Recently 11 blogs from the Fine Fools network sold with content, designs, and links for a total of $4,500. I am still busy kicking myself in the teeth, because I would have paid much more than that for those blogs. Those blogs were generating over 300,000 monthly pageviews, but the sites were generating only roughly $300 in monthly revenues.

Without even adding any content to those sites, given their traffic volume and link authority (most of the sites were strong PageRank 6 sites with natural backlink profiles) I could have easily increased the income to over $5,000 a month (ie: had the network more than pay for itself in the first month of ownership).

I think that limited $300 / month revenue figure is a great example of why it is worth worrying about more than just pageviews. SEO is just one piece of the puzzle, and usually most sites have big obvious on site gains that could be pursued long before you look to invest heavily in increasing traffic.

I get some people who tell me that they are already getting a million pageviews a month and they want me to guarantee they will get 3 million pageviews a month if they read my $79 book. If you can get 2 million monthly pageviews for $79 please let me know the source and I will follow you with a few thousand dollars in hand. When you are to that scale the issue is not that you need more distribution. If you can't make money with hundreds of thousands or millions of pageviews you ought to consider changing your revenue model.

I realize that celebrity sites might get tons of low quality traffic, but how hard would it be to add ring tone affiliate ads, concert ticket text links, or dating affiliate ads to the sites? How hard would it be to write a dating ebook you sold for $30? And the blog A Man's View could have easy been changed to a porn blog that would make in excess of $5,000 a month by itself.

I guess a valuable lesson here is that networks that don't profit will eventually fall apart and/or will be sold for well less than they are worth. Another valuable lesson might be that there is still a huge disconnect between traffic and value in the minds of most webmasters, and the WWW still has near endless profit opportunity about.

A friend normally gives me the scoop on auctions at Sitepoint, but something went wrong on this one. I am still kicking myself in the teeth. I would have loved to have bought those blogs, especially that cheap. Damn damn damn damn etc ;)

A friend of mine recently quit his job to work as a full time content developer for me, where we share the revenues generated. He started off with about a 20 page website about a month ago and right now it has about 40 pages indexed in Google. Yesterday the site brought in about $40 in AdSense earnings (which is not a lot, but the site is young). Within 2 months I expect the site to be able to make at least $200 a day.

Create a Wide Net:

The ability to quickly grow revenues quickly is largely due to throwing out many fishing poles at the same time and then accepting the feedback the market provides. As you learn what feedback the market offers you can create more content in those areas.

Use Software to Track Your AdSense Clicks & Earnings Granularly:

Here are some ad click stats by URL from the last 3 days. Off to the left of this image are URLs which I did not want to include in the image, but you can see that a few of the pages get the bulk of the pageviews and the bulk of the clicks.

In the last 3 days 137 clicks came from 17 new pages that my friend recently created. That is not bad considering that the rest of the site has exceptionally amazing link authority pointing at its well established pages and only had 117 clicks over that same time period.

Keys to Understanding how to Profit from Content:

• not all content is created equal

• if your site already has plenty of authority that may carry new pages added to the site
• not all ads are equally relevant
• not all SERPs are equally competitive
• not all people click at the same rate

If content production is nothing but a game of margins (and it is) then it makes sense to focus on the areas that are easy to get exposure in and are conducive to click happy site visitors.

Track Your Earnings at the Keyword Phrase Level:

So that is kinda how tracking your site performance on a per URL basis can help, but you can also track your ad clicks on a per search query basis. I had to scroll down through 9 screens to look at all the search queries that wounded up leading to ad clicks on that site this month.

While there were hundreds of search queries that resulted in ad clicks many of them had any of about a half dozen common modifiers in them. The modifiers that were useful on certain pages of the site were also likely useful relevant words for other sections of the site or perhaps the entire site.

Manufacturing Sitewide Relevancy:

I recently modified the site to

• integrating relevant keyword rich navigation, breaking large sections into smaller sections and using subheaders near the navigational categories/options and

• a descriptive bit of teaser content integrated into the content on each page

Doing that makes it easy for every page on your site to naturally match many modifier rich queries that were previously only relevant to a few pages that may have only accidentally contained those modifiers that resulted in heavy traffic.

