I bought just about every book imaginable a couple years back - before I found and stayed at DP. Of the ones I bought I would most recommend the rich jerk. It's short, to the point and worth the $50.
true the rich jerk was a good read i liked the first bit though then it got boring, i really liked the tips on writing a sales copy that was good
All of the information in those ebooks can be found on WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint. They lurked these exact boards themselves to create those ebooks. Please save your money, and if you need help with anything HTML/PHP, marketing, advertising, hosting, adsense, or google related just drop me a private message and I will be glad to help you out, free of charge. I've been doing this for about 5 years, and I've always believed that you must first help others and then you will be helped, internet karma? maybe. It has done pretty good for me so far.
For the most part, ebooks exist merely to tell you what you want to hear, not to actually make you successful at anything. Find an ebook that only requires payment from your profits and then you might have some valuable info. However, that would be a losing strategy for the author. A really valuable adsense ebook would have to be HUGE in order to give you all the reference information you'd need to be able to deal with a wide variety of situations and intricacies. Sadly, it would quickly become out of date. That's why people are telling you to visit forums, which are dynamic and can quickly respond to the changing Google winds. Blogs are another viable source that are conducive to keeping up with Adsense. Adsense's own blog is a good source, for that matter. Probably the most valuable resource for succeeding with Adsense, beside research/trial and error would be to have a mentoring relationship with someone who knows how to make money with it. PM someone who seems to know what they're talking about, it can't hurt to ask. And no, I'm not offering.
I think something a lot of people fail to take into consideration when calculating the value of an e-book of this nature is the value of the time of the individual purchasing the book. I consider my time quite valuable, and there were several e-books I purchased that I consider a bargain. Yes, I could have found that information here and there for free. I would also say without a doubt that I have learned more on these forums than in the pages of any e-book. But, for the amount of time you have to spend reading these forums to get that information- I think paying $47 for the short version is a bargain all-things-considered. Not everyone has $50 to $100 to throw around though. I understand many people are students, from another country, or are just tapped out. And for those people, it may be worth their time to simple forgo the purchase of a good e-book and do their homework the hard way. Either way, if you're in the market for an e-book - the rich jerk won't do you wrong. I'm not a big fan of mining gold on the internet though. The information is outdated and shawn casey rambles about things he need not ramble about. Sort of like what I'm doing now -Cheers, Greg-J
Unlike most people on these forums I don't think ebooks and books about AdSense are a complete waste of time sometimes only two or three ideas make the book worth it's value 100 times over in the long run... I personally have been working with AdSense for at least 18 months now, but recently invest in Joel Comm's "The AdSense Code" which costs like $15 or something like that on Amazon and it is like 200 odd pages long and I read it in two days because it was actually a well written book that was an interesting read that covers pretty much everything and breaks things down into common sense for a lot of people, and even though I consider myself to be fairly "well read" when it comes to AdSense I still picked up a couple of good ideas that I'm planning to apply and I know that will make the book worth it's weight, and I will probably read the book over again yet to reinforce a lot of it. So I do think there is value to books and ebooks, just as much as there is for places like DP - which is priceless mind you! Also as a little side note, I sometimes get the impression that those that are always plugging forums as being "all that you need" are those that have never bought and read ebooks and books, and that have learnt all that they have learnt from forums and as such shouldn't really being commenting on the value of ebooks because they haven't forked out the money to justify their perspective. That comment isn't to negate the fact that forums ARE great sources of information, that are dynamic and updated with all the latest but SOME books in my opinion are still worth their weight in gold, and for the small prices that some good books are you can save yourself literally days, probably weeks of browsing through incomplete threads and half answered questions with conflicting responses from various members - time well spent developing an actual site that will be making money. As for books about "finding profitable niches" well there would no doubt be a few around but to be totally honest I think you are heading down the wrong path if you want to be in this AdSense game long term. Your better off listing 10 - 20 things you enjoy and are active with in your life and then finding out which of those are the most profitable rather than trying start a site about something you are essentially ignorant of but you "think" is going to earn you $5 a click... not that it will. So honestly, list of all the things that interest you and that you could create a site on then go to "overture's bid tool" or the "AdWords traffic estimator tool" and find out which of those gets lots of traffic and still has a high earning per click for the topic your are interested in - that is your best option, because at the end of the day "quality content" wins on the net and it is much easier to produce quality when you enjoy what your are doing and know what you are talking about. Best of luck.
The books are a waste fo time I concur, judging by the way Google Adsense is always changing these days a book can't keep up. That's why forums are better, updates come any time. New methods and old methods can all be discussed and you can figure out yourself if it's worth it for your site. And most of all it's free. Thank You
I've browsed a few of the eBooks. I think that the eBooks are useful if you are a complete beginner to Adsense as well as the Internet. If you are a complete beginner, then chedk out some eBooks. Other than that, it looks like it's the experienced people like me that say that the books are a waste of time.
AdSense is extremely simple, actually. The little you need to know about ad placement can be picked up on forums such as DigitalPoint, though you should always TEST TEST TEST different ad placements. What isn't nearly as simple is the other 95% of the equation: traffic building. If you want people to click your ads, the first thing you need to do is attract eyeballs to your site. This is an art in itself, and you can pick up tips by reading the forums, but if you combine this with an (e)Book, it may be advantageous. AdWords, on the other hand, has a lot more information to take in. There are many more different strategies to using it. In my opinion, a combination of forums and UP TO DATE books works best here. So basically, your best option is to use a combination of both forums and books. Books have all the information condensed in one place, and forums keep you up to date, active in the subject, and provide many opinions on different ideas.