A few times a year I have the lucky foresight to spot a hot trend before it hits, when most of the competition is unaware that this hot trend will hit. How it Works... I don't want to give any big trends away, but could give you a small example... Let's say Apple is bringing out a new product in 6 months time, you think of what might be one of the most popular accessories for that product, in this case let's say it is a remote control. You then start building placer content and doing promotion for that page months in advance to land the top rankings. When the time comes you make sure you have the best page on that topic, then let the traffic flood in from Google. If you run Adsense your earnings will jump up considerably, and you could monetize in many other ways (in the Apple example you might have an affiliate link to the Apple store). So How Did I do? In 2009 I managed to get this tactic done twice (would have done it more but was doing a lot of traveling). These were HUGE events which had target audiences of millions of people so if I pulled it off the stakes were high. The first one I did earlier in the year was a huge success, - I received hundreds of thousands of extra visitors over a couple of days. About 60-70% came from Google. - I scored a few hundred natural links from other bloggers and websites linking to the page. This was the main aim of the project, the extra cash was a bonus. These sorts of links I value at at least as much as the earnings themselves, if not a lot lot more (I got some mainstream media links from places like USAToday). - I did approx. $1000 in Adsense in one day, but I also had other ad revenues from banner ads, Kontera etc. which brought the total closer to $2000. Woot Woot. Revenues were up a few days after too until the traffic died down when the event was over. Round 2 Later in the year I targeted a surprise event on short notice - it was potentially huge and because it was not a planned event there was hardly any competition. Easy pickings. I put up a page a week before so Google would catch onto it, and did some soft promotion of that page announcing what would be on it (Press Releases was one tactic). I put together the best page on the web for the particular topic and made that content available at the last possible minute so nobody could copy it beforehand. This turned out to be even bigger than the last one. I think the event itself was on-par in terms of audience size with the event earlier in the year, but the lack of competition meant I dominated. Between my site, a few sites linking to me and the press releases I owned half of the top ten results (sometimes more depending on the exact search term). The results... - Even more traffic in the hundreds of thousands, I nearly lost my server and had to do some emergency tweaks with my host to keep it up. (an optimized site is essential for this - see my sig for more info). - Even more links, include a lot more from authority sources. That particular site picked up some of its best links that day. Again this was the main aim of the project as quality links mean better Google traffic for years to come. - If it had earned like the last one I would have had a $3000-$5000 day, but no such luck. The Adsensebot screwed up big time. Instead of showing ads that matched up with the readers interests (and their were hundreds of thousands of them), it latched on to one word in the headline that while very relevant to the topic, in itself was not relevant at all. I'll try and give an example... Let's say you get a flood of traffic for 'Lady GaGa's Car Smashed'. The best sort of ads would be for Lady GaGa music, ringtones, memoribilia, and more general celebrity and entertainment stuff. But instead Google Adsense picks ads about new cars, which the audience is not interested in, and they don't click. That's what happened to me, the wrong sort of ads were being triggered and I was getting no ad clicks and missed out on thousands. Adsense figured it out after a couple of days and showed the right ads, but then it was too late. I shared the hot topic with a friend and he published a post on it too and got hundreds of thousands of visitors. His ads were well targeted and he did a $10,000 day. I was gutted to say the least, and a little bit envious, but that's just how it rolls sometimes Still all good fun! Shoot with any questions and I'll try to answer them best I can if I get chance.
really awesome brother.. how much blog u have till get so big earning? waiting for your sharing about the trick how to get it..
The big question I have is about your site hosting. Are you on a shred hosting plan or what? And whom is your server? I am on BlueHost and they throttle my CPU if too much traffic at one time.
Surprisingly good post, don't come across too many like these on DP - normally all you see is "Dear sirs, how can i make monies online - tell me your urlz".... anyways.... Not sure if this matters.. but have you tried "incentivizing" the adsense bot to show ads that you want to see by placing those keywords somewhere on the page in a non spammy/relevant way? My best days were using tactics somewhat similar to this, but not on google... without going into too much detail i like you had found trending topics in a specific niche - it paid off very nicely for a month - around $17,000 in adsense and $5,000 in kontera, it really picked up at the very beginning with a few days over $1,000 - The sad part is if my ecpm was what it normally was on my sites it would have been around $60,000/month - but can't complain too much i suppose
Great advice and thanks for sharing something people can actually use! You're lucky that the bot finally figured out the right topic. I've a page about programming marquees that's been up for at least 2 years and while the Google search engine bot has always indexed it properly the Adsense bot insists on putting ads about party tents - apparently Brits and some others call tents marquees. How unfortunate in your case that it didn't get it right until after the deluge. I wonder if you could password protect the page, let the Adsense bot in (I'm pretty sure I saw that somewhere), verify the ads are good and then post to the world?
Great post. I've seen some really odd inconsistencies on ad targeting that takes some time to get corrected but never with as much traffic of a short day(s) spike as you're targeting. You can utilize the AFC adsense hint directive, may help some in terms of targeting relevancy. I've also heard from some that aggresive targeting using channels, for some reason, causes odd hickups or eCPM variances -- if you are changing out channels in Adsense a lot just prior to the events you may want to take extra caution.
In my experience the Adsense bot mostly goes off the title of your page, and if I changed that then I wouldn't get the flood of search traffic I was getting - so it's a catch 22. The keywords we're all there on the page, but Adsense has its own mind and while it is usually pretty good, especially on older pages, it does get it wrong from time to time.