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How to Make Money With AdSense
Step One: Build a Crap Site
To make a site work good with AdSense or Overture the first step is in building a site that is totally useless or close to it. This is an important first step because you don't want your visitor hanging around your site, you want them clicking an ad and finding another site. Otherwise you don't make money.
So starts a wonderfully honest post on the topic of How to Make Money with AdSense Sites -- the beginning of a thread by janeth on the WebProWorld discussion forum.
This isn't one of those Pollyanna posts about how useless sites are evil and don't really work -- janeth claims she was doing about $10k a month with these made-for-AdSense web properties (although spending about $6k on keeping them running). In the end she's getting out because the business model was too unstable for her.
Steps Two Through Ten: The Crappier the Better
If you really are interested on what it takes to earn a living on these ad-only sites, read the rest of her (somewhat snarky, but actually quite informative) post about what it'll take to earn money as an AdSense publisher. (Then check out the leaked AOL query list to figure out which keywords you should be targeting.)
Labels: blogging, monetizing
Posted by Melanie Phung
Posted by 
: 8:57 PM, August 20, 2006
If all it took to make money online was building crap sites, then the Javascript geeks would be rich. But they are not.
Posted by 
Melanie Phung: 2:05 PM, August 21, 2006
Never said that's all it takes.
With the advent of dummy-proof content management systems like Blogger, you don't even need to know HTML much less JavaScript to churn out a crap site. Knowing how to monetize a crap site is a completely different skill.
If you read the thread, as I recommended, you'll see the point is quite the opposite -- it's not as easy as everyone thinks. This model is actually hard work to sustain and, in the end, in my opinion, not worth the effort.
Posted by Melanie Phung: 2:07 PM, August 21, 2006
p.s. If you don't believe "Google does all the work of finding relevant ads for a crap site"... all I can say is you haven't seen what I've seen out there in the Splogosphere.
Posted by : 5:49 AM, August 22, 2006
You are right. Creating blogs does not require knowing Javascript or HTML, but creating web sites does. Making money online is an art that most web designers don't master.
I am convinced that blogs with interesting content and useful information atttract more traffic,hence, attention of advertisers than worthless "crap" sites.
Posted by Melanie Phung: 2:52 PM, August 22, 2006
Quote: "I am convinced that blogs with interesting content and useful information atttract more traffic,hence, attention of advertisers than worthless "crap" sites."
Yes, of course. But we're not talking about attracting advertisers. We're talking specifically about sites/splogs made just for AdSense. AdSense/AdWords is automated and doesn't make the same distinctions. It will let you run ads on your site whether you have an audience or not.
Steve Rubel posts that the current issue of Wired has an article saying splogs will be the downfall of the Blogosphere. It's hardly news to those of us in the industry, but Wired is a pretty mainstream pub. My hope is that regular folks will get more educated about this issue and stop clicking through the links on splogs, which will make it harder for sploggers to stay in business.
Posted by
michela barcelona: 1:04 PM, August 10, 2006
Do you seriously believe that net citizens spend their time going to crap sites and companies waste their ad budgets on worthless (aka crap) spaces?
I assume your blog on "how to make money by creating crap sites" is rather sarcastic. In reality, in order to have tons of traffic to your site, you must provide attractive and useful information to readers so that companies looking for ad space will contact you.
Google's PPC program AdWords only places ads whose services or merchandises have some things to do with the content of your site. I don't think that Google does all the work of finding relevant ads for a "crap" site.