Google Adsense Secrets: Review by Michael Tangorre

 
Sep 22, 2005

by Michael Tangorre

Ebook
132 pages
Author: Joel Comm
Publisher: Joel Comm
www.adsense-secrets.com

Google Adsense Secrets by Joel Comm has the potential to be one of the hottest e-books on my hard drive. The first chapter had my mind buzzing as to the money I could rake in by placing Google's Adsense code on my site and drawing visitors not only to the site, but to the links the Adsense code renders on my pages. These links are what Adsense is all about.

Right off the bat in chapter 2, Comm talks about the importance of content, search engines, and links, all areas that would prove to be my Achilles heel. My website is not that old and I have never submitted the URL to any search engines, nor have I gone out of my way to promote my site. My site exists mainly for me and the occasional blogger who wants to comment on an entry I made or who followed a link from FullAsAGoog.com. I, do, however mix in personal content with technical content, so there is a little variety. Let's face it, not too many people care that I am checking out some new XPath tutorials or buying an English bulldog. I am sure there are some people out there who care, but the one or two clicks and impressions they generate are insignificant. By the end of Chapter 2, I realized that I already have my work cut out for me. The potential is there but the content, appeal, and traffic to my site, are not.

Chapters 3 through 5 covered some great tips and insight into the style and types of ads that perform the best, as well as reasons you should select one ad type over another. Since my current site consists of nothing else besides my blog, I was really tied into that current layout, which was Ray Camden's initial blog design. I have a new design in the works but for now I was dealing with a plain-Jane website. I followed the guidelines for links, colors, sizes, and placements and everything looked pretty good.

Chapter 6 was actually a huge wakeup call for me as I never gave keywords a second thought with regards to my site, probably because I had no intention of drawing people to it on a regular basis. Put a price tag on the traffic that comes and one's mind quickly changes! Since I chose to place one large set of text ads along the right side of my site, there was no content beneath the ad block, which didn't help the subject matter of the ads at all. I did notice the ads being served up were generally close to the content on the page, regardless of what was below or above the ad block. Joel Comm thinks that the content directly below the ad has some affect on the ads served. Perhaps it does, but due to lack of content, I could never tell! The remainder of Chapter 6 talked about drawing the robots to your site to get the content indexed as well as changing the meta-tags on your site.

Since everyone is familiar with Google and the search bar and logo, I thought that placing it on my site would help get those visitors searching and clicking from my site when they didn't find anything interesting at my site. I wasn't surprised that the search box did not take off because, again, that requires visitors and I have none! The concept is nice and it doesn't take up too much space on the site nor does it stand out too much. If I can eventually draw people to my site I am sure it would be used. The couple times it was used it was me testing and my wife thinking I somehow stole Google's homepage and put it on mine.

Chapter 8 interested me most but it also got me thinking. Chapter 8 focused on content: where to get it, what to get, who to talk to, etc. I know I am lacking content on my site but I figured I could spend hours drumming up content or I could write code for my normal hourly rate, which is most likely better than what I could be making on Adsense, assuming I had more content. For that reason alone I found it hard to pull away from time earning money to spend time collecting content in hopes of earning money. Perhaps as my workload lightens I can get more content up.

Chapter 9 talked about tracking ad clicks and analyzing the results, logs, etc. Since I did not really get hooked on my $0.07 profit, I could not bring myself to spend much more time delving into other aspects of Adsense. I needed to focus on content and then I can worry about what people are doing when they get to my site. I couldn't determine what was hot and what was not because there was no baseline to go from ... Again, that notion of content keeps creeping in.

The rest of the e-book was pretty good but again, hard to really take hold of since what I was working with was the bare minimum: a basic site used for blogging, minimal cross traffic, extremely light on unique content or content that would interest visitors, and no self marketing (website submissions, meta-tags, etc). What I walk away with is a better sense of what I need to do to increase traffic to my site. The time investment needed to gather content and get people to my site will have to come at a minimal impact on my day to day work, as that is guaranteed money. Over time, I am sure I will see my balance grow from $0.07 to something more substantial but first I need to find a focus for my site because right now, $0.07 is probably too much for what is there.
Michael Tangorre has been programming in ColdFusion since 1997. In addition to CF, Michael enjoys working with a myriad of other technologies such as JavaScript, qForms, CSS, Java, XML, SQL, Fusebox, and Model-Glue. When not disrupting the peace on the House of Fusion CF-Community list, Michael can be found blogging at the cfcoder Web site (www.cfcoder.com) or picking the brains of Sean Corfield, Jared Rypka-Hauer, and Joe Rinehart on AIM. Michael currently works as a Senior Software Developer for Abacus Technology Corporation in Silver Spring, Maryland.

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