How to Convince a Skeptic

Posted by Grizzly on Jan 1st, 2009 | 182 comments

There is little doubt that the Make Money Online niche has a horrible reputation – so bad in fact that I would have nothing to do with it except that it does have a huge selection of keywords that draw traffic. It is an ideal Adsense niche for that reason alone but when coupled with the amount of advertisers available it is proving to be an exceptional Adsense niche. Compared to my best niche it doesn’t have the CPC but it has almost unlimited potential for adding keywords. When I say “adding keywords” I simply mean it has an unlimited number of terms that I can rank on top of the serp’s with. Take the 4 word term “Make Money Online with…”and add anything after the “with” and you have a new keyword phrase that can be targeted. The point is obvious – the more keywords you rank on top of the serp’s for the more search traffic you will get.

There are not a lot of niches that can grow with such ease. Most niches have a small core group of terms that garner traffic and once you have topped the serp’s for them you are done growing. They can be profitable but your profit is limited.

The MMO niche unfortunately attracts a lot of social bloggers who jump in with the intent of selling crap that will supposedly make people money. This is nothing new and the cumulative effect has been to give the entire niche a bad rep.The sad fact is that most people with an ounce of skepticism in them now assume that anyone claiming to make money online by any means other than selling advertising is full of bullshit. I can’t say I blame them. The vast majority of people who claim to make money online really only make a few dollars and it comes in haphazardly and usually at the expense of someone else without giving value in return. The odd affiliate sale for a product that is worthless would be the norm here.

I like to think I’m different from 99% of the people involved in the MMO niche. The big difference between me and everyone else isn’t my willingness to give out free information or my willingness to help others out. That is nothing more than my shtick – it is an easy way to produce content.  The difference is that I use the niche to make money with Adsense and can do it with or without readers.

Having readers is a double edge sword – they provide me with great links (having subtly explained how to use anchored keywords in the links) and I try and repay their generosity by writing useful content that really will make them money if followed. On the other hand having readers curtails my ability to target keywords. Simply put – I have to optimize my posts for various terms without being too obvious. I would love to create a post a day on my beginners blog with titles like – “Make Money using Twitter”, “Make Money using Digg” and “Make Money using Stumbleupon” but my readership would quickly evaporate. It’s not that the posts would be accurate or useful – I just want to rank for those terms which would bring in yet more search traffic in order to increase my Adsense revenue. The same goes for writing posts about every piece of crap affiliate product that comes online. I don’t want to sell any of it – I just want the search traffic. I make money online by driving a lot of search traffic to my sites and there is no niche that I have found that has the potential for search traffic like the MMO niche.

If I could make more money without readers – why don’t I? There are a couple of reasons aside from links which I can rustle up on my own if need be. The biggest reason is that I like having readers – I have made lots of friends and we help each other out. I also haven’t given up on the idea of selling Advertising – at some point with a large enough base of readers I may be able to command enough Ad revenue that it will outperform Adsense. This has happened with my best earning site. I have 3 Corporate advertisers who pay me far more than I was earning with Adsense. The site has no readers per se but it sits atop the serp’s for a highly searched set of keywords and I outrank the 3 corporate giants for their own products. They couldn’t outrank me so they joined me. I should point out that it’s only in the MMO/Blogging/Social Media niches that you need RSS subscribers to attract advertisers – you just need to dominate the serp’s in any other niche.

Okay – aside from blabbering on and stuffing in a few keywords there is a point to this. Yesterday a fellow left a new comment on an old post on Court’s Internet Marketing blog. His name is Jim Green and he left the following comment;

What difference does it make? Attempting to make money from Google ads is an exercise in futility. You can write brilliant articles, get a high ranking and subsequently get a crap load of traffic to your site, but at the end of the day while you make have a crap load of impressions, your ad clicks will be low for two reasons: 1. Google’s algorithms are seriously flawed when it comes to matching relevant ads with content (Their Competitive Ad Filter is a joke). 2. People have simply stopped clicking on ads or banners.

Face it, the days of the average site owners making money from Adsense are over. The only one who is making any real money is Google and a modicum of business owners who have always used the internet to marketing their products or services. If any site owner or blogger tells you otherwise, ask them to show you a copy of their last tax return.

