I’ve been building niche blogs and static sites and I thought I’d share how quick and easy it is to setup a one-page AdSense site.
1. Find a template
Assuming you already have the niche figured out, the domain, keywords and the content ready I recommend searching Google for free CSS templates. There are thousands of great looking free templates out there and most just want a link in the footer.
‘CSS‘ stands for Cascading Style Sheets and if that’s new to you don’t be intimidated. CSS is basically just a way to control the structure and appearance of the site you are designing, in this case I’m referring to simple HTML sites. CSS templates allow easy changes of colors, font and layout. Most are ‘tableless‘ helping them load quickly.
I recommend a nice and simple template. A header, footer and one, two or three columns is about all you need.
2. Edit the images
Change or edit the graphics to fit your niche if necessary. Keep in mind we’re creating a fast and easy niche site so perfection is not needed. Keeping it simple is the best bet. Don’t use too many graphics and keep the file sizes low. Fast loading pages are much more important than impressing people with our images. The goal is to guide visitors interested in the topic to the next step (action) by clicking an ad link for more information.
3. Ad Placement
AdSense allows up to three ads on a single page. Problogger has a three part post on Positioning your Adsense Ads that’s worth reading.
Don’t place AdSense ads next to images to ‘enhance‘ them in any way and don’t try to hide the fact they are advertisements. All of the ad must be readable including the ‘Ads by Google‘ statement.
I will often toss in a ClickBank or Market Leverage ad into the mix to help monetize the page.
4. Adding Content
Content is an important part of an AdSense site. You MUST have content and it needs to be relevant to the niche. Pages with just ads are in violation of the AdSense terms. It’s important to give visitors valuable content yet you don’t want to give away the whole ball of wax. You want to leave them wanting more but give them enough to want it from your links. It takes practice but use the content as a guide or call to action. NEVER EVER ask visitors to click on an ad. This is another big AdSense terms violation.
5. Promoting Your Niche Site
Once you have your site up and optimized with key word rich content it’s time to start promoting it. One of the easiest methods of promoting and gaining backlinks is by commenting on related blogs.
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been working with a couple of article marketing tools that I am very impressed with. I’ll be writing a review very soon but I’ll give you a ‘heads up‘ now.
- The first is Free Traffic System. Free Traffic System is a powerful way to submit articles to many blogs at once and they have a system to help make the content somewhat unique for each blog.
The second tool is Magic ArticleRewriter. This as an incredible tool. I just purchased it and it’s very easy to use. Be sure to watch the video, it’s amazing. Magic Article Rewriter works with Free Traffic System and the two together should move your article marketing to the next level.
Do it again, and again…
One AdSense site isn’t going to get you anywhere. I recommend setting an initial goal of 100 sites. If you only earn $3 a month per site you are still doing pretty well. That will cover the ten dollars a year for domain registration, cheap hosting and you will gross $300 a month. You should do much better than three dollars a month but that’s just an example. Once you have those hundred sites running and doing well on Google just double it. You can see how quickly this can add up.
Awesome, Brian. Love what you’re doing with those niche thingy but I wonder if you ever thought of using WordPress to create one page Adsense site.
Oh, I’ve been using Free Traffic as well as part of my link building campaign. I won’t say it’s the best but it does its job pretty good if you ask me.
Good luck, Bud!
So you have a blog where other users submit their contents too.
I did that with Article Marketing Automation but that was a long time ago and I still do for free contents.
Come to think of it. I’ve forgotten about it actually since I set it on auto pilot. I’d better see what’s in the house now…. LOL
Actually, I just setup the blog with Free Traffic Systems as one of the blogs that hosts the articles in that category. It was simple to setup and now I don’t have to worry about content. It has a page rank of 2 and I promote it a little so the authors get a decent blog as well.
Surely the way to really monetize adsense is in volume? This single page technique could be far more valuable to me than my previous attempts. I’m afraid I tend to get too precious with my sites, so never put out enough to make anything through adsense.
That’s a great point James. I have the same problem of being a perfectionist. This is going to sound strange but I hope it makes sense…
Last fall I was sitting in my car waiting for my Wife and a boy was raking the yard across the street. I was watching him stop raking and go grab a leaf every time a new one fell from the tree onto the already raked area. As strange as it sounds I related that to what I often do online. He wasn’t getting the yard raked wasting time on every leaf. I waste far too much time with the little details. That little realization was a real eye opener for me.
