My 2006 AdSense Summary - From $10/Week to $800/Week

Thank you for a very informative article. Being that I am a relative newcomer to adsense it is most helpful

 

People sure seem to love a really good success story. I am sure this thread will be popular in months to come.

 

Look at mine

 

Nice post Burta.

 

Bravo! Excellent long read, thanks for sharing

 

Very informative and well done! Congrats and I wish you a very successful 2007.

 

Great post, thanks for sharing.

A newbie questions here, what do you mean by supplementally indexing and how did you solve that problem?

Thanks in advance for any help and best wishes on the new year.

 

@Burta: I hope I didnt say, I was gonna try to market stuff Im not interested in..Im working on my stuff 50+ hours a week and I know I couldnt be doing that if i wasnt interested in the topics...but I still managed to find a lot of niches for subjects Im interested in..whereas I dropped other ideas, which I thought were good ideas, because I saw i wasnt interested enough in them, so I wouldnt be able to put together a great site.

 

Great post, Burta! Very useful information. I just have a question for you: on your attachement of the template you use there are on left of the page 3 green squares...do they stand for pictures on the site?

 

Great post Burta. I've just got a quick question about your sites. Do you just have a general information site with lots of articles? Or do you, say, have a camera site with lots of articles relating to cameras.

Also, how do you think the setup would work with a blog? I'm thinking of starting a niche wordpress blog soon where I would be posting 400-800 word articles every day. I would then try to get some links to point directly to those articles.

 

well...my $0.2, but take 'em with grain of salt.

Avoid duplicate content...supplementally indexing happens if you eg. have an amazon affiliate store, asi have a bunch. Do everything first in terms of SEO, and then check out the forum here...eg. i just found some helpful advice...if ANY POSSIBLE unique page titles, descriptions.

If ANY possible add your own unique content, if you're only a 1:1 copy of zillions of amazon stores then you wont have a good chance and your results will go into the supplemental.

You ARE limited if you use a pre-fabricated store software, eg. i use AoM..but there ARE options to turn on SEO and change/modify page-titles. So use them.

Add uniqe stuff on your page woith the amazon store, a forum, unique content, articles. Thats all i can say to that topic. PROBABLY dont pull the SAME exact identical reviews off amazon, you dont want duplicates. I dont pull reviews, i only pull product description relevant to the items i sell.

Change titles/headers in AoM so every product page does NOT come up with your page site name and slogan...i deleted those so every product page just has the product name as page-title. MUCH better then zillions of sites with the same identical site-slogan in the title.

The 100% optimum solution of course would be use a custom store-software...pull nodes from amazon..and then SOMEHOW rewrite all the pages and product descriptions so they're not 1:1 copies off the amazon server.

 

The good thing about a blog is that you do not necesarrily have to write posts that very long. Most blogs I come across, even the good ones, tend to have posts that are about 200-250 words long. I don't think people want really long posts in blogs.

 

Burta, that was a fantastic read. Let me commend you on an excellent job with your business. I see that you are a great content writer, which is a skill I lack, however I plan to work on that. Right after reading this article, I registered a new domain and am working on a subject that I love, and that I doubt has been broken into. It has to do with Cars, and I know that cars are over saturated, but I've taken the subject, and have formed my own sub-niche which isn't populated at all! I can't wait to get this project going!

Also, have you heard anything from the Adsense team? I've submitted an email a few days ago and have yet to receive a response from them, I'm wondering if you are experiencing the same problem as me.

 

Ahahaha - Well if/when I get to $8000/week it will be an absolute pleasure to write!

I really didn't plan this thread to be what it has turned out to be - I wasn't really ever looking at it as a success story, it was more just my reflections on 2006 and what I did to get where I am now (other than work hard to try to learn as much as I can) but it would appear that lots of people have found inspiration out of it, which is GREAT to see. Now if only I could inspire my friends and family .

Wow Lee Dodd congratulating me !

