Talking to a friend a few weeks ago about online marketing, the subject of adsense came up. He immediately dismissed it “You can’t make money off Adsense!” he boldly claimed. I said I begged to differ. While I had only made about $10 in April, that was the most I’d achieved in a single month since turning Adsense on towards the end of last year.

What changed? I started activating more sites that I had purchased domains for but never used. I put some content on them. Some I was lazy with and just published a few articles on. And then I underscored them with 3 Way Links, which is a set once and leave system.

I think the main thing is having a site with good on-site optimization, including having a domain that consists of a keyword with low competition. Then obviously having relevant content. For most of these sites, I at least published a single article on EzineArticles so that the sites had at least one high quality backlink coming from a page containing relevant content. Having 3 Way Links must surely help to keep them ranking thought, building up some level of external support and authority. Great to build up links while you work on multiple mini site projects.

The cocktail seems to be working well, I made $55 in May and can also more clearly see which sites are getting ad clicks and which ones aren’t. One of those sites is seasonal however, relating to fathers day. It gets high traffic, but alas the domain name was based on an informational keyword not a buying keyword so that site gets a disgustingly high bounce rate, but nevertheless generates enough clickthrough to be on a par with the other sites.

For June, that site may possibly perform very well as last minute people send the traffic even higher and in turn attract a higher number of people seeking to buy.

Regardless of that June is off to a great start with £12 three days in – more than I made for the whole of April, and 1/5 of what I made in May. Maintaining that rate for the month alone should double May’s figures. However, I did have quite a few days ending in $0, and of course some days there were highs, while on others there were troughs.

I expect to see the same again, except perhaps this time avoiding a $0 day would be nice.

So I believe yes, you can make money with adsense, just that you have to work harder for it than you would through affiliate marketing or creating your own products. However, over the long term it could prove to be the more steady and lucrative income earner out of the two for some. A major benefit is that the sites are yours rather than someone else’s and assuming you look after them, they should continue to generate revenue for you. Just ask some of the folk that have spent time building blogs and websites where adsense is now generating them at least a five figure income monthly! How’s that for a day job?

Article submission to high authority directories are a great way to get an authority backlink. However, be sure that having many links coming from the same directory will not do all that much for your rankings.

2/3 submissions may carry weight, but I’m beginning to wonder whether having more than that is not merely ignored but can actually contribute towards your site getting a slap (i.e. the assumption is that you’re trying to game the search engines ) at least while the site is less than a year old and/or doesn’t yet have a good variety of other backlinks coming in yet.

The idea does sound plausible to me as I have seen a mass of posts on the same topic appear under various author names all published over a course of days, if not the same day. I’m talking double digit submissions here.

This can serve a purpose though – swamping out the directory makes you look like the expert on the topic (or a freak, or an obvious salesman trying to push a product take your pick), and should drive a significant quantity of traffic to the target landing page.

So if you’re going to write articles for SEO purposes, use multiple submission sites. This should go without saying, but I got a bit lazy and couldn’t be bothered to sign up for other directories, squidoo, hubpages etc.

I also wanted to quickly get to platinum status in ezine articles – but I only ended up as Basic Plus after the first 10 articles were submitted as I did get a few articles flagged. I guess I am further than most people by getting as far as I have without outsourcing.

(In fact I’m just listening to an interview with Chris Knight in 2008, and he states less than 15% of the ezine articles members at the time have submitted more than 10 articles. Furthermore, to gain authority over your niche, you should write 25-250 articles. For better SEO of your own website, you may wish to spread submissions between several directories to leverage the variety of backlinks coming from different authority sources.)

Now I’ve only just recently submitted an article to squidoo and another to hubpages, which may have helped with the latest re-ranking menti0ned in y last post. I say these new sites may have helped with the re-ranking as I can see that yahoo has counted them, but the links do not appear in google webmaster tools, therefore I don’t know for sure that google has seen these and taken them into account.

That said, if page rank updates are ongoing, but are only made public periodically, then there’s no reason why the same too could not apply to counting links before they are publicly mentioned in webmaster tools.

Finally, remember, it’s one thing to get a link, to get a relevant link is another. Publishing to article submission sites is one of the best ways to get relevant backlinks as the websites that republish the articles should be related to the subject matter that your article is about. If you’re lucky enough to get a site with some PR republishing your link, then that’s even better.

So there are three good benefits from article publishing, squidoo and hubpages publishing:

1. High authority do-follow backlink (assuming you are submitting to a directory like ezine articles)
2. Trickle of Traffic (unless you write about a really hot topic(s) with a compelling reason for people to click through to your link then you can expect to enjoy at least 1 or 2 visits per day/week depending on quality and/or quantity of articles  and the demand for the subject matter of the article(s).
3. Article Directories only: additional backlinks. As some article submission sites offer republication rights to the public as a condition of authors using their service, and as the public in turn are expected to include your personal resource text with the article with dofollow, then you start getting free backlinks from sites relevant to your subject matter.

