom flat and has a retired lady called Veronica sitting in it as our tennant.

The plan was always to use the capital from the sale of that flat to eventually clear our main house mortgage.

Veronica has taken up an offer now to move into one of the many many houses owned by my mother and father in law so we will be selling it slightly earlier than intended but that all depends on what interest we get in it when it goes on sale.

Here is the place she is moving to – they dont look much these places but its ideal for a retired lady, easy for the shops and always in demand

So thats really the story of my Adsense flat, I do miss the easy money where the script was the money maker.

I have moved to outsourced teams and affiliate nowadays, whilst that doesn’t mean that I need to work much harder it does mean you have to manage much more.

2010 I will be making more time to get back to generating cash away from the client work.

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As the bright light of a new decade streams through the bedroom window to suddenly focus what now appears to be an acute case of hangover I wanted to post this advice.

Normally at this time of year the net is suddenly filled with predictions posts and tweets (I even considered making a Twitter web app where you could add filter words to remove any tweet that contained “prediction”)

Rather than make any pointless predictions myself I would rather just share some commitments and plans for the coming year. This is a task that I would normally do at this time of year anyway.

2009 Goals

1. Move to entirely self employed (Done – March 09)
2. Diversify income as the first stage in long term plan (Done)
3. Start a new business with a friend (Done – Kerboo)

And my 2010 Goals are

1. Sell my Adsense flat to nearly clear my main mortgage (1st / 2nd Qtr)
2. Get Kerboo to 500 customers
3. Make 80% of my income location independent

And the sub projects for this year are all around the theme of

AUTOMATION

AUTOMATION

AUTOMATION

We have a 3 week trip to California planned in for August this year to look for somewhere we can relocate to (Planning for 2012 ish)

Heres the incentive for that…

Have a great 2010, make sure you have a plan and that you ACTION it

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Having just read the interview with Matt Daines of Twellow I decided to go check out the site.

Im not sure how useful the site it to be honest, it all seems a bit 1998 to me.

If you are looking for a way to find people who you should follow I still think that both seeing who your friends follow and using the excellent Mr Tweet service to find people who you should really pay attention to is better.

I was amused to see that they obviously used my profile to have their site guess what category I should be in. As an ‘Adsense Farmer’ I should obviously be in ‘Agriculture’

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I miss the old days of creating made for Adsense sites then sitting back and watching the free money roll in. The reason most of us had to slow down from doing that was that Google started banning accounts for very soft reasons and taking all the money back.

But today they opened up a new way for us to get free cash…

Google have announced that they have opened up their Adsense for Domains to normal publishers

And now ill show you what I will be testing so you too can have some free Google cash…

One of the reasons why Google may have banned accounts in the past was that the traffic didnt have any referrer (so Google didnt know where it came from) or it took a spammy path to get to the ad page.

Now Google lets us chumps in their Adsense for domains programme we have some advantages again: -

They expect ‘undeveloped’ sites so we dont have to have anything other than a crappy holding page with reference to the domains subject
We dont have to create crappy MFA style content anymore
Many people reach parked domains through a simple type in method – thats where people type in something like “cheapcarinsurance.com” in the address bar rather than searching for it.
So we can ‘gather’ our traffic from any crappy source (spam spam spam) and then as long as we clean off the referrer we make it look like type in traffic

So heres the plan
Have a look through your domains or buy a new domain like iwantacheapmortgage.com
Put a parking message on the page that includes the line “i want a cheap mortgage”
Add Googles Adsense for Domains code.
Hope their targetting doesnt blow as much as it did
Send traffic from any spam you can through a page that ‘cleans’ it

I would also keep your CTR down to something low for a while as Parked domains will have a really low CTR – we will have to find the level that gets us in trouble..

Let me know how you get on but thanks to Google we are back in the Adsense easy money game..

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Times are hard and they look like they will be getting harder for most people. Spammers however have some advantages over the rest when times get hard: -

The click based spammers (Adsense, AFF ppc offers etc) don’t suffer the same problems as those selling a physical product as they don’t actually have to sell anything. They get paid for the simple action of a ‘click’

Even if you are skint you can still window shop and click.. They also have the advantage that they aren’t tied to a product or service so swapping out to an alternative offer is pretty painless, as long as there are advertisers they will prosper.

I think that there will be advertisers throughout any downturn as it remains one of the most measurable ways to spend on advertising there is.

Those spammers who have created networks to promote a set niche will have to do some adjustments it seems but they are often in a position of power where they can sell their cheaply gained traffic to the highest and most desperate merchant.

Spammers often also have the luxury of being able to earn a living whilst the spam adds to what they earn, giving them security and making the downturn less painful.

So if your feeling the credit crunch fire up the spam and ride it out.

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SEOidiot is the name I got saddled with a long time ago and its too late to change that now…. My real name is Paul Madden and I live in Lytham in the UK.

When people ask me what I do for a living normally I reply “Spammer”

I work with a variety of clients across a mix of disciplines as well as owning the market changing distribution business KerBoo Limited.

If you want to follow me I can be found at many places including as a Mod over at the Blackhat Forum Syndk8.net and of course you can join the banter with me on Twitter as @seoidiot

Someone actually recognised me from this once!

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It amazes me how much you learn about real world SEO from doing web spam. Many people seem to think that building or promoting sites for the corporate world is an entirely different game than making a simple spammy site for adsense or afiliate but for me the lessons you learn from spam apply across all that you do.

The main reason I believe this is that spam is SEO in the real world, its results driven work and it gives you feedback far quicker than long term client work will ever do.

These are some of the things that spam teaches you that have applications within safer SEO: -

Any more you can think of ?

No related posts.