I'll be honest and say that this man right here has contributed a fair amount to my own success. He has some great advice on how to manage and build forums as well as ways of monetizing them. He has been at this game for quite awhile so if you are looking for some helpful tips on running some forums, even some general marketing head over to his blog Forum Trends.

Sorry everyone about the blatant plug but I'm a big believer in giving credit where credit is due, and well my most popular forum wouldn't be fraction of it's size if it wasn't for Lee Dodd and his team at Forum Trends and the Won Li Do Sho (if only it was still active ). Anyway thanks for the comments Lee I really appreciate it!

Well in short supplement results are pages that Google have indexed that they deem not really worthy of featuring in their search engine results pages. And from memory when I said supplemental indexing I was referring to how Google might be indexing a number of my pages but they were going straight to supplemental results.

In my case it was normally due to using the same, title and meta tags as well not having a great deal of deep backlinks. I think you will find many forums sites and sites that use user generated content and give each page the same title, description and keywords often end up in supplemental results. I get my pages our of supplemental results I just made sure that I applied individual title tags to each page (though they were still automated) and I tried to build up a few links to the deeper pages of my sites. It seemed to work and it drew a large percentage of my supplemental pages out and into the SERPs.

I understand - and I mean if you are interested in it and enjoy it then by all means go for it. After all if you are "doing a job you love you will never have to work a day in your life".

I was just trying to get across to you that sometimes trying to tackle and industry that is very competitive can be very frustrating, and that frustration will only grow if your not doing it at least because you partially enjoy it.

They are actually where I placed my navigational bar and other links, and I also used the top and bottom boxes to place affiliate products or other advertising.

If I have a site about cameras I pretty much only put articles about cameras on it. It gets hard to rank in search engines for sites that are a bit of everything but focussed on nothing, if you know what I mean. And the principle is pretty consistent with real life as well, people that are "jack of all trades" tend to get by but they are never going to ahead, where as the person that really focuses on one aspect of anything finds it really easy to dedicate the time, energy and resources to that one area and as such they get well ahead of the pack and as a result they can make a lot of money.

I'll be honest and say that I haven't worked a lot with blogs, but that is largely because I normally am trying to build a site not just around articles but something else, normally something bigger like a service or product. But that said there are a lot of people out there getting great results with blogs and doing very well in the SERPs with them as well. So setting up some niche blogs and writing good quality articles everyday I'm sure has the potential to make you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, it has definitely produced these results for other people.

Sounds great, go for it! Oh and on the topic of not being a great content writer, I honestly wouldn't put me in that category either. I'm pretty lazy but I don't mind writing about things I enjoy, I mean look at the original post for example, I dont know exactly how many words it is but is a LOT and none of it was hard to write about, because I had experience with it and I enjoyed sharing the story. If you can find a subject that you enjoy writing content isn't THAT hard - and by the sounds of it you have found your subject.

Actually I too sent an email a few days ago and haven't heard anything as yet, I'd imagine that there might be a few delays just due to the time of year, but if I don't hear from them in the next 24 hours I might try again.

 

Thanks for the response. I will try to re-contact them again if I do not here a response in the next 24 hours. Also, I'm in the same position as you. I tried writing articles about stuff I have no idea about and I'm horrible about it. But when it comes to writing about stuff I like, I feel that what I write isn't all that bad. I just need to get myself around to actually doing it

 

I wasn't really planning to have it be a typical blog, more of a receptacle for articles, but with the articles being updated frequently. I may switch my idea and just use wordpress as a CMS and use pages instead of posts.

 

You might like to look into Drupal as your blog/CMS - though it has a bit of a learning curve, it's very flexible and powerful once you know how to use it.

 

Thank you so very much for sharing your experience in such an eloquent fashion -- you are an excellent writer IMHO and convey your thoughts in a very clear and concise manner. Just wish I could crank out content on my sites as well as you have written here Please keep us posted on your future developments.
Phil

 

I can't code/design though, so I love the huge variety of wordpress themes/plugins available for free.

 

This is the longest post I've ever read in DP! Thanks very much.