How I make 15K a month at AdSense | Hacker News Reader

How I make 15K a month at AdSense

blackhatworld.com

145 pointsAndrewWarner83 comments

The key "trick" that he's using is to have unique, relevant, helpful content. That's the whole secret, imho, to good SEO ranking (obviously using the right tags, keywords, etc... helps).

He's just doing it backwards from what you and I would do, i.e. he's finding ad money, and building a site based on that, versus building a site, and then working on building traffic (ad based or not, you want traffic).

He's working smarter not harder. Finding a market and then delivering what they want, which is old news in business. He's just being tech savvy about doing it online. Most entrepreneurs build something they want. He's building a products that he has empirical proof someone else wants.

I wonder if that alone is worthy of a home based business?

He's done all his real work in qualifying markets to attack. If you did this then sold it to the zillions of people who want to make money with blogs, you might be on to something, and save yourself the google rath.

I was intrigued by the $8 for a 500 word article. Some commenters were complaining that it was too expensive, but when I compare that with my consulting rate for my writing, it's a real bargain. I wouldn't farm out a technical article, but it makes sense for consumer oriented ones. I would spend more than that on coffee while I wrote.

EDIT: does anyone know what the going rate for a well written 500 word consumer article from a US/CA/UK based writer would be? Back in the days when I was using PR firms, it was quite expensive.

Oh, they go lower than that, but you're not getting the kind of "quality" you might normally think of. It is more geared toward SEO and often in broken English. Using the acai berry theme, here's what you might get:

Acai Berry Supplement

When looking for an acai berry supplement for weight loss it is very important that you choose a good acai berry supplement. Acai berry supplements vary in quality so one might not supplement your diet with acai berry the way you expect. Look for a top-quality acai berry supplement that has acai berry taken from the Brazil acai berry trees fresh.

Yes, but looking at the way some people behave in forums it makes you think people are really stupid :)

So probably someone reading that article, one of them stupid people, which seems to be many, will think wow that article was so amazing it really helped me out lol

Yeah, but that crap gets penalized by Google and it's no good at generating links organically because it is, in fact, crap. Laying down good money for quality content that will naturally attract long-tail links and traffic over time will pay off in the long run.

I have a couple friends who are freelancers (as well as myself) that do consumer-based articles. For a good 500 word article you're looking at $25-40, depending on the writer and topic. With a tech/gadget article you may only need to pay $10 for 500 words, but if you get into health/sports/fashion/whatever other topic, the prices go up a bit.

Here's another you've probably never heard of.

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=345974

(Guy owns some websites you've likely never heard of, not getting masses of traffic, but he knows how to do PPC and make money).

The thread is from 2005, and at that point he was spending $300k a month on adwords, and making a ton more from affiliate networks including adsense. (Attached bank statement screenshots)

I did the same for a while (Ad arbitrage), and got up to about $2k or so profit/month, but as odd as it sounds, it didn't really seem fulfilling. Probably the lack of contact with real users etc.

There's money in this 'advertising' thing though ;)

What's a good place to start learning about this, if you wanted to try it out? The site you linked to?

I have a suspicion I would suck at this or would not be willing to stick it through long enough to be successful - sounds like a lot of busywork - but I'm definitely curious to know more.

hm...if it's "busywork" you'd think it would be computationally tractable.

That, would be interesting.

I posted it because I think some of his methods can be used by any site.

I totally agree. His article starts out feeling like a "get rich quick" scheme, but what he does is to create a reasonable quality site in a short time. All along he promotes it using low cost methods.

The linking strategies he employs could be used by any website. I think one could use these strategies to start any number of websites.

Edit: last sentence didn't make sense so I fixed it.

Not really. The linking strategies he talks about will likely get your site removed from Google's index. That's part of the cost of doing business for guys like this, and it's why he maintains hundreds of Made For AdSense sites. He knows that he'll lose a certain percentage of them every month.

This sort of thing would be suicide for a site you actually care about. As a startup, having your website de-listed by Google is pretty much guaranteed to kill you.

The free blog one sounds like a good idea. Would that get you google-banned?

I run one of those free blog hosting sites the author mentioned, and have to spend a few minutes each morning deleting a dozen new blogs from people that took that guy's advice. Please don't add to my workload.

But yeah, linking from bad neighborhoods is pretty much the best way to get removed from Google's index. Blog hosts that allow spam are considered bad neighborhoods.

Does it matter? If it wouldn't today, it might tomorrow. If you care about one site, you can't take that risk. He can because he has hundreds of sites to risk.

