Mailbag Friday 11-4-11
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
Well it’s a beautiful sunny Saturday here in downtown Chicago, and you know what that means…mailbag Friday! Yeah, I skipped it yesterday to talk about my October Adsense numbers and now I’m playing a little bit of catch up.
So let’s just dive right into it!
Question 1
From Jason N. “You talk a lot about building thin Adsense sites, but do you ever do thick authority sites?”.
Good question Jason. When I first started building adsense sites, I built thick sites and only thick sites. I wrote all the content myself, did great research, and built what I consider to be very high quality valuable web properties that truly helped people find the information that they were looking for in order to make well informed purchasing decisions.
My sites ranged from 5 pages of content up to around 30 pages.
I also built a couple thick authority sites (sites on one topic with 100+ or more pages of 500-1000 word articles per page).
With each of those sites I engaged in white hat above board SEO tactics such as link building, social bookmarking, link exchanges with relevant sites, etc.
What happened? After about 6 months of 10 hour days, 7 days a week, I had 2 thick authority sites (100+ pages each) and about 30 smaller “thick” sites with 5-30 pages of content each. Earnings? I was pulling in between $10 and $20 per day…sometimes less. That’s crappy.
Then Google released some algorithm change or another and traffic dropped, and earnings plunged below $10 a day.
The moral of the story? Thick sites suck. Even at their best I was earning less than $20 a day from 6 months of hard work. Google does NOT appreciate quality content, as much as they claim otherwise.
I was constantly being outranked by crappy thin, spammy sites.
So I switched to thin sites. Now I can churn out 100 sites in an afternoon and I make thousands of dollars a month, all with about 100th of the effort. I’d rather build good thick sites that people find useful…but I’d much rather make tons of money…I’m a realist!
Question 2
From Tim M. “I use X webhost for my blog. Can I use them to build my adsense empire?”
I get asked this question a lot, with a number of different web hosting providers. Chances are I haven’t used that particular host so I can’t really speak to their capabilities.
But the bottom line is, if you’ve looked over their specs for the different hosting packages they offer, and see that they offer the ability to host unlimited domains at no extra charge, and offer decent processor speeds and bandwith, and especially if you’ve used them in the past and are comfortable with them…then there’s no reason to believe you shouldn’t use them.
I recommend Hostgator for beginners, and Servint for more advanced users who plan on building hundreds or thousands of sites.
I recommend them because I’ve used them in the past, am incredibly familiar with them, and know that they have the capabilities you need to run an Adsense empire.
But there’s no magic bullet. I’ve had bad experiences with webhosting providers in the past, which is why I stick with those two I just mentioned. But you can certainly use others.
Thanks everyone for the questions, keep them coming!
Keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
