Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I am without a doubt the top individual adsense publisher in terms of pageviews. Me talking about how I did it won't help you, but here is what i found you need to be successful in adsense.
1. Get a database of IP's so you know where your traffic is coming from. Then create channels for each country. Its not uncommon to see US traffic with a CPM of $5.00 and a CDN traffic at 20 cents and vice versa. If you have access to the hints option, give different hints based on IP. ie if your page is about 401k plans, that won't get you anything outside of the USA.
2. You have to create sites that will bring in repeat traffic. If you think you will get rich off SEO think again. If you create a Free jobs site you could net 30 million + a year if you got big. Club listings site, free religious personals etc would all be big money makers. Look for established markets and offer a service for free and support it with adsense.
3. Have your users create content and lots of it. User reviews of night clubs, Resorts, golf courses etc. Build your site around your users and make them part of your site, don't build your site for consumption.
4. Do not enter markets with a lot of competition monitized via adsense. Try and undercut paid content markets by offering a free service, or better yet create your own market.
5. Keep your site dead simple, it has to load fast and have no more then 2 ads and 1 or 2 pictures other then your logo. Do not confuse your user, give them what they want and give it to them fast.
6. Troll around various forums and if people are not talking about your market, there is a good chance you will make money.
Because they're not part of a community whose ultimate purpose is to hang out at that site. They're seeking something, to the ultimate degree. They're probably very highly motived to learn of and investigate similar sites.
Is this in response to my question?
If so, why would a returning customer come back to my site, just to move on to another site? Unless it's clicking an Ad accidentally.
Rick
Your questions are being asked in a kind of accusing manner, so I don't know if you actually hope to learn anything or are merely trying to imply that Markus is lying about his traffic.
Either way, I suggest you look at Markus' site for yourself and try to figure out why people come back. There's probably no single simple answer; it'll be part of the overall way that people interact with the website.
First step: Collect Underpants
Second step:?
Third setp: Profit
Not just anybody can do this. It would cost a very large ammount of money for somebody to have this site made and another ton of money to handle the traffic once you get it. You can only do this if you are a web programmer and know a lot about how to set up the backend and a good chunk of money. If you just have the idea and limited skills you will need a very large chunk of change.
All this said I know a large percentage of the people reading this would think they died and went to heaven if they made $1000 a month in adsense.
One thing I'm curious to see from Markus is, if you bring loads of repeat customers to your site, and they actually return to your site, why would they click on your Adsense ads? Shed some light on your theory for this.
It's a valid question which is simple enough to explain.
1. Curiosity, what is there?
Why?
2. It does not cost the surfer to look.
Plus,
3. New ads appear and people want to check them out.
Back to explanation 2...
That's the Net for you:-)
Your questions are being asked in a kind of accusing manner, so I don't know if you actually hope to learn anything or are merely trying to imply that Markus is lying about his traffic.
No, I'd never say anyone is lying simply because I know the potential of this whole net thing. So if you assume I'm accusing Markus of lying, you're mistaken. I'm questioning the users point of view. If I go to a dating site, bookmark it, go back to it, the only way I'd click on an Adsense ad, is by accident. But most of these people can't tell the different between an ad and a regular link if the ad is placed right. Which I also mentioned, are the clicks accidental?
Oh, and I've seen his site.
Why even run a tv ad to the same dedicated watchers of a sitcom. Eventually they will be branded and or "need" the product or even just become currious enough to check it out sometime - sometimes that is all it takes.
One thing I'm curious to see from Markus is, if you bring loads of repeat customers to your site, and they actually return to your site, why would they click on your Adsense ads? Shed some light on your theory for this.
I actually have the opposite response, because of his market, online dating.
People looking for dates want as many prospects as they can find, especially if they live in small cities/towns where the selection is limited. So they're very likely to check out every service they can find, and clicking on Adsense ads is the natural way to do that. It's a very clever idea.
The visitors are in that frame of mind. They're highly targeted and motivated. Whether they're looking at profiles and pics or the professionally crafted ads next to them, they're clicking. It's perfect for Markus AND the advertizer.
As for competing sites advertising on a free site of the same theme...
Pulling or adjusting your AdWords campaign to exclude Markus' site and all that targeted, motivated traffic would be insane.
K
My question is how so much money can be made from ONE ad unit at the top of the home page.
I'm not seeing ads on many pages.
I suppose that much traffic can do wonderful things with less.
Don't you suppose the same ads will be coming up time after time? So if the majority of traffic is regulars, won't they realize just what they are clicking on?
Perhaps they already know this and use Markus as a starting point- hard to say.