He's just speeding up the ranking process with the free blogs though. His sites would get the traffic eventually because they are so tailored to the topics at hand.

If I were to do this I'd measure the risk/reward of trying to speed up the growth rates, but everything he did previously is probably good enough.

Replace free blogs with tech buzz and publicity from established blogs and its exactly the same thing in eyes of google. This would never get you banned.

> it's why he maintains hundreds of Made For AdSense sites

But doesn't Google know who the owner of each AdSense site is? Eventually, they have to send him a check, after all. And if someone owns a lot of these AdSense sites, doesn't this raise any flags?

This sounds suspiciously like A Real Job.

It really is. That's why I don't understand why he wouldn't channel that creativity towards a business that has more meaning. Still, he he won't, you and I can by learning from him. Seems like a smart guy.

Why would he? This is essentially passive income -- a more traditional business requires more traditional hours and workload. If you have an automatic moneymaker, you don't trade that in for something you have to tend to.

yes but its putting considerable time and intellect into a very vulnerable asset. google inevitably changes the way it does things and then its time to start over. and with each keyword he is competing with passionate and dedicated people (the winning side of any war is filled with these) that view their efforts as something more than a hack or arbitrage.

While that's a good point, Google would basically have to remove adsense to have any measurable effects on this business.

These aren't worthless placeholders, they're valuable collections of decent information. He is speeding the ranking process a bit, but that would come eventually.

It doesn't seem like he is spending that much time to accomplish this kind of income. He IS handling the interesting parts(data mining the google data.) and outsourcing the boring/time consuming bits of writing the actual content.

I don't understand the logic that says you shouldn't do something because what your doing today may not be possible a year from now.

In the meantime, this guy is pulling in a pretty healthy paycheck; I would assume he will be better prepared than most to handle any changes that come up.

think of it terms of option value. its relatively cheap to invest talent into something with bigger (as a function of time) payoff. when you make the point he is talented you are right, this makes the discrepancy in option value larger.

That clarifies it for me, thank you.

why couldn't he do both? having a less meaningful job that you use to fund a more meaningful but lower paying one is a common solution.

I dont understand why you would call this a business that doesnt have much meaning. Hes basically a more modern version of newspapers, and magazines. They hire editors, and content producers, pick topics of interest, and make money off of advertising.

So from my perspective hes just a smaller scale Rupert Murdoch.

Too many newspapers today are just publishing tons of stuff from the wire and then writing one or two local fluff stories to go along with the local sports scores and grandma's bragbook.

It is a real job, but if he makes that kind of money every month it's quite alright. I assume that he could stop doing that and it would still pay off for quite some time.

Sure makes sense to me. Spend a year or two building a business that returns $10-15K a month. I then have a choice of continuing to build my income, pulling a Tim Ferris, or putting it into maintenance mode and working on something for the fun of it.

$15K/month * 12 months/year= $180K/year. Not a bad paying job, either.

Yes. But there is one principal difference - the money will continue to flow even when he stops doing it.

For a while, yes. But not forever.

I think that's the kicker - he's providing a real service!

People are looking for this information. He's providing it for them. The fact that he's choosing both what topics to provide and is not personally an expect and outsources is really more a product of an intelligent business operation that it is a nefarious idea.

This actually sounds like something that could revolutionize modern media really.

He's not providing any useful service. He's taking traffic and ad revenues away from legitimate sites while providing low quality content, which wastes people's time (hence they navigate away clicking the only links available: ads).

Google's fault.

There's an assumption that the articles that he's having written are of low quality. It's possible that they might not be, and might be informative enough for users to find out what they might be looking for.

At $8 a pop? I expect they're complete drivel.

I found this site as a "sample" of SEO writing from the guy he links to. Seems to be high enough quality to me.

http://www.businessaviationtraining.com/

That's not a made-for-adsense site. It's heavy on SEO, and looks indeed like high quality content, but for a different purpose. The content on a made-for-adsense site is designed to look good enough to fool Google, yet not helpful enough so the visitor has to click on a ad link to find something better.

99% of the web is low quality drivel, often wrong, misinformed and uneducated opinion pieces.

If he was writing all of that content himself would you still have a problem? If not, then what makes him any different than any other two bit blogger - you (presumably) and I included?

If outsourcing is your problem, then that's another story altogether. The provider he linked to seems to output relatively high quality pieces. One would suppose that you could get a refund on your $8 if you really were dissatisfied.

