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.

Maybe its because I am drugged up with my cold or maybe its because I am an idiot but I think I may have spotted one of my dating sites that isnt converting and may need some attention fairly quick…

I hope this makes you chuckle as much as it did me

OK so dating affiliate program paying $21 per lead, traffic from a spam method and some organic traffic redirected through…

They state that there worst affiliate ever converts at 1 lead in every 180 profile views…..

My stats this month

2561 profile views

1 sale

Woooooooooooooot

The 1 sale shows me the link is valid the 2561 shows I’m an idiot

Thats gotta rank up there with when I forgot top add the adsense onto a site with 60,000 pages indexed in Google and a PR5 front page….

Have a good new year and may all your sites convert better than that one!

Well I have decided that I am unhappy again with the stats that i have been recording from my Adsense / Affiliate sites. It seems that every few months I decide that what I did last time was silly and that I should change them.

This time I am going for a more integrated Dashboard style report where I can get a conclusion from the one page and also I would like to move towards some central KPI’s (Key performance indicators) so i can track the whole network in one go.

For example KPI’s like Total Pages Indexed in G | Burn rate | Inbounds to Index | etc etc

Many of you know I was banned from the Adsense program last year but in fact I had two accounts banned at the same time. The reason for this is that despite what you read our friends over at the plex do monitor how and where you log into your account from. The ONLY reason I had two accounts banned at one time is that I had logged into Adsense from the same IP, no other reason.

I also know of other people who had accounts banned for the same reason (In fact I know someone who had a relative banned for using his pc to check his Adsense). This got me thinking so IF i was still doing Adsense i would: -

Make sure the PC i applied from or created my Google account from was ‘clean’
Once approved login from that clean PC and set up custom reports
Have these reports email you at a free email address with your stats once a week (Hello hotmail!)
Never Ever Ever login again

You don’t need to check your stats every day – once a week is enough. I’m am with Quadzilla on that, you can get too paranoid and check them every two minutes but day to day changes aren’t what you need to track its longer terms trends. In my opinion Google turn the tap on and off when it suits them.

A clean PC is defined as new IP, new location, no chance of it being used by someone afterwards to log into a Google service.

If you do this you should minimise your risks of getting the new account associated with the old and therefore banned too. Never say never though.

One thing that might have occurred to you when reading this is – “Yeah but how do I get new advert codes or set up channels?”

Advert codes – its standard code just find a site with an ad on you like and change the PUB Id
Channels – Googles channels blow anyway – either write yourself an ad tracking and serving system (It ain’t that hard trust me) or just install and use Adlogger.

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don’t….

OK well if you must..

• There isn’t an easy way to make money with Adsense, in many ways it can be as hard and as frustrating as any other money making procedure
• Content generation isn’t the hard part at all. To be honest as long as its unique most content will do for starters. TRY to provide some value to the visitor as you will last longer and you will therefore make more
• Good page titles mean good ad targeting
• don’t bother with section targeting – its bollocks
• Make sure your internal link structure is very very clear, you want to get crawled and indexed as quick as possible
• Build in batches and if your brave interlink between sites in the same batch (Never cross link between batches)
• Don’t flood your sites with links, the engines will index based on very few well placed links, if you can use your own network to get the bots in rather than having to go and ‘get’ links elsewhere
• If you have to go and get links make sure that you do it ethically and provide value for the link they give, 100,000 yes I agrees is not smart in my opinion
• Don’t over optimise the sites, be loose and natural
• Don’t do anything that can get you banned
• Remember you should have done this 18 months ago
• Learn PHP at least
• Never use someone else’s template
• Css might make a site look different but from a spiders viewpoint its the same code
• Get the cheque it feels better..
• Never believe what people tell you they earn – if they tell you then its a lie (Reduce by 80% minimum)
• Clean your keyword lists religiously – you don’t want bad words in there
• Strip out the words where you are wasting your time and where you wouldn’t provide value to the advertiser (There is NO point at all creating pages for terms like ‘bad debt’ or ‘Viagra’ your just wasting everyones time
• Make sure you can control your adverts remotely so you can: -
• Turn them off when you need to
• Monitor and control who clicks and when
• Ban people or ip’s that may be trouble
• Swap them out where it makes sense or if you get banned
• Get good stats
• You know which advertisers you are sending clicks to (You never know how useful that could be)
• Don’t rely on the money from Google
• Don’t do anything that would piss off the normal user (The boy scouts on the other hand will always get pissed whatever you do so meh)
• Turn off the advertise on this site link
• Play with ad formats and placement to get the best CTR
• Don’t try to game Google
• Never use an off the shelf content gen
• Watch what you use and what it does
• Make sure you know how you got indexed and formulate a plan to repeat what worked

I hope thats useful, some may argue with parts but its a good grounding i think.