   Squidoo and Hubpages only: you can earn money directly from these platforms. I gather some people have created good income streams from hubpages in particular, but obviously you will have to submit a load of popular and in demand pages to get to that level.

Okay, after the latest yo-yo, where my site went from top of page 2, to slowly slipping down, then getting pushed down to the hundreds, it’s then came back to the late 50s, then the 40s, then when I thought maybe it got fresh slapping action, I found it had got re-ranked onto the bottom half of page 1 – YeeHaa.

Well actually, after the constant yo-yoing, I’m not feeling too confident that I’m staying there, although perhaps this time I may very well be. I have engaged in some link building attempts. They haven’t all come through yet, but some have.

My ezine-articling appears to be paying off well too. I am getting a trickle of visits daily AND I am starting to get backlinks from sites publishing my articles. Now I was glad to be getting the little trickles of traffic while the site was new and getting battered and bruised all over the shop while google algorithms (and staff?) decided where to put it. It kept me from despair.

I’m a beginner right, I want to see elements that this can work as quickly as impossible. Yes, I believe this can work. And I believe I can do it and become very successful at it. But like most things there’s that learning curve and initial uphill struggle to get through.

When you seem to be doing well, and then get a slap, then come back and get slapped again, you obviously don’t know whether you’re coming or going. Getting some referrals from others sources such as ezine articles, accompanied by a few adsense clicks or affiliate sales helps put a little silver lining on the cloud of uncertainty.

So I think launching a site with article submissions is definitely the way to go when launching a new site unless you have an effective means of driving traffic from the get-go lined up. However, that said, spread out the articles between different directories. More on that in another post.

This is a part 2 of Google Slaps my niche.

Interestingly, the slap was only temporary. A few weeks later I was reintroduced on page 3, then slapped down several hundred places before I now finally being reintroduced to page 2, which I am hoping is permanent this time.

I slowly climbed up to position 11, but I understand page rankings “snapshots” have been happening recently, which have caused me to slide half way down the page. Hey, I’m still on page 2 and I can climb back up right?

Just need to apply some social bookmarking and get around to a few relevant blogs and the like and see if I can promote my site onto page one. The site is on topic with useful information compared to the other sites which are just retailing products so I think it should be there anyway!

Main focus now has to be building backlinks so I can increase ranking and traffic. I’m also going to hold off applying for affiliate schemes until I do that. Crawl before I walk so to speak.

As google have lifted my site higher in the SERPs, I am getting some traffic through search as well as a trickle through article marketing – and I’ve not even scratched the surface of Article Marketing yet as, I’ve only dealt with Ezine Articles thus far.

So anyway, I guess the main thing when building a new niche site after market research is not to panic and get disheartened if your niche gets a nice ranking position then gets blasted into no man’s land. If you’ve not employed tactics google doesn’t like then you may very well return with a matter of weeks. Keep working on your site in a natural way, and relax!

Google slaps my niche site out of its results. You can now find me in the second hundred list of sites – although from the way the domain is listed (minus “www.”) I assume that’s some sort of historical listing, as it’s supposed to appear with “www.”

Hmm, will have to try this again sometime with 30 day challenge style approach to see if there is a way I can avoid my site being put in a box! I think their vintage electric guitar project never got the google slap.

Am I bothered about my site getting some google slaps? Yes and no.

Yes, because I’m not going to get any organic search traffic for a while now. Not that I had much to begin with, but I did get a few.

No, because as I am learning about article submission and social media. I’m learning that I can generate traffic without google. Google is seen as the be all and end all. “I must get listed in google” blah blah blah, but really, so what? Google should be seen as a chunk of traffic, but not the only source.

In fact if the recent post on SEOBook is anything to go by, google may soon become less valuable to focus your efforts on. The post claims google adjusted their algorithms in January 2009 and is now giving extra weighting to brand names to determine at least the top 10 listings on some search phrases.

Examples given demonstrated in one instance the change in results for a search for “airline tickets” now results in 4 brand name airline companies suddenly ranking in the top 10. So it may be in your best interests to get smarter and seek out new ways of generating traffic. Because these changes might ensure you never even had a chance to begin with.

Another reason why I’m not bothered – I’m very interested in this niche and keep thinking of things I can do to grow it and offer lots of useful content. Of course there’s a chance the efforts may be a waste of time.

But I like to think that by the time it gets reindexed on google, not only will it make it to the first page – hopefully to the first few positions if not the first, but that it becomes great at converting into either affiliate sales or adsense clicks.

I may do away with adsense at some point as affiliate sales are more profitable and reflect the purpose of the site. But at the moment I’m still building content, so affiliate offers wouldn’t integrate well just yet.

Anyway if there is a tecnhique that generally avoids resulting in the google slap, please let me know.