The Good 'ole Days: My Adsense Earnings - The Lessons

I was thinking of how my strategies have changed and how I've matured as an affiliate and how I put my SEO knowledge to use on my own sites - and I started thinking about Adsense.

In the past I've talked about how I've done things that can't be classed as "white hat" - but the important thing is that I've suffered from my "black hat" activities and in turn has made me a better affiliate / SEO consultant.

I've included a chart below which shows my adsense earnings from the beginning of July 2003 to the present day. What you'll be able to see is that for a period I was making a handy $450 - $800 (around £250 - £450 then) extra a day from these tactics.




But what did I do? Well not being the most technically gifted, I used a programme called WebMerge to crank out thousands upon thousands of pages from spreadsheets and templates with Adsense on there and a few CPA offerings. These were the days before product feeds really became openly available in any way that would allow me to build more visitor-focused pages.

I'd openly admit that then I'd created 2,000 pages around mortgage keywords another 2,000 on loans, another 2,000 on holidays etc etc. And it worked for a while - until Google clamped down on differentiation and duplication. Most of the traffic went over night - and rightly so. I was caught in that greed frame of mind. A place that I still see many people.

Apart from Google kicking those pages out, you may ask what stopped me doing it again? Well I got some calls from the One Account via OMG asking me to stop promoting them on pages about Halal mortgages because they don't offer them. That's right, I took absolutely no regard for the CPA deals being acutely relevant to the search term - they were effectively foder! I decided that there has to be far better ways of making cash. I still had a load of successful CPA sites that were bringing home the bacon, but I wanted to fill my time doing something more interesting.

I then put more effort into markets where the EPC from Adsense wasn't as attractive as getting the right CPA deals. I started to create sites around niche products and products launching in the future. I found more joy in learning about products I had little knowledge of before and writing about them. Social Media also really started to kick off and I moved in that direction - leaving the Good 'ole days behind me.

But do I still feel that there is a place for Adsense? Bloody hell yeh! But you've got to go down one of two routes:

1) Short Term - Spam the hell out of Google with database sites and have no regard to the internet net user and run the risk of waking up one day and having that revenue stream blown out the water;

2) Medium Term - Create useful content sites and use Adsense wisely - where it makes economic and estethic sense keeping users coming back and refering your site to others.

From what I've learned, I'd recommend you go for #2. Build a wide variety of income streams in a wide range of niches and focus entently on choosing the right CPA deals for your users and add Adsense where appropriate.

I've stopped being an Adsense jerk. I hope you never will.