Everyone in the media/blog industry write with an eye on optimizing advertising revenues. The difference I guess is how much you care about what you write and how much you care about your readership (your integrity if you will).

Remember the guy who was loudly complaining that google suddenly changed its algorithm and his site, which was nothing but an auto-generated directory, suddenly was excluded? Good for them.

Despite providing some ways for folks like this operator to partly game the system, Google has been on the for-front of forcing sites to have something of unique value in order to reach top ranking.

Yeah, doing what he says might sound like a real job, but doing what he does is probably fun. Why would anyone who is making 15k a month tell others how to make 15k a month for free! I don't see business people going around telling others how do to business for free. I mean literally he is giving away "trade secrets".

Well, that is the illusion of course as most probably he does none of that but sit in his chair and think up ways of how making money through adsense may be done and turn it into awesome sounding language with plenty of cliche and then get plenty of posters saying ohh thank you you are my god I love you so much and most probably hardly any of them will implement what he said and if they do they will prob not make as much as he says cus the work sounds very time intensive.

"I don't see business people going around telling others how do to business for free."

Sure you do. Just look at this website. Or Signal vs. Noise or your local SMBA or Chamber of Commerce...

Something I wondered... where do these adsense keyword lists actually get their data?

Surely it's something google keep pretty close to their chests?

Google provides a lot of this data to advertisers -- so they bid for more word combinations.

Even though Made-For-AdSense microsites are polluting the infosphere, in the short term they probably even make Google money. Overstuffing natural results with repetitive, poorly-written information? Great, you're more likely to click a paid ad instead! Making it so all the top 10 natural results are AdSense-holding pages? Great, no matter where you go, you might click a Google ad!

Making it so all the top 10 natural results are AdSense-holding pages?

Actually, that's probably the one area Google won't go for, but it results in a smaller pool of people to make money off of, as consumers can't get the right answers to their questions.

The key needs to be high-quality content delivery. Without that, you leave yourself vulnerable to being banned.

Yet: there's an inherent tension. Unless there's a credible threat people will go to another engine for natural results, for Google to degrade their own natural results slightly can improve Google's quarterly revenues!

Let's say Google is A/B testing a ranking tweak. Option A results in more searches (because people don't find exactly what they're looking for on the first try), and more clicks on ads (because they look relatively better). Option B results in one click on a natural result and nothing further.

Are we sure they'll always choose option B?

Maybe Google can add a new advanced operator: [-src:googlesyndication.com]. That is, don't return results that 'source' (as in <SCRIPT SRC="">) Google ad units.

I won't hold my breath.

Actually, Google has an Adwords tools which allow you to estimate what it would cost you to run an ad.

IIRC, that has estimated Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Thousand (CPM) columnns, along with estimated impressions and a sweet API to pull it all together.

Many people estimate Google takes a 20-40% rip from the advertiser, and gives the adsense guy the rest of the payout. So from that you can estimate what the adsense ads pay.

How much Google takes is not confidential, you can compute it from their SEC filings. Would you believe that they take 70% of the advertiser's money, and give back 30% to the site owner?

On average you are correct

For an individual click it varies.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/10/21/google-adsense-givi...

Well those figures are the opposite of gp's. Google passes on between 75 and 79% to publishers.

I think there's some really good lessons about SEO that startup founders can take away from this. Namely:

- Relevant, well-written, and keyword-laden content on your site is important

- Getting links to your site is important

- Getting links with good anchor text is even more important

- Having keywords in your site's browser titles is important

You can automate a lot of this once you get the hang of it down.

The spammy part kind of sucks. I would say, if you're going to do this, at least make sure there's useful content. There's nothing wrong with that. People search google for information, they click an ad or find you organically. If you've given them good information, then it's not spam, but actually something useful. Sadly, this ideology isn't the adopted norm.

Is this a veiled advertisement for adsenseheaven.com? His whole strategy is based off of that data and you have to pay at least $10 for the list of keywords.

He's probably an affiliate, but he's not blowing smoke. This method works. I suspect he's not afraid to tell people about it, because it's a lot of work.

Just guessing, but this might be his Acai Berry website:

http://www.acaiberryproducts.org/

#4 result for "acai berry", lots of small articles, and tons of AdSense.

If that is his site, then I don't really have a big problem with it. The information was semi-alright and it looked legit enough (although there were a-LOT of google ads).

Google only allows 3 ad's per page and that is what is used. The page length is very short so it could be that a higher percentage of the screen is ads than other sites. Still, it comes nowhere close to magazines which are probably more than 50% ads.

