There is indeed a chapter in his book about providing content that covers the basic stuff: writing it yourself vs. hiring others, getting articles out of article directories, using blogs, about 10 pages worth. Standard kind of stuff. I also have a section like this in my own book (it's in the sample chapter you can download from my site, actually), but I focus more on write-it-yourself content. (I have a strong preference for being more than just an information repeater on your own site, though it is ironic in that I recommend writing free articles as a way to get increased traffic, which happens precisely because other sites fill themselves with other people's free content. But I think it's good to have something that makes your site distinctive and revisitable.) I think what you're looking for is more a book about "whole website" design, of which content is just one part. I always recommend the Web Style Guide as a starting point. It's available online (free) or you can purchase it in printed format. It's not a technical book, it's more about organizing and laying out a site. Certainly worth a look.
Concerning registering a domain that was previously banned I would not be concerned. One thing google is not is stupid. They routinely check whois info on sites and I just don't believe they would do that. I am not calling the guy in that post you cited a liar but It will take much more then a guy posting that he thinks (rumor alert!) but does not know for sure why this has happened to him. Google is even going as far as contacting webmasters of some sites who are violating the rules and telling them why their site has been de-ranked and what to do to fix the problem. As for google banning Spam sites well, they are not. Period. Google is banning sites that do certain things but if you do a Spam site without some of the black hat stuff and dirty tricks kind of things google will not penalize you. How do I know this? I can prove it to you instantly just pick some popular adsense search terms and run some searches in google. Plenty of Spam sites still rank well. BUT it is the straight sites without the black hat stuff that still rank well. Personally I see a great value in having 100 little sites that do a $1.00 a day then one big site that does $100.00 per day because that $100.00 per day site will strongly depend on the whims of the search results. Fall out of favor and guess what? Your 100.00 per day goes to 5.00 per day and you are toast. Has and is happening to me so I know. Most of my small sites are fed by MSN (bill is so good to me I'm putting him on my Christmas card list this year) and yahoo not google although google does send me a little traffic. Also concerning my previous post you guys do realize that a lot of that was said tongue in cheek right? I have a large business directory site that has falling out of favor with Google. 16k pages of listings. I used to get 5 to 10k page views per day and now it is 1k but that site is seasonal. So in the spring things really pick up with it. It is the one big site verses the many small sites thing. The directory information is what it is. All business listings for a certain industry. Google may be penalizing me for stale info but as I said it is what it is. So While my big sites fall my little sites rise and fall with the tides of the search engine updates but some always rise as others fall. Google will never ban little sites who play it straight be they what one would consider Spam type sites or little sites based upon original short articles about certain subjects. The thing that will get small Spam type sites de-ranked is duplicate content. Google hits that one hard. The way I do it is like this. Pick a subject build a site with cash page builder then research what is out there about that subject. The I collect the cream of the crop from top ranked sites in google and copy some content from each to use as an example. I then totally rewrite the content 100% for my site and insert the content into the page created with cash page builder. Say what ever you want about that program, it does have problems. I would not recommend it to newb webmasters as it does some stuff that will throw you if you are not experienced and can fix the quirks. But google does like the pages it builds. Say what you want about that technique. The object is to get enough content there to bring in visitors. Then leave them wanting more info. Give them the adsense ads to click out on and they eat it up. Please don't sermonize me about the morals and ethics of this. Google has built this little world with their own version of plagiarism. After all google copies my (and your) content serves it up and draws people in then makes hundreds of millions of dollars serving up ads to them based upon baiting them in with others peoples content. Oh well, that is ok just because google might send me a few visitors so they can do this with my content no problem. Really? That is what you think huh? Wake up! Google don't want to send you anyone. They want to use your content to draw in searchers and then get the searchers to click on the ads served up with the search results. They don't want anyone to ever make it to your website. Adsense was invented to make more money for google by making a easy way to bring in money via utilizing the over flow from the searches. You know what I mean right? I mean the people who did not click