If it is done well it could double the productivity of your site without adding much risk profile. Good spam does not look like spam. The intent is hard to question if content development is done in a manner where the additional content and navigation elements look like they are useful and targeted at human consumption.

How Do I Track My AdSense Clickthrough Statistics? What are the Best Scripts to Use?

If you want to start tracking your AdSense clickthroughs I offer a free script to track AdSense via Google Analytics. If you don't mind splashing out $97 you may want to give AdSenseGold.com's AdSense tracker a try as it has a few more features and is well worth the price if you intend on making big bank from AdSense. As a warning though, I found the associated newsletter to be so hyped up and spammy that I cursed him out for it, but I think AdSense Tracker itself is an exceptionally useful tool well worth its price.

Google's ad network is large enough that they can afford to kill off portions of their short term income to improve long term network viability. The still sell ads on garbage sites because some advertisers find value there (and others have small accounts or have not researched their spend). Andrew Goodman recently had a great post about how Google is filtering out the profitability of advertising noisy spammy AdWords ads to minimize the number of them appearing on Google. Andrew wrote:

Post pages that don't give adequate access to the crawler - or adequate keyword cues - and you risk facing the wrath of the quality scoring algorithm. It's less of a worry as much if you have an established account - it's new accounts that face the toughest tests with the predictive aspect of the algorithm, intended to weed out specific types of violators, experimenters, and ham-fisted copywriters.

In essence Google is going to require you to build trust and market data over time to gain the ability to even be trusted enough to gain anything near maximal ad distribution (even if you are willing to overpay for exposure).

Jumping from Paid Search to Organic Search

Some people believe that old sites only rank well because of the links they have acquired over time, but I think even just existing for a certain amount of time without being manually or algorithmically tripped up for some spam infraction allows search engines to place more trust on your site.

Plus requiring sites to be a bit older to rank well requires an additional expense and / or level of knowledge that many people lack.

You can bet that if they are taking a lets wait and see approach on paid ads they are also doing the same on organic search results.

Microsoft AdCenter Labs offers a tool for Detecting Online Commercial Intention. It estimates the probability of a web page or search query being information, commercial-informational, or commercial-transactional in nature. I think you have to use IE to use Microsoft's tool. Well at least they are consistant with the stupidity of trying to make it hard for their good ideas to spread.

You can also use Yahoo! Mindset to see how page relevancy scores change as algorithms move from commercial to informational in nature. Google's current search algorithms are heavily biased toward older and informational resources.

AdCenter tool link via WebMetricsGuru

A number of my friends have stated that they have been growing less and less impressed with AdSense as a monetization model, but I think it provides a huge opportunity. The reasons I like using AdSense on a new site are:

• Google has huge reach, so it shouldn't take their advertisers long to pick up on new advertising trends and opportunities

• it requires virtually no effort, thus it allows you to scale without needing to hire ad sales reps
• it makes it easy to establish a baseline earnings potential so you know how much to value your other media sales at
• that also allows you to determine how much effort and investment each channel should get before committing you to spend thousands of dollars on a money losing channel.
• if you track your ad clickthroughs you can also see which advertisers you are sending your leads at. If they keep buying them over an extended period of time and your site grows to be powerful with broad reach you can either partner with the same sources they are using, or perhaps create direct and premium partnerships with similar or better offers and companies in the same field

Of course there are downsides to placing AdSense ads on your site (like having your largest income generator and one of your largest sources of traffic being the same company), but as I have been building a few sites I have found AdSense helpful in determining where to pour resources.

John Scott recently had an AdSense integrated design competition , where he is offering a couple hundred dollars for a site design. Where else could you get a profitable and amazing site design for only a couple hundred dollars? Running a forum or being socially active helps you establish other baselines outside of your company and outside of AdSense, which allow you to be more efficient at finding and using resources. Friendships allow you to scale up and down without having to worry about hiring and firing employees.

Social interaction and the distribution it brings leads to further distribution, which gives you a wide reach of great people who will offer to give you feedback on your errors. So long as you are not defensive and do not try to control language when your ideas spread then nearly unlimited fast and honest feedback are great bonuses for anyone trying to spread ideas.

Which resources do you overvalue? Which resources do you undervalue? What do you use as helpful baselines in looking at the productivity of your business?