Anyhow, I put together a silly little online tool called How Much Of The Web Do You Own? that you can use to determine your own percentage. First calculate how many pages you have on all your sites — use the Yahoo! Site Explorer to get the numbers, it’s more accurate than Google’s site: command — and plug that number into the tool. Then bash your head against the desk…

Think of it from the AdSense publisher’s perspective. If each page you own (and “own” can be defined pretty loosely to mean any page which you can monetize via AdSense) makes you an average of 1 cent per day (I’m just pulling that number from a hat), then 100 pages doesn’t make you much — a whole $1/day. You need to get up to 10,000 pages to start seeing a significant amount of $100/day. Just think of what you could make with a million or so pages…

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Yes, I am a member. All existing members will get grandfathered into the upgraded service and won’t have to pay the newer monthly rate, which is essentially double the old rate of $97/month.

Note that you don’t get access to the new PLRPro services until next month. You do get access to the PLRPro content, though, for the current month and all subsequent months until you cancel. You also get access to some members-only blogs and article directories for getting backlinks to your sites and various books and forum postings on how to do things, including a nice little book on setting up your own VRE (virtual real estate) network of sites. Just remember my tip on profitable AdSense article marketing if you’re going to rewrite some of the articles for submission to article directories in order to drive traffic to your AdSense sites.

If any PLRPro subscribers are reading this, feel free to leave a comment detailing your experiences with the service. On the whole I’ve heard nothing but good things. It’s not the only program out there, but it seems to be one of the best.

P.S.: I should also mention that PLRPro also has an ebook service which is quite good. Each month you get 3 ebooks complete with (and this is what I really like) an audio version of the book, 4 different websites for selling it, an autoresponder sequence, a teaser ebook for giveaways (to encourage people to subscribe to your autoresponder), a custom WordPress blog theme and a bunch of articles for traffic purposes. If you join PLRPro you get access to the ebook service for $42/month more.

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Normally, the AdWords keyword tool gives you at most 200 keyword ideas. What most people don’t know is that the list of keywords can vary on each request. So by running the tool multiple times on the same keyword you can generate a slightly larger set of keywords.

Here are the steps:

Search for a keyword (or analyze a site)
Scroll through the results and click all the Add all links so all the keywords end up in the list on the righthand side of the browser window
Go back to the top and hit the Get keyword ideas button again.
Scroll through the results. Any new keywords not already in the list will be obvious, since they’re in blue and the other ones are in grey.
Repeat this process until you don’t get any more keywords. Try checking or unchecking the Use synonyms option while doing this to get even more keywords.
The only downside with this approach is that when you move the keywords over into the righthand side you lose all the search and competition data. If you plan on analyzing the data, you’ll want to download the spreadsheet format for the keyword data after each press of the Get keyword ideas. You’ll then have to merge the data into one big spreadsheet.

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The idea is very simple: buy low, sell high. You write two sets of content for a given topic/niche: one set (the traffic set) is for distribution on other sites, the other set (the money set) is for publication on your own site. The traffic set targets low-paying (but often high-traffic) keywords, the money set targets the higher-paying keywords.

Let’s use the broad topic of cooking as an example. Type cooking into the AdWords keyword tool and sort the results by search volume and you’ll get something like this:

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The most interesting use from an AdSense publisher’s perspective is to see what Google thinks your site is about. Actually, it can be more specific than that — you can use the keyword tool to determine what Google thinks of an individual page.

Take All About CRM, a demo site I created with PLRSiteBuilder. If I run its homepage through the keyword tool, I end up with an extensive list of keywords grouped under the following primary keywords:

customer service
crm software
small business
customer relation
crm
customer
software
Some miscellaneous keywords are also in the list. Most of the keywords are in the CRM category (CRM = customer relationship management), which is what I want. But not all of the keywords it lists are ones I want to target — customer service is too broad a topic, for example. This tool makes it easy to discover if your site is properly targeted or not.

It’s also a good way to determine if your topics are search-worthy or not. Plug in the URL for the Alaska Ferry Travel site and you see keywords like this:

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Build yourself a list of popular news and general interest sites, high-traffic sites whose content changes a lot and is geared towards a general audience. Sites like Yahoo!, Wikipedia and CNN fit the bill. If you’re a techie you might also want to throw in more techie-oriented sites like News.com.
Go the AdWords keyword tool and select Website content under How would you like to generate keyword ideas?
Now on the right type in the URL of one of the sites in your list, being sure to check Include other pages on my site linked from this URL
Press the Get keyword ideas button. The keyword tool will crunch away for a minute and analyze the content of the site you gave it to come up with a list of relevant keywords complete with bidding costs and search volumes.
So what do you do with this information? Some people will tell you to enter a large value for the maximum CPC bid to see which of the niches pay a lot per click. You can do this, but take the values you see with a grain of salt — see my high-paying AdSense keyword lists series for the reasons why. Don’t worry too much about maximum values. Look more at volume and competition estimates. Try bidding down the CPC value to see at what point bid positions shift from the 1-3 range to the 4-6 range.

The goal here is to come up with ideas for things you wouldn’t have thought of yourself while avoiding niches that are obviously going to pay you just a few cents per click. Do this procedure for each of your news/interest sites and do it over the span of a few days and you should come across several potential niche ideas that hold promise.

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Now the question is, will depenalization affect the other pages on the site as well? Currently none of the other pages shown any PageRank, despite the home page having PR 5. PageRank values in the Google toolbar are not updated on a daily basis like search engine results are, so it may be weeks or months before the site’s “real” PR values get reflected externally.

I’m still looking at what to do with affiliate links, though. There are differing opinions about them.