on one of the ads served up in the search results. With adsense google gets another shot at making a buck from those dastardly people who dared click on a website listing in the search result and not one of their ads. The only way for them to do this as of now is to agree to split the pot and give the webmasters a cut via adsense. Oh MY GOD! WHO KNEW!!!! I am just jumping in on this (google) bandwagon. Google will never (I hope) take adsense away as they make a ton of money from it. Don't look now but google has become a big business who is publicly traded and they will maximize profit any way they see fit. Certainly the world of adsense will eb and flow but will it go away? Not likely. Those who learn to ride that wave can improve their lives via a nice little (or large) cash flow. This will no doubt inflame a few of you but the others who are quietly reaping huge bucks via this method will just smile. The adsense books all dance around this and hint at it a little but no one will just come out and tell you to build thousands of little profit making sites to make a fortune. I don't give a darn who thinks what about me. Don't like me? you know what you can do. One thing I am not is a BS artist. This is what I do to make a buck from adsense. As well as owning a small ISP and web hosting business. Website that get 10k plus visitors per day etc are few and far between. You can do everything right and the web will just pass you by. There are no guarantees, it is hit or miss and mostly miss. So me and my growing collection of straight shooting small adsense sites will just keep on keepin on and making bucks. It is an easy formula. More sites = more income. Simple. Ask shoe why he has 1200 domains. There is only one reason to have 1200 domains and that is to do exactly what I have described with them. Well, that or park them and make money from the people who visit thinking there is still a website there instead of some parking page full of ads such as ultsearch does. I have tried that rout and the good domains get bought at really big prices. I can make up a good keyword domain with 2 or 3 key words with a - in between and build a nice little site and link to it with my directory site (to get it crawled) and in 30 days or less it is making .50 to 2.00 a day. Why the heck not keep it up? Google created this enigma so I am going to milk it for every dollar it is worth. ---
It's true that I never state this in my book, but then again I don't claim that you'll make a fortune. Your method is no secret, this is true, in fact that's what some of those scammy schemes -- you know, convert RSS feeds or Google Alerts directly into blog entries, or deploy tens of otherwise-identical sites that use synonyms of the same keyword -- do. Your method is much better, in my opinion, because you're writing original content. It takes time, though, to build that much content. How many hours do you think you spend building a site? And you have to be ready to lay out money up front for the domains and the hosting, though with reseller accounts the latter isn't too bad. Ultimately, it all comes down to traffic volume. You either have a few sites with big volume, or else lots of sites with little volume. Traffic is hard to get, so the many-small-sites model is very valid if money is the primary motivation. I guess someone could write a book about the specific steps to do it!
Well, they are doing that. Because of this, it is often advised (for example here: Any Blacklist of domains) to contact AdSense support in advance when buying a domain. These kind of cases were rare before but, as I said, they are more and more frequent now. Apart from the already mentioned on Digital Point, a recent example on another forum is the thread Bought Expired Domain, Put Up Adsense Then Account Disabled, but surely you can find more with a quick search. Right.
Hours spent? It depends on the depth of the project. Some sites can be finished an a day or so and others take me weeks. But in amongst all this is lots of other stuff popping up and calling me away for hrs or days. One advantage I have is I run my own servers (I am a small web host) so I can load up with sites for little cost. You all can do the same though just find a reseller account that gives you say, 2 gig of space with unlimited domains. Domains cost is why I setup a reseller account for domains with wild west (godaddy) domains. I don't really care if I sell a bunch of domains or not. I save enough money just registering my own domains to make it worth while. I give out accounts to all my friends for domains at my cost also. Traffic is the key to it all really. But one cool thing with adsense is even with modest traffic I can still make book on the small sites. If I ever get to the real money and thus gain some kind of actual credibility as an adsense expert I will write a book. It will come it two parts. Part one will be for those who need to go from step one. Part two will be collage level for people like who have made it to say 1k and want to get the real knowledge to get to 30+ K per month. Part one will be about $75.00 Part to will be delivered as a week long seminar on a Caribbean cruse and cost at least 5K with a money back guarantee. Do exactly as I say and if you don't make the 5K back in say 3 months I'll refund every cent you paid. OK Juan G I will email matt cutts about this and ask him. (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/) He is a google engineer. If some of you have not read his blog or know about him well you are in for a real treat. You can peer into the mind of google via reading what this guy thinks and does. You know he is not spilling all the beans but what he does say seems straight up and upfront. He will answer questions and email some times so we will see about this bad domains thing. ---
