Custom Search
(and related tips)
Timothy Horrigan; July 15, 2010
Almost all of the pages on TimothyHorrigan.com have Google Adsense placements on them, and I have used Adwords in the past to promote my site.
The two programs are two sides of the same coin. A website publisher (e.g., me) provides a few square inches of space on his or her pages via the Adsense program and Google auctions the space off via Adwords. On the average, Google shares 51% of the gross web advertising revenue with its affiliates. I can definitely say that it is worthwhile to put the ad placements on your web site: aside from the revenue it is fun to see what gets matched with your content.
Here is an example of an Adsense placement (as if you haven't seen millions of them already!):
Custom Search
You will see a lot of Adsense arbitrage schemes advertised. The basic idea is that you buy incoming links, through Adwords or some other venue— and then make a profit when surfers click on the Adsense links.
These schemes often involve selling you prefab "content" packed with high-paying keywords. The highest paying Adsense keywords are the most expensive Adwords keywords. No one aside from a few Google employees knows that those are, and they change all the time. But it is safe to say that the priciest keywords are related to money, sex and asbestos. (Asbestos snuck in ahead of "food" because there are many asbestos-related lawsuits, and hence many lawyers looking for contingency fees.) Key phrases related to mortgages and insurance are also expensive. The ultimate high priced key phrase might be something like "asbestos penis enlargement insurance settlement loan restructuring."
The first problem with keyword arbitrage is that only a small percentage of surfers click on your ad placements. On my web site, an average of about one visitor in 200 clicks on an Adsense ad. The percentage varies significantly from page to page according to the topic: some material attracts people who like to click on ads, some material doesn't. But even if you pick the right topic and put the ads in just the right spots on your pages, you can't get a clickthrough ratio of more than 2% or so. Even 1% is a very ambitious goal. The promoters of arbitrage schemes always imply that you will be getting clickthroughs in the 5%-10% range. If you take 1% as your clickthrough goal, and if you use Adwords as your source of clicks, and if you assume that you and Google splits your Adsense revenues 50-50, then you would need to find low-priced (and presumably generic) key phrases which are closely linked to high-priced (and presumably specific) key phrases which are 200 times more valuable. That's virtually impossible to do.
A second problem is that Google filters out low-performing Adwords ads. If people don't click on your ad, it gets killed. So you can't just randomly target generic keywords.
The third and biggest problem is that Google puts the best ads on the best pages. A crappy prefab page isn't going to get desirable placements. Ditto for a "splog" (which is a fake blog made up of random text scraped from real web sites.)
A few years ago, there was an explosion of (apparently) South Asia-based splogs That scam involved creating hundreds of thousands of pages of bogus blog postings, attaching Adwords/Adsense ads to them and clicking on the ads. My Adwords ads ended up on some of those splog pages. I would have been willing to tolerate the sploggers were it not for the fact that they never bothered to even load my own Adsense widgets, let alone click on the ads. (The sploggers loaded only the text on my web site and nothing else, and sometimes not even all the text: this saved bandwidth but also made them very easy to find in my server logs.)
How do you get traffic? The basic answer is simple: find a topic which interests you and write something about it which other people will want to read. If you succeed at that, you will get free clicks.
There are all sorts of theories about how to get free clicks, but none of them work if your content is worthless. You need to find something which will rank high on search engines, and yes there all sorts of theories about how to game search engines, but it is pointless worrying about that too much. Some content is more profitable than others, for the simple reason that (like I guess I already said) some stuff attracts people who like to click on ads and some stuff doesn't. (My pages about Second Life, for example, don't get much traffic, but people who are interested in virtual worlds are also people who like to click on stuff. My pages about educational and personality testing are popular, but they attract people who just want the info and don't want to click on anything extraneous. ) But the main thing is just to come up with good content.
My site's most popular pages, by the way, include:
http://www.timothyhorrigan.com/documents/unicru-personality-test.answer-key.html
http://www.timothyhorrigan.com/tempjob_measuredprogress.html
http://www.timothyhorrigan.com/documents/measuredprogress.html
http://www.timothyhorrigan.com/documents/writing-sat-essay-samples.html
There are a few legitimate ways to use other people's content. Video sites such as YouTube and photo sites like Flickr will let you embed other people's content in your pages, preferable with your own original commentary on the page. As long as it is clear whose content is whose, and as long as you link back to the other site, this is a perfectly acceptable practice. Also, almost all government documents and most political speeches are in the public domain: you can't claim ownership of them but it is OK to re-publish them.
For example, see a page about testimony I gave to the New Hampshire House in Fenruary 2009 in favor of HCR6, "A RESOLUTION affirming States' rights based on Jeffersonian principles", which includes the text of the resolution:
It is not cost-effective to use Adwords to buy Adsense clickthroughs, but Adwords is still pretty inexpensive. It is very good if you are selling an actual good or service. Just remember that your sale needs to be worth at least 100 times the cost of the incoming page view, since 99% of your incoming clicks will be duds. If you have an especially compelling ad, and if you are especially clever about finding places to put it, then maybe 2% to 2.5% of your page views might lead to a sale. Although there is supposedly no direct connection between search engine results and ad placements, I have found that Adwords campaigns do prime the pump when you are rolling out a new page with few incoming links: advertising a new page for a few says does seem to shorten the interval before that page shows up in search results.
You used to be able to buy
Adwords ads which deeplinked to pages on sites like Amazon.com.
You should be fairly restrictive about targeting your ads. Unless your product is of special interest to people in those regions, I recommend redlining the entire third world and the former Soviet bloc. Those areas generate lots of fraudulent clicks with no sales. Even if you are selling something of global appeal, you probably only want to place your ads in North America, Western and Central Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The rest of the world, even though it is full of wonderful people and places, is simply not worth the trouble. The people in those "other" regions of the world simply will do not do anything which you can make money off of: they don't even click on your Adsense placements (even though it costs them nothing.) You don't want to take restrictive geotargeting to an extreme, however: for example, even if you are selling yourself to just one state (perhaps because you are running for office), you should go ahead and target the surrounding states. In addition to geotargeting, you can also target specific web sites and even specific sections of a website. I am proud to say that several advertisers have chosen to target pages on TimothyHorrigan.com.
Banner ads are easy to add to your web site and fun to play with. I haven't found that they work too well, since websurfers tend to ignore them, but there is no harm in checking them out. Google has a banner ad network, and there are many competitors, such as:
Amazon has a great affiliate program. In addition to targeting specific books or other items, there are a wide variety of widgets you put in your web site. I especially recommend the "Omakase" widget which functions much like an Adwords/Adsense placement: it semirandomly selects Amazon listings based on the content of the host page and other factors. For more info, click on:
There are several different Amazons, each serving a different part of the world. The different affiliate programs are separate but extremely similar and you have to apply to each one individually:
Google's ad programs exclude (amongst other no-nos) "Pornography, adult or mature content." However, you can buy and sell R-rated ads. The definition of "adult or mature" seems to be pretty permissive. It is also subject to change at any time without notice. The policy on violence is somewhat less permissive.
Amazons.