Hopefully the depenalization means more AdSense publishers will find this blog and subscribe to it… I’ve seen a recent jump in subscriptions to the feed, actually, I wonder if it can be attributed to the depenalization…

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My first impression of the Knol homepage was “uh oh, spam city” because of the topics of the featured articles: cancer, diabetes, and other ailments. Typical fare for a low-quality info site, in other words. But a closer look showed that the articles were actually high quality, written by medical specialists. And there were no ads on those articles, so money wasn’t the motivation for writing them. (Well, maybe Google paid them… but they weren’t MFA articles.) It sounds like Google rounded up some people beforehand to write quality articles for the site.

Still, this is an AdSense blog, so let’s get to the topic everyone’s interested in…. How do you make money with Knol? The obvious answer is through its integration with your AdSense account.

When you register with Knol, you have the option of associating your AdSense account with your user profile. You must do this explicitly, even if your login is the same as your AdSense account login, and you’ll get an email from Google asking you to OK the association. Once you do that, your AdSense info is passed to Knol. There’s some kind of review that happens at this stage, which may take up to 2 weeks to happen. If you’re approved (I wonder if they’re looking to keep out obvious spammers) then AdSense ads will appear on any knols you author and the clicks will go straight to your AdSense account.

Knol has an unfair advantage over other revenue-sharing info sites. Unlike those sites, you don’t have to share your AdSense revenue with Google, since of course they already make money from every AdSense click no matter where it happens. Presumably this is going to make Knol more appealing than Squidoo and other place that take a cut of the AdSense revenue to support their business model.

Expect to see spam show up on Knol, of course. I know of at least one person who’s released a tool to automatically submit articles to Knol. All links on Knol are “nofollow”, however, so from an SEO perspective getting links from Knol to your sites won’t do you much good… but they may still be good for traffic. And then there’s the revenue-sharing…. there’s definitely some appeal there for the shadier types.

What I’m really interested in seeing is if Knol pages get high rankings in search engine results the same way that Google favors Wikipedia pages. Given that everyone’s talking about Knol, presumably there will be a large number of natural links pointing to the Knol site to give it good PageRank. Will that be enough to overtake Wikipedia in the long term? Guess we’ll have to wait and see….

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Google is now letting advertisers combine both types of targeting. This lets you effectively target specific pages of a large, multi-topic site by keyword instead of having to list off all the URLs on that site that match your criteria.

It’s a nice feature for advertisers and will make the content network more appealing, which is good for us.

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A: Back in 1998 or so I read a book that really shifted my thinking about small business and the Internet. Called Striking it Rich.com (now out of print), the book profiled 23 “incredibly successful websites you probably never heard of.”

One of those sites was AsktheBuilder.com.

The book profiled the site and its owner, the builder, Tim Carter. Tim is a nationally syndicated columnist and his website is a font of home improvement columns, videos, tips and help.

His is also your prototypical small business, with but one and a half employees. Yet not only has Tim been incredibly successful with his online business, he’s convinced anyone can have similar success.

How? Hold on and I’ll tell you, because last week the affable Tim told me.

But first, let’s get an idea of just what online success might mean for a small business:

When Tim started his site back in the mid-’90s, he sold ads manually — making phone calls and getting banner ads. But the advent of Google revolutionized his business. All of a sudden, instead of having to sell ads one at a time, he was able to sign up with Google AdSense and have Google populate his content with ads.

How successful was this strategy?

So successful that Google recently did a case study about AsktheBuilder. Here is what Google says:

“In April 2004, Carter learned about AdSense for content sites. He recognized that it would enable him to reach thousands of advertisers and screen ad quality with minimal time and effort. Carter immediately experienced a jump in advertising revenue of 400%. His monthly advertising revenues, including AdSense, grew from $1,500 to $7,500.”

Wow!

But it gets better. The case study concluded with the fact that AsktheBuilder soon began to make $1,400 a day in ad revenue, but according to Carter, that is now incorrect. Today it makes significantly more than that.

So how can we duplicate his success? Here are the steps, according to the master himself:

1. Tap people’s pain or pleasure: Tim Carter says that people go online for one of two reasons: Either for pleasure (to play games, shop, learn, etc.) or to alleviate pain (pay a bill, research solutions, and so on.)

To create a site that draws a lot of people, and therefore Google ad revenue, you need solve problems, such as what Carter does by helping people easily learn about do-it-yourself home improvement solutions.

Solving problems therefore requires that you create content on your site, whether that be written or video. If yours is a service business or you are a consultant and you want to sell your expertise online, you need to create easy to understand articles for posting on your site.

Note however, that even if yours is a product-based, this strategy would work for you too. Says Tim, “Figure out how to give your knowledge away for free and become an expert; get people to trust your information and sell ads around that.”

For his part, Carter is now also moving strongly into video solutions and believes there is even more profit to be had there. (You can see his videos either on his site, or on YouTube.com/AsktheBuilder.)

2. Become an SEO expert: Carter does no marketing of his site, other than creating the best, most useful articles and video he can and then making every article as search engine optimizable as possible.

More than 1 million people a month find his site through nothing more than organic search results.

3. Tweak AdSense: Says Google, “Carter quickly began tests using AdSense channels trying different ad formats, colors, and placement to gauge relative effectiveness. He immediately found ads with a yellow background resulted in a 40% drop in income, so he discontinued them. One winning strategy Carter discovered is a rectangular format. … he saw a 20% jump in revenue from placing the rectangle in the upper left corner inside his articles.”

So can a small business make it online? You bet, and in a big way. Just Ask the Builder and you will see how!

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