Jim’s impression of Adsense is by no means isolated – I see comments like this almost daily in one forum or another or in the comments on one blog or another. If you click on Court’s link and scroll down the comments you will get a pretty good idea of just how ill-informed people are when it comes to making money online. The post had to do with everyone’s favorite topic – “content vs links”. As usual all the comments come from bloggers and not internet marketers and with few exceptions they all feel that content is king because it will get you readers etc… I won’t rehash my feelings on this except to say that none of them mention “making money”. The goal of bloggers is obtaining readers. None ever seem to ask if readers will make you money – they simply assume that they will. This doesn’t bother me in the least as they can find out the hard way. Jim’s comment did bother me though and it did so because he actually addressed the issue of making money online.

It bothered me because he came to the conclusion that Adsense doesn’t work because of all the crap he has read and from his own trials. He is a skeptic and rightfully so. He added several more comments in response to others telling him he was wrong and the end result is that unless he sees a tax return he can’t be convinced that Adsense is a viable way to make money online. There is no chance in hell that I’ll be forwarding my tax return to anyone but he got me thinking that there has to be a way to convince a skeptic. Normally I wouldn’t care but I liked how Jim wrote and I read his blog posts and my impression was that he is a decent intelligent fellow that is simply fed up with all the crap he’s come into contact with. I don’t know who he has been reading but it took 2 seconds to see where his problems lie. His posts are fine but his site is a SEO nightmare as far as Adsense goes. His site is not unlike all of the sites my readers have ask me to review – sites that I glance at and sigh because it will take posts as long as this one to explain what is wrong with them. Stuff that I have written about at length in my blogs. Stuff that new readers don’t bother to read. (Hint! – it would be quicker to read Make Money for Beginners than wait for me to review your blog – the answers are all there)

In Jim’s case I want to point out a basic fact about Adsense. If you are optimizing your site for the benefit of readers you will not do well with Adsense. You have to optimize your site for a machine (Google) and always remember that a machine is stupid compared to a human brain. Everything about Jim’s site is written for a person to read and absorb. If you want to write for people that is fine but you can’t make money with Adsense doing so and this doesn’t mean that Adsense doesn’t work – it works fine but not if you think you can just create a blog and write whatever you feel like.

Jim’s blog makes the following errors.

- his url has no keyword in it. (He uses his name – nothing that the bot can asign ad relevancy too)

- his blog title is “Demystifying Internet Technology” – Drop “Demystifying” – no ad relevancy.

- he has 5 separate unrelated posts on his home page. Use only one post per page for Adsense unless all the posts target the same keyword.

- the Adsense bot uses your post titles as the main indicator of what ads it will display. Give it five unrelated post titles on a page and yes you will get irrelevant ads. The bot is a stupid machine – it doesn’t know what the home page is about. If Jim checks his post pages (only 1 post on each page) he will see that he has relevant ads on them.

- put the large adsense block in the money spot – top left corner above all the content. Who cares if it looks ugly or that nobody reads your blog – you want to make money with Adsense. If you want people reading your posts then forget about Adsense – you can’t have both. (okay – yes you can but not until you understand how optimize for Adsense while writing for readers)

- Jim’s content is perfect for Adsense – it’s relevant to the post titles and it is real and well written. It would pass a visual inspection with flying colours. (International spelling )

- last point and this applies to everyone. Quit trying to use adsense on your precious baby – you know the blog that means so much to you and conveys your true passions. If you want to make money then make money – if you want to be a writer be a writer. If you want to be a famous blogger be a famous blogger but quit assuming that you can make money with Adsense just doing what you feel like. I’d really like to make money just sitting on my ass sipping Rum in the sun but Google won’t give in and send me a check. The buggers actually require me to work for it.

It would do a lot of you some good to understand this – Google is not concerned about publishers. They are only concerned about giving value to their advertisers. They make money from them – not the publishers. They let anyone publish Adsense but if your site doesn’t provide quality traffic that converts for the advertiser they will pay you a cent a click. Jim mentioned in Court’s comments that Google isn’t very good at explaining how to make money with Adsense. He is correct – they don’t tell you how aside from a few vague references to producing quality sites. There is a reason for this – Adsense and SEO run hand in hand. If they told you how to optimize your site for Adsense they would also be giving away the farm on how to optimize your site for top serp rankings. They can’t tell people this or everyone would quickly be gaming the serp’s. I’m the one telling you how to do it.

