Apr 13 2009
Throwing My Hat into ‘Made for Adsense’ Game
Since I started expanding my website porfolio back in 2005, I have pretty much stuck with the same strategy. My intention has always been to provide websites with good quality content that are actually useful to people. I’ve always taken a lot of time to construct and research them and usually spend quite a lot of time on making them look nice, just for kicks. In short, while making some money is always the ultimate goal, it’s important to me that I also provide useful information in a well prestented way.
But building large, content rich websites isn’t the only way to make a buck online and, up until now, I’ve pretty much ignored all of the other possibilities. After learning how much a fellow web marketer earns with Adsense on one of his simple websites, I decided to see if I could make it work. I’ve done a bit of keyword research in a similar niche but totally different geographical area and came up with a bunch of site ideas and found plenty of available domain names.
I registered one a couple of days ago and after a solid day and a half of work, I’ve got a site that is ready to go live. The site isn’t purely made for Adsense as it actually provides useful information, just not that much of it. The site is small at 20 pages, it’s simple, and the only way I plan to monetise is with Adsense. I will post the URL and give a report on how things are going in six months or so.
My web marketer friend and I both agree that sites can take anywhere from six months to two years to get anywhere and the key is to produce and wait (with a bit of link building thrown in here and there, of course). I’m not expecting much from this site for the next six months to a year or maybe even longer, but when Google starts to warm to it (and they always do) I think it could become a nice little earner with Adsense.
I’m going to create a few more small sites based on keyword research with the same long term goals in mind, get them online and forget about them. I’m in no way going down the ‘100 sites making $1 each a day’ road, but I would eventually like a handful of very small, no maintenance sites to compliment my bigger ones.
My earnings seem to be going down instead of up so it’s time to start exploring some different strategies.
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I've been travelling since January 2008 living off earnings from the web. Follow me as I bum around Asia and beyond, getting up to mischief and working online as I go. 
Sounds like you got a good game plan going on there : )) I made a couple of similar sites about 2 yrs ago, and they are still pulling in decent money without any work on them — definitely enough to pay off the yearly domain renewal and server hosting.
if you cant get ur site on the top #5 of the first page in 3 months, u are doing it wrong. You might not be able to get some of the more short tail traffic associated with your site that soon but the keyword you are going for should be a sure thing if you picked the right keyword.
is this ur friend with the goldfish site? cause I am coming after that term lol. though i haven’t done anything with the site yet but once i get around to it, im gonna take that #1 spot
I just got into the top 5 for a short tail keyword after 6 months…it took me 2 to get #1 on the longtail.
point is….read the griz and courtney tuttle if this is how you want to go…they will show how to rank
and it does take links…
LOL it is the goldfish guy but that site makes little in AS I’m also rolling out update 3 bigger & better for the goldfish site soon so you will have to go some to take away my rankings
I have to disagree with you on long tail vs main keywords if you do it right & your main keyword / domain name is a popular term you will get long tail traffic fairly quickly but may not get on the map for your main term for many months.
Ok my bad i see you wrote short tail, these i agree will also take time.
LOL -you going over to the darkside Kirsty? Diversification of sites and affiliates has to be important in this economy.
Good to hear pktan! I’m hoping for a bit more than covering my hosting and domain costs but the not having to maintain your sites thing sounds good to me.
Matt I do ok ranking as it is without really knowing why but I keep meaning to read those guys. Ranking for long tail keywords has never been a problem, usually within weeks. I am actually ranking with Google for a really good transportation-related term on my London Olympics site after under only a week which is a nice surprise. That page has zero inbound links besides the ones coming from within the site so, as always, that’s confusing.
A battle of goldfish sites sounds interesting. My new site certainly isn’t goldfish related so you guys are on your own on that one.
Lis ya… I’ve always sort of thought of it as the dark side but I’m only going over a little bit. If the site does well (plus another similar one for a different city that I’m working on now) then it might change how I look at this business. Time will tell!!
I think it’s good plan Kirsty. I do well with Adsense on a variety of sites. As mentioned above link building is key. It is even more important than content.
Looks like competition in the goldfish niche is hotting up! Glad I’m not a player there.
Kristy, you often see a bounce with new sites. my travel site hit #3 then got bounced down until I built links to it. It’s now #2 for the term. But eventually u need links. it’s great you can get up there with onsite seo but in the end if you want to stay on top of what will become a hot niche, ur gonna need links.
goldfish guy- i actually have 3 goldfish sites on page #2 without doing anything. I see the CPC is shit but since i made the site, i figured i might as well go with it now..
Kirsty time for a forum
[quote]link building is key. It is even more important than content.[/quote]
Content will allways be king with out it you can build links to your hearts content and go nowhere create decent content the links will take care of themselves naturally as they are supposed to.
If you figure out how to monetize goldfish as a term let me know happy to work with you & help you can contact me any time you wish.
OK, I exaggerated for effect there a little bit. But only a little. It’s a rare thing for content to to do the work for you. If you want an example of world class content and not much online exposure or traffic. Take a look at lot of Conde Nast sites. Pathetic online traffic with great content and great looking sites. They still don’t understand the net, that’s why individuals like us can still out compete big corporations.
[…] Google Adsense - $251 - Adsense rebounded from the month before when my main site was on a brief ban for bad behaviour. I really feel like Adsense is underperforming though. I am hoping my two new sites will push this up but it won’t be for several months at least. […]