Don't count on it. You may think Google doesn't care about this, but it effects their core business pretty significantly. And they make a LOT more money off their search engine advertising than off the content network. Feeling like a protected child is not a good strategy. If you are pumping out valid content, feel free. If you are scrapping or just putting up 10s and 100s of junk sites, you will eventually get hurt, one way or the other. I have even heard rumors of a bounty being laid out for turning in adsense violaters... So we shall see how things evolve. I don't know this for a fact, but I bet a small number of ShoeMoney's sites make up the bulk of his review. I get the impression is a lot of what he does is trial and error and testing. Some things take off some don't. I have seen several of shoemoney sites and all of them have been very different from one another, and not one of the ones I have seen is anything close to being a made for adsense site. In fact he even says in this thread he is fairly new to adsense. He makes money from a lot of different sources. That is the long-term key to making money with web publishing by the way. This idea that you can just monetize sites with adsense and retire with 10 million dollars after a few years is ridiculous. And I have no issue with that strategy at all really. Domain parking is one thing.. but if you are optimizing your site as a scrapper or using blackhat methods to get serps, then I have issues.. YOu just parking domains and monetizing the traffic that comes by.. I agree why not do it. If you are taking pro-active action though to get those sites highly ranked for keywords, then I do have an issue because you are cluttering up the search engine results. I am pretty sure credibility as an adsense expert is way down the list of things required to write an e-book on the subject. You don't have to be an expert. You just have to be able to persuade a handful of people you are an expert.
Skip part one, I've already written it The cruise idea sounds neat. Kind of like Geek Cruises. Shoemoney: Matt Cutt's blog is at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/.
You need traffic. But does good content always equate to traffic? I don't know. Making money with Adsense is complicated and dififcult and there are many ways it can be done but I doubt there is a single golden rule.
IamNed If you really are at that point with adsense the best thing you could do is read back through this thread and buy both of the books mentioned. ---
If I remember correctly, Matt has said that people ask him AdSense questions but, although he was involved in AdSense time ago, he is working now in other Google matters (like search algorithms, I think) and he doesn't know the current AdSense details. Anyhow, it will be interesting if he knows about that quite new situation. By the way, an interesting thing that he developed or helped to develop, and I'm using on my sites, has been the new link attribute rel="nofollow", to avoid endorsing and adding PageRank to uncontrolled links on blog comments, forums, etc.
monRa can you be more specific about what seems fraud to you? If you are speaking of Joel or his book I can tell you personally it took me 2 plus years to learn on my own what his book can teach you. Say what you want about Joel but If you take the time to find out more about him you will see that he seems to come off as a straight up guy. I have found it much easier to trace down lots of his websites and look over what he is doing online verses others I have heard of on this forum who claim big incomes from adsense and other stuff such as shoe. I can't find much at all on him. Wish I could so I could see how he does things. Note to shoe: I in no way am accusing you of any shady stuff just to be clear. I usually will believe what people claim unless I have some specific reason to doubt such as in some one trying to sell me something. Joel is selling his ebook but he does not hide everything about what he is doing online. If you take the time to dig a little it is all right there. ---
I think I saw a few of the Shoemoney's sites, time ago. He has interesting ideas, beneficial for users. But many publishers think it is better not to publish their URLs on webmaster forums, because of the few black sheeps of the family. Some have had unpleasant experiences with unethical competitors, etc. About Joel, I agree with you. Of course he is very interested in making money online, but in an honest way, at least from what I know. monRa, I don't think Joel "Seems freaud" or Sigmund Freud. Well, maybe a little the beard.
Matt Cutts is a google engineer who post in some forums and has a blog. Interesting to read what he writes as he does it all as "Matt Cutts google engineer" Since we all have a big stake in what google does naturally it stands to reason ya sort of would want to know what one of google's engineers says and does. seems freaud as in sigmund? Man I never though of it that way, hmmm