Updated 06-24-2010 Wow! had it really been almost a year since the Adsense Treasure Experiment began? I no longer use BlogProfitz (which I still highly recommend) I moved on to a plugin for WordPress that just keeps getting better and better – WPRobot just rocks. If you want to read more about WP Robot
Just click here
I’ve repeated the Adsense treasure set up with more targeted niche topics and the results are about $175-$375 per month per site. I do very little promotion and zero backlinking and yet my sites get indexed and people do surf on by and click ads.
and that’s my 1 year after the fact update
I wanted to tell you about a little experiment I am running with Adsense Treasure.
If you come here often you may know that my partner and I are really into affiliate marketing – I mean let’s face it, that is what 99% of all the articles we write are used for – promotion of websites and blogs for the purpose of sales – usually affiliate sales.
We do a lot of affiliate marketing and we use the slow but steady method of articles, press releases and backlinks. It’s tedious to do and most people lose their steam and abandon article marketing because they don’t get instant gratification (money) but I promise you if you stick with it – the money comes. It took me a solid six months before I started seeing steady traffic/income but once it started, it slowly grew from there.
Curiosity Gives Birth to an Idea
Now, I’m sure you have gotten emails and the subject line is always the same “Make $40,000 a month on Adsense”. I had gotten a ton of them and hit “delete” like I do with most of that stuff. And then one day curiosity got the best of me and I clicked the link. This dude named Abid shows off his car, his home, his rockin’ electronics collection – all with his face blurred out (why?) and he promises to give you his system that makes $40,000 a month.
The seller repping this had it up for sale for $1 big dollar…. I thought, “What the heck?” and spent one dollar on this “system”.
In a nutshell, it’s a search portal. Adsense Treasure is a simple set up.
It’s just a few sections (Main search page, car tips, computer tips, finance tips, shopping tips, travel tips) and it comes with 1600+ articles.
Now the articles are old and really evidently written by people who do not have English as a first language.
I did a cursory search and found over 25,000 copies of one of the finance articles. So I decided to completely ditch the articles and not bother having them rewritten or anything of the sort.
Plus all the pages in Adsense Treasure are html – which is a pain in the posterior to make dynamic, site-wide changes. I tried using .htaccess to make the html pages into .php (if I just made you go, “HUH?” sorry) and that didn’t make it any easier.
The Lucky Email
And then I got an email from Scott Trimble of Halfagain.com. They had a new product called Blogprofitz and it sounded a lot like Firepow except I would have a TON more latitude and a lot less to pay.
I decided to look into this a lot more deeply.
Decision to Take the Adsense Treasure Experiment in a New Direction
The more I read about Blogprofitz, the more I saw a whole new set up for Adsense Treasure.
So here was my new direction for Adsense Treasure.
I slightly redesigned the Index page and ditched the crappy cartoon feed and replaced it with a Youtube video feed. It would have been cooler if Adsense hadn’t of retired Video units – I was enjoying that money! But, study after study has shown people are far more mesmerized by a video than a simple graphic picture so hence the change.
I killed the cartips/financetips/shoppingtips/computertips/traveltips sections of Adsense treasure and set up separate subdomains for each section. My idea was that I was going to run a Blogprofitz section on each one as a WordPress blog. I totally took out the Video feeds as since Adsense doesn’t pay for clicks on video units it was basically hogging up 400MB on my server that I could use for money making pursuits.
The Template for the Adsense Treasure Experiment
The theme template I chose was AdsMinded and it’s excellent for not only Adsense click through rates but also for posting a good number of affiliate marketing programs.
After installing WordPress on each subdomain, I signed up at Blogprofitz and set up each of the subdomains to receive product and Content Club article feeds. So there is a balance of products as well as just articles so it doesn’t look too “sales-y”.
I only used Amazon.com, Clickbank, Content Club and You Tube Videos on my Adsense Treasure blogs and after the initial set up, which is pretty darned easy – my grandmother could have done this.
You create categories on your WordPress blog, for example I wanted to sell Netbooks as they are a really hot item. So I made the category “Netbook”.
Then you go to Blogprofitz and go to “Create new Rule” – a page will appear and you tell the rule where to pull products from (I chose Amazon for this one but there are several choices) and then which blog to post them to – I chose my “Computer Tips” blog and then how often you want posts to go up.
Remember you need to grow your blog slow and steady so it looks normal to Google and other search engines. I chose 1 post per day as I was adding several other categories and didn’t want too many posts going up per day.
That’s it – creating rules is so simple.
Then after 24 hours the posts start happening and here is the back end of it.
I made a Twitter account and for each of the blogs I created a feed at Twitterfeed.com, this means as blogs are posted they go to Twitter and I get about 40-50 new followers a day. Some of these followers visit my site and other people find the site by searching exactly for products they want “waterproof MP3 Player” is a big search term for people hitting my site and I’ve made some sales this way.
I created a site map using a WP plugin (detailed below) and posted it in my Google Webmaster account to get the site indexed. All the plug ins I used are outlined below in a list for easy perusal. Links included.
The Maintenance of the Adsense Treasure Experiment Blogs
So you’re wondering what I do to maintain the blogs? It’s not much work at all really. I log in everyday to the blogs everyday to make sure they are posting relevant content for each blog (I’ve had less than 3 posts on each blog that were off-topic) and then I go to Google Trends to see if there are any hot searches that
I can put in any of the blogs. If there’s nothing in the top 20 I don’t bother with it that day. I try to add content of my own at least weekly to each blog and it works nicely.
I also add 1-3 categories per day to each of the blogs. Today I added plus size lingerie, wedding favors and kenneth cole handbags to the shopping tips blog.
The entire process takes roughly 5-10 minutes per blog. Which is very close to this experiment’s goal of “Set it and Forget it” blog marketing.
So here’s what I used to do this experiment (which is still ongoing)
A copy of Abid’s Adsense Treasure (Cost – $1)
Membership at BlogProfitz ($19 per month)
Wordpress (free)
Wordpress Theme – AdsMinded - note this theme is NOT widget friendly so you have to make your changes via the theme editor.
Twitter (free)
Twitterfeed.com (free)
WordPress Plugins Used
Add Sig – you want to put a signature on all of your posts so when people scrape your site for content (and they will) your signature and backlink will identify your site as the authority site not where it’s posted.
Google Site Map set up a Google Webmaster account if you haven’t already and load your site map in there! You can see which of your pages on your site get indexed and if the robot has any issues -this helps you create a high quality page for Google and other search engines so you can get good organic results quickly.
WP Auto Tagger – this creates tags for every post automatically.
Sociable Use this to put links to social sites on every post. You’d be amazed how many people find products and post them to Twitter saying “I want this for my birthday/anniversary/blah blah blah”) – make it easy for people to share information off your site and they will.
Affiliate Programs Used
Some affiliate programs were used in Blogprofitz and others are on the site as ads in the template.
Clickbank
Linkshare
NCSReporting
Amazon
Clickbooth
Commission Junction
WidgetBucks
Adsense Treasure Experiment Results So Far -
Well I didn’t make 40,000 like our friend Abid, but the first month I used this system I cleared $300 in both Adsense clicks and affiliate sales. I am only in my second month but I can tell you I’ve just passed the $300 mark and I think this month will end slightly better than the first month.
For obvious reasons, I don’t have the blog URL listed here but if you’d like to see the set up – just write me at jolynn@keywordcontent.net and I’d be happy to share the link with you.
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