Every thing I just mentioned about optimizing Jim’s site for Adsense will also optimize his site for the search engines. The last ingredient to making money with Adsense – and the hardest – is ranking on top of the serp’s for your keyword. It’s search traffic looking for your keyword that produces the best Adsense results. It’s a numbers game that can best be understood as follows;

1000 people find your site using stumbleupon – they see your post title “I Got Rich Overnight”. The stumblers read your post and find out you got rich overnight because your “Rich Uncle” left you a fortune. Most read and leave but a few click on an ad for a get rich quick product. They are just curious and don’t buy. The advertiser is pissed at G so G says – “don’t worry we will only charge you a few pennies for those visitors”.

1000 people find your site searching for  “I Got Rich Overnight” in the serp’s. They read and most leave but a few click the get rich quick ads. They are more than just curious – they came online specifically looking to get rich quick. These people are far more likely to buy the advertisers product and a lot do. The Advertiser is happy and Google says “We will charge you a buck a click for those visitors”.

In either case Google doesn’t give a damn about you the publisher – you can provide the advertiser with traffic that converts or with traffic that doesn’t. If they convert Google gives you a better CPC. If your traffic is crap then you get pennies or worse – PSA’s (public service ads). If you really screw around you get banned.

Jim this post is for you and everyone else that thinks Adsense is crap. If you read my beginners blog and follow my advice you will make money using adsense. I’m not going to show you my tax return but I will ask you to use some common sense. My Make Money Online for Beginners blog is two years old, it has 2400 subscribers, it ranks on top of the serp’s for a lot of keywords. You can query a few to confirm – “how to make money”, “how to make money online”, “make money”, “make money online”, “making money online”, “earn money online”, “make money blogging” and dozens more if you are really bored. The point is my site gets traffic – a lot by most standards. So why don’t I sell anything? Why am I using Adsense on the site if it doesn’t make me any money? Why don’t I have ads above the fold? Does it seem logical to you that I would keep producing the kind of content I do and not be making money with Adsense? Would you continue for two years and not try and sell crap to a readership of 2400 people? There must be a logical reason as to why I only use Adsense.

You can click the link below to see my Adsense earnings for my beginners blog for the month of December – could I fake it – probably but I ain’t selling you anything except my integrity so keep that in mind. (Plus I am far to lazy to sit up all through New Year’s eve photoshopping a meaningless screenshot… and I don’t own Photoshop. lol )

Make Money for Beginners Adsense Earnings for December 2008

Below is a comment Jim left for me on Court’s blog and the motivation for this post.

Grizzly-

I’m not disillusioned but rather skeptical. I only put those ads on my site to prove a point regarding Google’s flawed algorithms. I wrote Google’s support asking for advice regarding the mismatch of ads to my content only to receive a form response giving me a list of links leading to explanations that I found to be far to complex for the average person to comprehend. I find it absurd that people like yourself have to explain Google’s Adsense model as obviously their own explanations are convoluted and that their support team is inaccessible.

Being that I am not a know-it-all, I will pursue your advice and if it works or doesn’t work, I will write an article about it down the road. Until that time, in all due respect, I remain somewhat dubious as to your claim that you make a lot of money from off your ads. Although I don’t doubt your sincerity, I think you are selling a pipe dream to bloggers.

-Jim

I don’t sell pipe dreams – I don’t sell anything actually to people who bother to read my posts. I make money from Adsense and search traffic and I tell others how to do it. Jim you have found someone willing to show you how. I hope you give it a try – the right way and drop by one day and tell me how you’re doing.

Oh for those of you who wrote to ask me why I used link bait on my New Year’s post – I did it to find out if my site is fully optimized for my keyword. The post title was The Death of the USA. If my blog wasn’t fully optimized in Google’s eyes I would have got some gruesome ads from Adsense. As it turns out I got a mixture of gruesome and MMO ads – this means I still have work to do optimizing the site as a whole. If done right you can get away with off topic post titles and still retain your primary keyword ads. Sorry for the change of pace – I told you it’s hard trying to optimize for a machine while keeping your readers in the loop!

Cheers to all and have a great year!

Griz