My question is how so much money can be made from ONE ad unit at the top of the home page.
I'm not seeing ads on many pages.
I suppose that much traffic can do wonderful things with less.
Well, the ads change due to the different profiles. That's the "ever changing content" along with the forum, etc.
I must admit it's a pretty good plan, in the right industry, I tried with jokes, but the adsense pay rate was horrible.
What we should all get from this is that if you get enough traffic you can make a lot of money with adsense.
That seems like too simplistic a lesson to draw from this site, especially given that the forum topic here is "AdSense". More than one poster here has exhausted the available AdSense inventory for their website long before they got anywhere close to Markus' level of traffic.
Others see such incredibly low rates of return that the amount of traffic required to reap the returns Markus is seeing would be pretty much impossible to achieve (still speaking about strictly AdSense income here).
The lessons I like here are (some mentioned reasonably often in this forum):
Even if you're not swinging for the fences for making huge bucks from AdSense, you ought to pay attention to the point about geography. If there are opportunities to segment any of your content geographically, you may have a chance to pick up geotargetting AdWords advertisers that you didn't know existed before. As local search becomes more important to both users and advertisers, this becomes a more valuable concept to publishers.
Thanks.
That speaks well for the value of the Adsense program. If the advertisers were not able to convert this traffic, they would have all blocked his site by now.
Its wierd seeing how differently people react to my site depending on profession. The first thing reporters usually ask me is, when are you going to get a real business model or when are you going to hire a bunch of people and become a real company. Most people think i'm making a grand total of 2k or so a month. Other affiliates are blinded by greed and just want to copy :)
What type of ads would people looking for dates click on? Only other dating services ads. SO Marcus runs his site for free and his competition pays him a million in 3 months. lololol Marcus laughs all the way to the bank! What a plan!
If the advertisers were not able to convert this traffic, they would have all blocked his site by now.
In my personal experience, I have found no shortage of companies spending large sums of money on advertising without actually have much clue how about how well it's converting. YMMV.
Its wierd seeing how differently people react to my site depending on profession.
Markus: What I notice is how many people do not read other posts fully but merely scan them, pick up a slight "thread" and then post believing they have contributed something new!
Members, read, read and read again the posts before commenting, there has been some fantastic extra advice here yet many are missing the simplicity of it all:-)
Is it because so many are raised with the corporate "We need X amount to complete a task problem" whereas Markus and girlfriend did it by themselves?
This is a personal observation of many years watching grey suits versus the talented individual.
Think outside of the box, there are very, very, many untapped opportunities, let's hope that Markus' posting has made you realise that David V Goliath is relatively easily possible...so long as one is prepared to work, of course!
Here's my reaction - Good for you. You found an inefficiency and exploited it.
I never worry about what the other guy is making - that only derails me from my goal. Unless you're Bill Gates, there is always someone that has more than you do. I stopped worrying about money years ago. I'm happy with myself and I'm happy seeing others succeed too.
I have a friend that is into psychology - she says I've reached "self actualization." Again, good for you and thanks for sharing your story.
I'm very interested in the geotargeting by IP function.
Can someone enlighten us on how exactly this can be accomplished?
there is an open source program that handles this - its just a DB of IPs categorized by geographic location. geoIP.
dont forget that AdSense automatically targets ads to your visitors by their location. so, the ads that one of your visitors see when visiting your site from location A may not be the same as the ads another visitor would see who is visiting your site from location B. in other words, AdSense automatically geotargets.
but, if you want to show different content to different visitors based on their location, then you can use the tool i described above.
You said truth but not the FACT
Search engine optimization is highly complicated and complex fact and anyone who says he or she is an expert and understands it all is wrong . Who said it is 2%? It is 50 to 60%.
SE traffic is the best sort because all web traffic that comes to your web site through SE will be active looking for information. Don't mistake me that I am overlooking the expenses (web promotion), but that can be minimized through SEO.
Another fact is with SEO and adsense the earning megabucks from websites, no matter the topic, has become easier than it's ever been before.
Markus is the one who said search engines only accounted for about 2% of his traffic. He's not dictating rules or arguing what kind of traffic is "best" -- he's simply describing his own site.
Someone also noted he has over a million pages crawled by Google. It is unlikely that the sheer amount of traffic he is getting comes from any other source but search engines. Maybe he could explain where he gets his traffic from? Oh, I forgot. He's not going to explain anything, he is very secretive about his technique.
...he is very secretive about his technique.
His thread is not about "sharing his techniques".
In fact, he shared plenty in his first post.
I will too as soon as I have loads of it...