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Many thanks to everyone who commented with suggestions on what I should write about this year, heres some of those suggestions and my responses / commitments for the coming months: -

Dave said:
Off the top of my head, you could show us an old example of one of your TV show sites. Just something a US newb like me could learn from.
Always, always, always: relevant traffic generation. I don’t care if its whitehat, gray, black, or blue.

I would love to run through an example – let me see what I can put together.

Chris said:
That is pretty much the stuff that anybody wants i guess. but that just shows that there are not so many good articles about it.
here it comes:
a step by step description of what you would do to start a simple project.
something like,
- where do you get your keywords and how do you choose them
- do use any tools if so which ones?
- …
i would really appreciate something like that.

I think a starter post on how I decide what to go after and how I choose things would be good too

Jason said:
I’ll take advantage of this since I got your email and normally I don’t bother with emails, but I thought I would give it a shot.

1. Adsense Targeting. I know people hate Adsense for the most part and tell you to get away from it, but I mostly build grayish white sites and can do them fast. However, I have problems with adsense getting me the right ads, even with a site/page fully optimized for a set of terms.

2. Keyword selection. I’m looking for some good tips. I pull my keywords from about 17 different sources with my own PHP script, but I am looking for the good keyword examples, like keywords with “buy, store, discount, coupons, etc.. ” What are the best “trigger” words to go with your keywords

3. Sites or ideas that: make money quickly ( fast burn ) vs. sites that make money long term and examples. This should be a weekly series. It would be awesome to follow someone each week was they do a “fast money site” and a “long term money site” and explain the differences of each.

4. Traffic. Whats the best places in general to get traffic ( drop links )? Please don’t be like everyone else and say ‘relevant authority sites’, what about a list of “here are some generally easy but good places to quickly drop a link” and why they are good ( indexing or traffic or link juice ).

Whoa thats a lot to go at there Jason… but some really great ideas thanks.
Adsense targetting – think I have covered that before but I will happily go over it again with some examples of it in action.
Keyword selection – tough one but I will do my best to work out what works for me and share that. Trigger words is more of an Aff thing in my opinion and targetted niche is more of an Adsense thing.
Fast v Slow – Yeah would be nice to put some numbers against these I think – whats fast and why, how fast is a fast burn. When building slow whats the timescale to start seeing some results? etc etc
Traffic generation – I hope to do some examples of traditional traffic v new social methods.

Chris said:

Hey,
I’d be more interested in hearing about the administrative side of your campaigns/link building.
What procedures do you have in place for tracking and logging all your link related data etc.

I have a bit of a stats habit I am afraid and I use simple data extracts and Excel to crunch the numbers. I would however love to do some posts about link aquisition and specifics on thinsg like link volume and pace as I know that I differ there compared to most people doing this type of thing

Garrett said:

I’m interested in hearing more about tips/tricks for automating tasks. For example, favorite scripts or tools that make your daily webmaster life easier (ie. link building/checking, competitor research, keyword development, etc.).

Maybe ill try to put together some simple scripts that could be used for that and also share some simple tips on where to get the data and how. Id also like to do some tutorials on scraping from a basic perspective (Watch for the Esrun taking the piss comment below – he knows how crappy my code is!)

Dink said:

When are you gonna do another Matt Cutts link juice cartoon?

Yeah I should do a few more link baits cartoons, maybe someone like Calcanis next time ?

Remember if you have any specific requests – get in touch

Thanks to you all again, some great ideas for me to go at there – look forward to writing the posts now!

Paul

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I know its against Googles TOS but I couldn’t give a flying fish what they say. What I thought I would do is show you a snapshot from one batch of sites over a full year and discuss some of the ways in which I worked to get these results.

I often have debates with people over instant messenger where they tell me that you cant make money at Adsense any more and that Google ban too quick now. I hope this illustrates its still possible to operate if you are careful…

I have also become jaded by people telling me what’s possible to profit from and what isn’t now – this post has helped me focus on what I will be doing in the coming year

I track each batch that I do and track the following stats: -

Number of pages crawled

Number of pages indexed (3 Main Engines)

Number of days X % of the pages survive in Google from first full crawl to deindex (What I call ‘Burn Rate’)

Indexing methods used

Uniques

Page views

Clicks

Revenue

Where each click went (Remember that you should really only be selling your traffic to Googles Adsense program till you can determine what affiliate program to redirect out to – here’s my post in Affearners on the subject of how to move from Adsense to affiliate)

My normal way of working is to create a batch of sites in a niche and share indexing methods etc to get them indexed. I would normally wait until that batch gets de-indexed by a certain percentage then create a new batch with different templates etc in the same niche – Remember domains die keywords dont! For this example I decided to replace one site per month and run them independent of each other so my stats would span a year of normal data.

Just to note some things before the stats -

My burn rate was on average 41 days for this batch so I replaced one site per month until month 10 then stopped.

My CTR for this batch was 13.26% on average which is about 4-5% lower than my normal for MFA crap.

The sites where plain text with one adsense ad block and links disguised via css.

The content was crappy mfa spider food padded out with generics to get the keyword and topic balanced.

The niche was Tea’s used for Slimming (I went as vague as I could)

Also just to note – you wont be impressed with the earnings here, a little over $2150 in 12 months from 32 domains.

I decided that for the best illustration of long tail made for Adsense work I wouldn’t spam the sites beyond getting them indexed. So this example shows that I bought 32 domains at a cost of about $70 (24 at first and 1 per month) , shared hosting at around $100 for the year and my time (2 hours initial setup and 20 mins per month to add a new site in)

So with 4-5 hours total work and $170 I made a profit of around $1900 ish

Yup I know there should be a $ symbol not a £ on the earnings but MEH

OK heres the stats.

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