How can I make piles of money with AdSense? (Answer: Write a book about it)
Book Review: The Adsense Code - Joel Comm
I’ve just finished reading ” The AdSense Code“, by Joel Comm. Subtitle: “What Google never told you about making money with AdSense”. Was it worth it? Well… I’ve got mixed feelings about this book.
Joel’s goal is to explain how to make the most money out of Google AdSense advertising. He does this mostly by explaining how to “tweak” your ads so that they blend in with the page contents, how to position the ads on the page for optimal results and how to perform some search engine optimisazion (SEO) to make sure your site appears relevant to Google and attracts visitors. For Joel, visitors == people to click on ads.
I guess that last point is one of the points that I found disconcerting. My idea of attracting people to Web sites is to make them stay. Give them what they’re looking for, perhaps teach them something or entertain them or in some other way make their visit worth their while. The mindset of an ever-optimising AdSense publisher is different: Attract people so that you can immediately send them somewhere else, as sending them somewhere else can make you money (click-throughs, which equal paycheck from Google). So when Joel writes about digging up public domain novels or stories and putting them on your Web site — not before plastering them with AdSense, of course — in order to score keywords and make your site appear attractive to visitors, I’ve got a problem. I’ve got the same problem with suggestions such as lumping together the two AdSense rectangles you’re permitted, in order to “make it look like content”. This is best iullustrated by the title of chapter 2: “Ho to tweak your ads to Make Them ‘Click’”.
Also, I was expecting more in terms of cold, hard facts. How does Google calculate ad value? How does Google’s performance measurement work? Of course, Google is pretty tight-lipped about these kinds of hard facts. So I guess it’s no surprise they’re not in the book, either. Squeezing 22 chapters, with a lot of screenshots, into 230 pages means covering a wide range of topics, but only touching on each one quite lightly. Yes, each topic is important but somehow each chapter felt a bit superficial and left me unfulfilled.
As is to be expected, most (or all) of the information in this book is also available on the Internet — large parts of it right there in Google’s own optimisation hints and AdSense help files. So, as much as the books’s title design and cover allude to the “DaVinci Code”, there are no big secrets disclosed in the 230 pages of the book.
That’s not to say I didn’t learn a couple of new points. I hadn’t previously discovered google_ad_section_start, for instance.
Having all this info in one book that can be easily read through in two to three evenings of light reading can be quite helpful, as well.
What I liked about the book was the strict “white-hat” approach (also known as the CYA approach to book publishing), of playing within Google’s AdSense Terms Of Service (TOS). The constant reminders that some “optimisation” tips are outside of what is covered by the TOS and could get you banned from AdSense. In fact, there’s a whole chapter on “AdSense No-Nos”, the point of which being that you can make enough money by playing according to the rules, so there’s no real reason to break them.
I’d recommend this book as a source of inspiration for Web publishers starting out with AdSense advertising. You’re not going to take away hard-core SEO tips. You’re not going to take away the killer AdSense keyword optimisation tips. But along with a few tips and ideas that you can apply immediately (and that I did apply immediately), you will get some inspiration as a starting point for further study and research into how you can optimise your Google AdSense income. There’s a lot of ‘tweaking’ — and quite a lot of learning — to be done. Use Joel’s book as a starting point for your own AdSense journey.
Personal request: I had a look at some of the recommended keyword and AdSense optimisation tools and resources. The ones I tried only seem to work with English keywords, with keyword or search results from google.com. If anybody knows of similar resources for German-language Web sites, please let me know.
Bibliographical information:
Joel Comm: The AdSense Code
Morgan James Publishing, 2006
ISBN: 1-933596-70-8
Tags: AdSense; AdWords; Google; SEO
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August 19th, 2006 at 6:16 pm
I did feel the “conceptualization” was pretty professional, other than that (like I’ve mentioned it on his forum too) he quotes nothing more than google TOS, “blending of ads” ie Tweaking them and ofcourse his experiences with certain ads like the “banner ad” which he says does not work and people tend to ignore at the drop of a hat.
I’d rather prefer to go over videos that Michael Cheney has that tell you how you can increase that CTR rate, rather than just bring zillions of visitors to your website.
Joel Comm’s Ebook does not quote anything out of the ordinary, most of that information as mentioned by many is commonplace, can be found in google help sections, on ebay and on most forums too, although some “tit bits” is something “you learn everyday”.
Overall, his ebook, left me “unsatisfied” and lacked that punch which I so every much wanted to see and read.
He does not mention that he owns 15+ (my estimation is more) websites, and that brand name sells for him now, thats the primary reason he manages to sustain those earnings month after month.
Rohan
http://forex4riches.com