I’m building very fast and simple sites and forcing myself to ignore the small details that take up valuable time.
hey Brian,
I would think that a 10 page site where the site pages support each other would do better than 10 one page sites… Seems like a lot more work to promote 10 different sites as well… I also wonder what search engines think of one page sites…
I saw your comment above that you haven’t tried one page sites yet, but do you know of any examples that work? And are there any advocates of this approach?
Of course an advantage of a lot of single pages sites is diversity… I guess there are pros and cons… I’d just be interested in any real “stats” on this. Interesting concept and good advice if one wants to pursue this…
~ Steve, the rambling trade show guru
Hi Steve, that’s a great comment. I’ll tackle it piece at a time but understand I’m new to this and I could be completely wrong in my thinking.
The way I understand it, a 10 page site where the site pages support each other would make a great blog but would bring too many impressions and too few clicks for an AdSense site. Here’s how I’m thinking…
First, we want a decent click to impressions ratio. The more clicks compared to the impressions can equal a better return.
Quote by Yan Susanto
Second, we don’t want a whole website giving away everything. We want AdSense clicks so we want the site visitor to go to the advertiser for the answers. We still need to provide valuable content but too much is self defeating.
Quote by Eric Giguere
I’m not pretending to be an expert, far from it. I’m new at this myself, I’m just explaining my thought process. As far as statistics I have none. I would love to get some real and honest stats myself. I am building niche blogs as well as single-page AdSense sites so in six months or so I should have a decent idea which is working best.
As far as promoting 10 different sites, I agree that’s something to consider. That truly is a lot of extra work.
For the search engines, I came across this short DigitalPoint Forum discussion: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=306007
hi Brian,
Wow. Great response and answers. I don’t really know much about “smart pricing”, but can see how that’s a factor. Trying to balance “how much content” to provide would be tough, because I think more content improves one’s rankings, and leads to more natural links, but you’re right, if you answer all the questions, who would then click on any other links – though you may answer a question and the ad may still be of interest… I think my head hurts.
My biggest concern (which you mentioned) is that if you have a limited amount of “promotion” energy, you may end up with 10 sites each on the seventh page of google results, or 1 site at number 7…
Pros and cons. I’m glad to hear you are actually trying different things (and I assume will report) as it is actually doing something that provides the best answer.
Again, great response! Steve, the trade show guru
I’m reading Ben’s site now and I subscribed to his feed. I actually had to search for the feed link. It’s in the footer. Thanks for the tip.
I don’t know if you are aware of this Brian, but I have just started a niche blog called Top Sexual Aids. It’s a pretty good domain name and got picked up by Google pretty quickly.
My problem is that I can’t find any decent quality blogs in the same niche.
Actually I did know that Sire, I was on it last night. I found the link on one of your other blogs. It’s very cool. I almost commented on one of the posts when I read about Teri Hatcher but I had too much going on at one time getting today’s ezine out. Feel free to leave the link.
So you see my dilemma. I want it to have a fairly professional look, and some of the stuff around there is pretty dismal and I don’t really want to be seen to be associated with them.
I reckon that in time some good sites will turn up, I just have to be patient.
And yes the blog itself is pretty cool, thanks mate, and I reckon the theme helped in that respect.
Hey Brian
Again a useful article. More I’m reading on your blog, more I’m loving it. Just tweeted this article.
More over the commentator has a point here, We can also do the same on one page wordpress site and benefit will be more since wordpress has better SEO advantage. What do you think??
Hi Brian… First time visitor
I really like your site so far. I read a few posts and I enjoy how you write. As for this post, there is definitely money to be made in creating several niche mini sites designed to make money through Adsense.
In the past, we have always designed our own simple pages, not utilizing WordPress or any type of blog format… just simple one page sites, and they have done ok. But we recently started testing creating one page blogs for small niches and the results have been much better. I think it proves that Google loves blogs!
Thanks Brian! I see you already found out how I got the domain MakingMoneyOnline.com, as you read my post and left a comment (which I do appreciate). Basically I registered back in the late 90′s and have held onto ever since, but have come close to selling it a few times. I am now very happy I never did.
