A Niche Blogging Experiment
“Find out how you can make loads of money from Google AdSense!”
“Google AdSense is just a hobby, but it pays my mortgage!”
“Scientifically proven methods of exploding your AdSense earnings… Instantly!”
If you’ve been around the make money online niche for long, you’ve probably come across these impressive claims or ones just like them. Programs or products promise to teach you how to make truck loads of money from Google AdSense with little to no work. Here’s the problem I’ve always had with these things, if they really could make you as much money as they promise, why in the world would they be selling it? This kind of goes back to the whole, Shut Up post but really I mean why would you spend the time to come up with a course, if you were essentially printing money with AdSense or a similar program? Wouldn’t you spend as much time as you could cranking out the kind of websites that have been such a success for you? I know I would.
Anyway, after coming across another similar product yesterday I finally decided to do a couple of case studies with AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) on some fairly tight niche sites. I had purchased a few domains such as keyword1keyword2.com quite a while ago and really hadn’t done anything with them. So, I’ve set up a blog for myself with YPN ads on it, and had a buddy of mine set up a similar site (slightly different niche) with AdSense ads on them. I’ve done about 30 minutes of link building for each of them, and we each wrote 2 initial posts. In all, I’d say we each spent about an hour on our site.
This is where the experiment part comes in. A lot of these systems rely on creating a critical mass of sorts in terms of the number of sites. If you make $10 a month from one site, you can make $10,000 a month by creating one thousand sites. Now obviously I’m not going to take the time to crank out hundreds or thousands of sites like this. However, over the course of the next couple of months I’ll keep tabs on how the sites rank, the traffic levels, and of course what kind of income each of us sees from our site. If we prove the concept with an hours worth of work, maybe I’ll write up everything we did and sell it as the next ground breaking system.
Oh, P.S. don’t forget to tune in Friday to find out whether I met my monthly income goal of $1,500 for January. Also, you’ll find out whether my ad buy on JohnChow.com was worth it, or whether it flopped. You’re not going to want to miss it!
I think earning money from the Adsense and YPN or any other ads on your blog is just not good enough. I believe both John Chow and ProBlogger are working really hard to build up their blog network. The Ads income are just small part of their income. You may want to start your own Ads network or affiliate network and sell Ads.
Good luck to your experiment!
I’ve always been a little cautious of AdSense just because I’m not a fan of the style. When I see it on other blogs, it’s a turnoff. Is there a way to make the ad links fit the decor of my site?
I’ll be interested in seeing your results. The theory itself seems sound in that if you can make $10 or so from a site with little work and can repeat the process enough times you can make some good money.
Of course the real question is how much you can make per site and how little work it takes to make that money.
I agree completely about the people selling these amazing secrets. If they were working so well why would they be spending the time selling the methods instead of using them?
Interesting Experiement, can you post the links to the sites? or would that be cheating? I had a question you may have some insight on, I have a few domains when I originally purchased them, they had their own hosting accounts and they seemed to be showing decently in the search engines. Now to save money I am using URL forwarding and locking to host multiple domains on one site. The caveat is the search engines hate this evidently! I lost what PR I had and been trying a few tactics to get them to list again with no success, so is the only solution to pay for a hosting account for each of my domains? Just curious how you manage these domains on your end.
Thanks, Patrick
I don’t believe you can even make $10 from Adsense regularly without a lot of work to get traffic. But I guess there are other things that factor into this…I just don’t think this can be done putting in a lot of work and time, which could be better spent doing other things. But I’m curious to see how this turns out
Patrick, I don’t want to post the links for a few reasons, one being that would draw attention to the sites that I wouldn’t get if I were doing this on a massive scale. Also, if it turns out it’s a profitable niche, I don’t want to give myself more competition.
As to your question about hosting, most accounts allow you to put multiple domains on one account. However, this is different than url forwarding. Feel free to drop me a line with the urls you’re talking about and I can give it a bit closer look.
@ Jason, I’m skeptical as well but we’ll see!
I can’t wait to find out January’s earnings
-Mike
@jason
Oh; I don’t know. Adsense works great if you have a blog that can generate consistent traffic. I have one I work with that is doing around 8-10,000 hits a day and it is making anywhere between 8 to 15 dollars a day in Adsense revenue. In fact it is all the revenue I have on that blog because there aren’t as many monetization techinques I can use on it due to the content.
I am one of those who doesn’t hate Adsense. I have seen results I suppose.
Hi,
for some reasons I lost my comment, I am going to post it again,
First I really would love to see the result, and I wish you the best Ben, and thank you that you explain a lot for us, well at least for me as I am really enjoying reading your blogs,
Anyway, I have a problem in understand the adsense thing, I would love if you tell me where I can find more about it and read it, also there is something called Affiliate program, what is this? I have read many talk about it and many say they are looking for a good affiliate program one, what is it? is there a place where I can read more about it?
Thank you very much,
Regards.
Ben,
I have created several ‘adsense’ sites that get a decent amount of traffic and make a decent amount of money. But as you mentioned in your post, unless your site gets a critical mass of traffic, you need to have several dozen of these sites to add up enough revenue to make it worth it.
I have seen a number of those sites and they don’t impress me much. You can probably make some money with those adsense sites but it must be difficult to get thousands of visitors a day. Therefore I prefer blogs.
Ben, keep us up to date on the results of your experiment. I have heard about this strategy before and wondered if it has any real potential. Of course, like you, I have no time or intentions to do 1000 websites!
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Ben,
This is a great little site. I’m really curious to see what’s going to happen – and congrats on making your goal in January. Anyway, I was wondering if you could elaborate upon what is actually involved in “link building,” or point me to a good post or article about the nuts and bolts of it.
Please forgive my naivete.
Peace,
Philip
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