This a true encounter of racking up thousands of dollars in AdSense revenue in a few short months. If you’re searching for a way to make money with AdSense, then you should listen to this story. It’s a true account of someone who has been there.
The Search For Profits Begins
Personally, Barbara (name changed to protect the innocent) didn’t want to make money online, she was obsessed by the idea. Barb was one of those people that searched relentlessly online for a way to make money fast. She bought tons of cheap eBooks and expensive programs that have left her wanting. It also left her with a much slimmer wallet.
Almost ready to give up, she stumbled upon a little site labeled internet marketing coach. She started asking many questions and Monica (name changed to protect the source) took notice. She told Barb to send her a pm. Monica took Barb under her wing and started showing her how to make money with AdSense.
AdSense profit model (that you should not try)
She showed her how to set up mini sites in a tiny niche. Apparently, the smaller the niche, the faster she could rank in Google. Why? Because usually people that pick tiny niches have no clue about SEO so she could usually pass them quickly. So, Barb picked keywords that had monthly searches between 550 and 1300. She had to build sites in a niche where people were serious about find the info/solution that they were after. The keyword had to have a CPC ranging from $0.50 – $2.50. That is something that a real marketer would consider chump change and would not go after.
Monica taught her everything for free. It was like heaven had sent her an angel. Once Monica showed her the ropes, checked some of her sites for accuracy she just disappeared.
A very thrilling ride to the top
From the first day Barb put up these sites, some of them went straight to page one. The first month, most of her sites had only been active for 5 days. She made $30. She never made money before it was exciting. Her ability to make money with AdSense grew in leaps and bounds. In a little under 4 months, she had made $4,000 in AdSense revenue. She felt completely – paranoid. She was still a rookie but her gut was telling her there was something wrong.
Every day she’d go to her AdSense account. She wasn’t checking to see how much money she made, she was checking to see if her account was banned. After a glorious ride to the top, her AdSense income started decreasing by half every month.
The desperate search for answers
She started searching for answers to find out what was going wrong. She found out that the type of site she was building was called Made for AdSense (MFA) site. They are crappy little sites made just to rack up AdSense income.
You’re probably thinking, “Would you mind defining crappy?” Gladly, a crappy site is one that has about three pages of information on it and each page has less than 400 words. It can be well written but if it adds no value to the reader, it’s still crap. Oh boy, she was in trouble!
Panda and Penguin – the best frenemies you ever had
Now she built all these sites just before the Google Panda rule hit. However, her sites were not affected; in fact, they continued to climb in rank. However, the Google Penguin rule of April 2012 wiped out all of her sites.
There are many people that are outraged about Google’s sweeping changes. They are hopping mad when they lose their income. Here’s the thing, Google doesn’t care about the advertisers. You would think that they wouldn’t care about anything else expect the people that are pouring big bucks into their company. Google doesn’t care about that – they care about the readers.
That is why your bounce rate is so important. If people are coming to your site and leaving within seconds it’s because you, as a webmaster, aren’t giving the people what they want.
Don’t you get angry when you go to look for something specific and you have to dig through five pages of Google content to find a page that isn’t complete garbage? Don’t you hate when you perform a search and the first five listing are written in bad English and/or the article makes no sense whatsoever?
Well, they hate it too. They respond to the will of the people. People want quality sites that will help them find an answer to a question. So they spend a lot of time coming up with algorithms that look for sites that are trying to scam the system. Wow, I never thought I would be defending Google.
How the story ends
She took down every last site. The last thing she needed was to be banned from AdSense for breaching TOS. She still has the domain names. She is now figuring out how to please the people and Google. She can go back, use the domain names, and build great sites. Well easy come, easy go and lots of lessons learned.
What happened to the angel?
Well, out of curiosity, I just checked her site today. In March of 2012, her AdSense account was “disabled”. You don’t say. She lost her ability to make money with AdSense and she is going to sell off the sites that are no longer gaining revenue. That means some poor unsuspecting soul will buy her site, and they will get banned from AdSense as well. Sigh. BTW, read my post,”A 3 Step Formula for Finding an Affiliate Marketing System That Works”. It has great info on how to spot people/companies with marketing integrity.
The morale of the story, thoroughly check out the people you take advice from online. They could do more damage to you than good. However, the best part of this story is that Barb knows that making money online is real because she experienced it firsthand. She knows that it is possible to make a living from her online efforts.
