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.

I just wanted to say thanks, thanks to all the people who provided the quotes you now see on the sidebar of this blog.

For years I have worked with the name SEOidiot and part of that is down to my general opinion that I am in fact an idiot…

When you ask people like DaveN, Jason, Joost, Rob, Ralph, Julie etc to give a quote you never expect them to say quite what they did.

I need to start showing that confidence in what I write here too

Well its that time of year again where we all plan what we are going to tackle this coming 12 months…. sigh…

For this blog however we are going to see a change in the content.

Most of my personal ramblings will head off onto Posterous
This blog will be far more focussed on the following subjects: -

Practical SEO
Guides, tips, advice

Experiments
Some fun, some serious

And above all…

The business of making your living online

Automation
Outsourcing
How to’s

Anyway.. Thats the road we are headed on this year

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

Spent the last weekend at the fantastic Thinkvisibility conference. It was great to catch up with a few people and great to meet some more new friends.

As a conference I think @thehodge has got it just about right, its a great mix of the social and the useful. Not too big an event and enough time and opportunity to meet nearly everyone.

Some people I met: -

Yoast
Name checked me as the guy who drew his avatar for him, resulting in everyone turning round and looking at me even though I was hungover enough to chuck my guts up at any second.

Photo from Caius

Great presentation as ever though and id like to thank Yoast for the cufflinks he brought me.

Jay Butler
Great to catch up, now permanently fixed as my Rum and Wasabi partner

Judith Lewis
Great to catch up with Judith and she delivered a very polished presentation as ever.

AlCarlton
Creator of the awesome Conference Calendar as well as a bunch of other sites. I like Al, he fits with my long history of having and being friends with people who enjoy an ‘adventure’

Chris Garrett
Finally got to chat

Bony Toad
Stephen is a great chap, always has been. He actually made me snort when, sat next to me, he posted this twitpic

Kieron Donoghue
Great to meet at last, keep up the good work with Share my playlists and keep on nagging me to stop tweeting whilst we drink.

Tim Nash – A great session on profiling (Which I am doing a separate post on Tim and thats why I havent written this bit until now sigh )
Hobo Seo – great to chat Shaun
Mr Scott Jones and Ian – probably as drunk as I was
Anthony from Bronco
And Lindop – as ever good to see you mate

Everyone else I have forgotten as im an Idiot

And of course Dom and Mrs Dom (soon enough) for putting on a great conference.

How Gumtree spam nearly made me a TV star

A Year in Adsense Stats - Some statistics from one batch