My interest got particularly piqued with the link that elaborated on adsense positioning. It happened that I have busied myself lately with an experiment with free traffic and adsense (which results I have posted in my blog). Happening upon this blog post was perfect coincidence as it added some data that I desperately needed to make my experiment even more successful. Then again, there are no such things as coincidences. Thanks Brian.
Hi James, Positioning of AdSense Ads is something I’m studying too and I’ve actually postponed my niche site building tasks to study a bit. Seems I’ve been spinning my wheels wasting time. I also taking a keyword course.
This is so exciting to me! I have some pretty good domains but no time to maintain multiple blogs with posts every week. If I could get decent enough content for one page (and my main problem then is getting the traffic to them) I’d be in good shape. Thanks for opening up this cool new world of possibilities for me!
Brian, currently I have ‘way too many domains
and had been using some of them to link to my main blog. I have no ads on those other sites. Is it against Googles TOS to have ads on a site that is mainly used to link to the main blog? (Does that even make sense LOL. ShapePetBehavior . com links to Miscbytes .com Would it be OK to put ads on ShapePetBehavior?) Thanks!!!
I agree with almost everything you’ve said, except that as far as I know smart pricing isn’t simply a result of a low CTR, but rather how well those ad clicks actually convert for the advertiser (in other words how well targetted your content is). I have a number of sites that share the same Adsense account, some getting around 10% CTR, others only 1-2%. Yet the account is not Smart Priced (as far as I can tell anyway).
I also tend to prefer 10 pages sites to 1 pagers.
Hi Christie, Thanks for stopping by. At first I thought definitely not but after seeing the site I’m not sure. I thought you were talking about a 301 redirect. You do have limited content there but I’m not sure how much is enough in Google’s eyes.
I’m new at this myself so I’m trying different things to see what works best. I’m determined to make all of my domains a source of revenue before all those renewal fees come flooding in again.
Just yesterday I started talking with a friend about one of my domains that’s in the weight loss and health niche. She can run and administrate it the way she sees fit including content, affiliate links and advertising. I’ll run my AdSense ads and maintain ownership and help out if necessary. She’s already a knowledgeable blog owner and marketer. We both benefit and that’s one more domain put to work. If this goes well I’ll try to network with other bloggers the same way.
Right now I’m studying ad placement and learning about key words. Like you I don’t really have a lot of time to drive traffic to each domain so I’m going to learn how to get the most from search traffic.
@Christie – I think it’s OK to put ads on spb, but you could do with a bit more content: a) you need to give the adsense bot enough info so it knows what your site’s about, and b) you don’t want to get labelled as a spam blog or Google will drop you out of their index anyway.
@Brian – of all the placements I’ve tried, the large rectangle above a post works the best. I’ve also had success with a half banner at the end of a post. The two best sources of info I’ve found for finding out about all this stuff are Griz and Court – they really seem to have a winning formula.
Curiously enough, and just to show that there really is no hard and sure way to know what works and what doesnt work apart from experimenting for yourself, I have personally found that a leader board at the bottom of my web pages does quite well often achieving respectable ecpm with decent click throughs… introducing the famous “rectangle” like just about every other website is now using, justs kills my web site and click through drops completely…
Personally I would say do what works for you and your website (bearing in mind TOS) and avoid doing what everyone else is doing… with everyone placing that “rectangle” in exactly the same place over 10,000’s of web site it is becoming dreadfully boring…
Dare to be different…
Niche sites yes wow worth a fair bit.
So far in the past 3 months I’ve had 5 sites up and sold 3 of those for between 3-600$ after 6 weeks or so.
I love researching for new niches may they be micro niches, a big whopper of a niche or just a single page niche (usually written as a post).
The two that I have remaining when I started them were making £1($2) or so a day each with minimum traffic and when vamped were hitting 10-20.
Though neglect has made them back to £10 a month niches….
My point being myself I find building the sites and researching more ‘exciting’ then ‘promoting’ it, and as sire said some niches are a lot more harder to promote then others.
So now i’ve decided to hunt down a partner who can help me with that angle :p
Though I will check out the magic traffic and article rewriter to explore other venues of link acquisition.
Hi Donace, Feel free to leave links to those niche sites you still have. I’d like to see them. Nice job on selling the domains. I have had terrible luck with selling them.
I’m taking a key word course right now and if it looks like that will help promote my niche sites using search traffic I’ll be posting about that too.
