Catching the AdSense wave – good practices

Catching the AdSense wave is something that can make you good money for a short time with slight efforts. There is a great chance that you make a mistake by creating a pointless website, just like the aforementioned, so you should be very careful. To illustrate what I am writing about, I will tell you about the All-About-Bird-Flu.org website. As you can see, the domain is extremely unpleasant to write and to pronounce – 4 worlds, 3 dashes and ends with .org.

However, the goal was to catch the wave the media had created about bird flu. In fact, it was not an initially planned project but a sudden revelation that since every media outlet in the world was covering and discussing the topic then there would be enormous interest and a high number of searches on the topic. For understandable reasons, there were no websites dedicated entirely to the disease and one Saturday night, in about an hour, I created one. It was comprised of literally five pages of information about bird flu, flu in general, diagnostics, and treatment. The texts on these five pages were of no more than one-third of A4 format, in English.

I placed one banner on each of the five pages and color on the website. It was so melted into the background that it seemed like a box with links to more information placed there by the “editors”. Naturally, these text banners showed offers for treatment, vaccines, prevention, and everything connected with flu in general. I used the time left to write comments in forums on the issue. I added the website to my profile or posted it as a link to additional information when someone asked questions.

This way I bypassed the forums’ or question and answer websites’ SPAM ban because I was simply providing additional information to those interested in the topic. There were places where my comments were deleted but it happened after I had already managed to generate the needed traffic. People got what they wanted – information. Due to the mass psychosis, many international bloggers cited my website, included it on the lists of links or recommended it to their consumers in one way or another. This brought an unexpected traffic in just a few days and the website started earning $15 a day.

This continued for about 3-4 months and then the traffic and the revenues dropped to the minimum because the epidemic and the media interest in the issue had passed. The website cost me only a domain registration and hosting, while the investment was paid off on the second day. It earned more than $1800 for an investment of about $30. The profit was really big, bearing in mind the minimum efforts and work done. There is no financial instrument in the world that offers you low-risk investment with more than 6,000% yield in four months. Neither investments in shares, nor Forex, nor high-risk mutual funds, nor bank deposits can even get close to such cosmic profitability.

Challenge accepted

Shortly after the release of my first book 1 Click Away my best man Bozhidar Bonchev, who is one of the best internet consultants in the country, too, challenged me to catch the wave again. It was supposed to be a test whether this principle was still working and to what extent we could count on this AdSense profit strategy. The challenge was expressed in the following task: to think of a topic, create a website in a couple of hours, and then earn at least a few hundred dollars within days.

I accepted the challenge and set to work. We chose a relatively competitive topic – the UEFA Euro 2012 in Poland and Ukraine and the London Summer Olympics. Two sports events attracting great interest and separated in time by just a few days. A complicated and ambitious task.

One Saturday, in less than a day we created a website of about 10 pages of text about both the European Championship and the London Olympics. We launched the website about 5 months before the events, played with its optimization for about a day and then almost forgot about it. One nice summer day, while I was resting at the seaside, my best man called and asked me: “Did you see how much money we earned today?” I had no idea what he was talking about because I had forgotten about the project and I did not follow the sports events.

It turned out that on the first day of the Olympics we had earned several hundreds of dollars and the day was not over yet. Obviously, the website generated serious traffic, but it took us some time to realize how this exponential increase had happened all of a sudden, in just a day. It turned out that Google liked us more than anyone else. It had changed its logo with a thematic daily doodle for the Olympics and when a user clicked on it our website appeared as a top result on the topic. Of course, consumers clicked on our website to enter it and then happily headed to the advertising banners. It turned out that we were not so lucky for the Euro 2012 but the optimization we worked on for months bore fruit just at the right moment. Thus, about five years after the first experiment, we proved yet again that it was absolutely possible to catch the wave as long as you have ideas and experience.

Projects that aim at catching the wave of searches on a certain topic are not long-term initiatives and counting only on such mini-websites with the purpose to make a profit will not bring success. I think that such projects should be undertaken only for recreation or for fun amidst the serious projects, as well as to experiment with new techniques and skills. The loss is insignificant because the invested resource is negligible, while sometimes the profit can be really good. Still, you should bear in mind that you are one step away from watering down.