The secret of the adsense gurus

There are people who have hundreds of tightly focused websites around subsectors of a broad niche. Individual sites may not make much money. Build enough of them though, and they could care less if each one only averages $5 a month profit.

This is the basis of the technique the so-called adsense gurus use - you know, those people with the red porsche and villas in 16 different countries who work just 5 minutes a day and make millions of dollars while waiting for the engines on their private jet to warm up. So they claim.

Or at least maybe they did, until Google changed the rules, but thats another story.

Reverse engineered niche sites

The twist is: rather than build sites with genuine content and optimize these for search engines, they instead look for search terms used by pay-per-click advertisers on Google, and then build sites optimized just for those key words, and their related phrases and synonms. Hundreds of websites, not just one or two. Submit them to the search engines, and just move on to make the next set of sites while waiting for these to be indexed.

Presto. Google adsense advertising targeted to these words appears on the website, people click on them, and the website owner gets paid. Or at least they did for a while. Google now immediately close down the adsense accounts of people they merely suspect of abusing their system in this way.

Whats happening here is that the whole website building process started with keyword selection, followed by a search for content relevant to those keywords, and only then is the web site built. Much of the content on these sites is obtained from elsewhere on the web, with little or no original material appearing.  

Traditional niche site building

As you can see, the 'adsense guru' method is just the reverse of the traditional niche site approach, where you first decide on the theme or topic of your website, then create relevant content, and then make adjustments to improve keyword targeting and so attract search engine traffic.     

Developing a number of small but related niche websites using the traditional approach is still a strategy to consider. Obviously it takes time and effort to put this into effect.

Some people prefer to have just one, or maybe two sites, and over time keep adding more and more content. Eventually their site will grow to thousands of pages, rank highly in the search engines, and attract a lot of search engine traffic. 

Sounds like starting your own websites could mean a lot of work for you doesn't it?

It does. Welcome to the real world. But its not as bad as you think if you use the right tools.

Read on for things to think about and tools you can use when creating your first website