Sounds interesting man; look forward to reading it…in regards to the niche sites…I wont at this time; one is well obviously a shit site but makes cash and the other is going through a remodel so will take time till its ‘ready’.
Yep, quick and easy steps but great things are always simple and easy to do. But you have to do these regularly and repeat continuously until you succeed.
.-= Phaoloo´s last blog ..10 Free Tools To Merge Multiple Files Into One =-.
Good point Phaoloo, one AdSense site isn’t going to bring home the bacon. An extreme goal, I like extreme
, would be to setup 500 before looking back. Average just a dollar a day per site and that’s $15,000 a month.
While I’m at it, I also want to mention to anyone still reading is I would never recommend using AdSense as our only form of income. Other things like affiliate marketing, membership sites, selling ad spots, etc. are very important. I’ve had the rug pulled out from me twice so far. That can easily happen with AdSense.
Brian,
On your niche blogs you have affiliate links side by side with adsense ads. Just out of curiosity from your experience do more people click your affiliate links vs your adsense links? So far my niche sites contain solely adsense links so that these are the places people are directed too. Of course with good content.
Good point Peter, I think I’m going to follow you on that and get rid of the affiliate links an banners. I thought I could capitalize a little with Market Leverage ads mixed in but so far I haven’t made a cent with Market Leverage. I understand many do real well with their affiliate links but I’m thinking it may be a mistake to mix them in with AdSense sites.
As an example, I added two large Market Leverage banners to Government Appliance Rebates. One above the header and one in the site bar. In the two days they were up my AdSense dropped dramatically. So much so my heart stopped thinking I had been sandboxed or lost my ranking all together. Those banners are off now and hopefully the site will rebound.
I think once I get this AdSense niche marketing down packed and start pulling in a nice profit from it I may start working with some niche affiliate sites separately. I don’t have much experience there but it may require different methods.
Good call, Brian (Peter)! For the most part, you can’t have the best of both worlds. You’ve got to pick the best converting one. But then it really depends on the niche you’re targeting.
Anyway, good to see you guys are jumping into the adsense bandwagon.
PS: Brian, any possibility of link exchange with your niche site?
Yan
Thanks for the tip Yan. Absolutely, send me the details and we’ll set it up csc4u.com(at)gmail(dot)com
Send the url, location and anchor you want to use text too.
Isn’t it weird? Only the other day I read where someone removed the adsense as they were conflicting with their affiliate links and I commented on how I left my adsense as it was producing more regularly than my affiliate links.
Fair point sire but I think you have to balance regular small income vs larger affiliate.
One of my sites used to make 3-4£ a day via adsense and when I jumped to afill…after a bit of trial and error it averaged at 2 sales a day namely £20.
Once you hit one of those; I think you’ll agree you would want to keep the afill product on there.
I have seen more sites not being approved for adsense due to a lack of content, have you run into this as well?
For now most of my niche sites contain only one page. Do you know that if your site gets the Google dance, all the pages with different keywords go along with the dance:)
Also, putting up a few images is a must. It’s also good for SEO as for me my niche sites are products and it’s easy to find these images and their names are in fact the keywords I’m ranking.
You may be interested in the following forum thread: http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/95891-6-months-later-300-daily-w-adsense-lessons-learned.html which discusses in detail various aspects of creating micro niche sites (be warned though – it’s currently 32 pages long!).
About midway through someone mentions how all his 1-page sites were de-indexed by Google due to them violating G’s T+C. I think the lesson is to make sure you’re providing enough valuable content (although it’s difficult to define exactly what “enough” is in this case).
Thanks Peter, I was just watching a KA video saying the same things. In fact, they said if Google determined we had a bunch of ‘for adsense sites’ they would simply de-index all of our sites, not just the AdSense sites. That would be very bad.
From what I’ve learned so far Gouri we need decent and unique content. I’m using at least three posts/pages right now, adding images like Peter just mentioned, and opening up comments. If your site gets flagged and someone physically checks your site it needs to be for site visitors, no just clickers from search terms. No images, no other visitors, little content makes it obvious that the site is designed for AdSense and nothing more. That will get us in trouble.
This does seem like a good idea but I too worry about violation of TOS even though there is nothing explicitly mentioned about this type of site.
Anyone else experience problems?
How do you always know where the ads should go and what they should look like?
Great and informative post, i really enjoyed reading that..
that plus i really love you blog, wicked idea
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