You know what's funny? I don't see a single Google ad on this site.

NoScript extension for FireFox is wonderful. I got so used to it, I forget how many ads I used to see on websites.

Sorry for offtopic :-)

sounds pretty shady... in the seo industry its impossible to know whats real and whats not

it wouldn't surprise me if this article is just a clever advertisement for this guy's article writing website

This is basically what some paper journal or even book editors do. It is just a bit unexpected and new on Internet. As long as everybody in the ring wins, I've the impression that it is Ok.

Thought if the rational is just to give what people are looking for and want, with just enough quality and pertinence to remain undetected from google's garbage detectors, where could this lead us ?

This is not "black hat." He's web developer. That's how he makes $15k a month with adsense. As a web developer outsourcing content creation and working his ass off on low cost SEM. You can do it, too!

I like the "donate to an opensource project" thing :)

The first part is interesting. The second part is lame (link sharing/spamming, albeit manual spamming, but still spamming) but necessary to pull it off.

Seems to me the second part is only lame because he's doing it strictly to make money. If he were doing it for a more creative project it would just be self-promotion.

yes goglebots can read keywords with OCR in your site logo images

Can somebody confirm that? I have never heard about this before, seems cool.

I was surprised too. I don't see why Google would spent cpu time on this, and I can't think of a way one would be able to validate that claim.

why Google would spent cpu time on this

CPU time is cheap, and it could be useful ranking information. Compared to an H1 tag, a graphical header is harder to create, so it shows a certain level of investment.

If the words in the graphic aren't repeated elsewhere in the page, then the page author may be naive in the ways of SEO. But that could be good, because the savvy SEO people are all trying to pull one over on the GoogleBot.

CPU time may be cheap, but Google has billions of page and images to index. If they were able to extract text from images, they'd probably use it for their image search. I'm also not convinced that the header image is a good indicator of relevancy.

Tens or hundreds of billions of pages -- but many, many fewer images. Images repeat across a site, and change much less often than text. Header and navigational images are easy to pick out and also relatively easy to OCR. (These images are not trying to be inscrutable, like CAPTCHAs.)

Further: Google has an intense interest in OCR, adopting the open-source 'Tesseract' project, spending millions on scanning first catalogs then books and journals, and most recently announcing they are OCRing bitmaps in PDFs:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/picture-of-thousand-w...

Finally: any reasoning based on Google being miserly with cycles is going to be wrong. (They invest a lot in efficiency, yes, but that's so that they can spend cycles freely to collect data.)

It's possible they ran an experiment and found text in embedded/header images was no better than inline text. (I doubt they would find such a thing, because generally indicators of sustained effort -- careful design, site longevity, good writing -- are also indicators of site quality.) But there's zero chance the CPU cost or scale deterred Google from testing the idea.

Just one additional reason, to add to your own: the original intent of YouTube, as I recall, was to OCR video for search indexing, which was a lot more complicated and processor-intensive than even OCRing pictures. Google bought YouTube; obviously this tech, laying about somewhere in their archives, came with the acquisition.

I wouldn't be surprised they tested it. I agree with you on that.

Does anybody else see an opportunity from the interest of the other posters?

On a seperate note though, how does the top keyword provider mine the google trends data without Google flagging their IPs, etc.?

I can't really blame anyone for making money on what is essentially arbitrage, but the bottom line is that they add no value to the system and they make it harder for legitimate sites to get advertising revenues (by preempting traffic and ad $$).

In theory, arbitrageurs will arbitrage away the gap until the margin revenue outweighs the cost. So, in a sense arbitrageurs are good for the markets as they bring them closer to "perfect markets".

As far as adding value bit is concerned, if the articles provided are worthwhile to users, then some value is created. (Although I feel very strongly against the idea of creating spammy blogs that he advocates.)

Meh, I don't even care about the spammy blogs. They aren't there for human consumption, and will never get enough links to be visible to humans.

The articles on the real sites are custom written, and he pays a small premium to decent content. (8-12 per it looks like), and in theory are researched a little bit.

He's creating value, then marketing it. A tiny bit spammy w/ the blogs, but it doesn't really hurt anybody (ie. humans won't see the spammy blogs).

Sometimes I do a search on google, and roughly half the results are meaningless gobbledegook. Clearly these results are this kind of project. It makes me wonder what percentage of websites are just revenue-earning sites with absolutely no useful real-world content. Like a newspaper or magazine with 50% of its pages taken up by advertising.

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