How to get rich with AdSense

(Step 1: Surrender your soul. And any sense of integrity.)*

I'm starting to realize that the AdSense ads on my sidebar and at the bottom of my blog are not going to make me rich anytime soon. These ads just don't work well with blogs like mine, which I think is considered a "Life" blog. The subject matter of my blog, and therefore the target market of my ads, varies from day to day. Even where the official AdSense site lists "success stories", all of these seem to be from single-topic sites.

I'm thinking I could exploit this by creating "spinoff" blogs using the Labels function. I could, for example, gather all of the posts with the Label "Yard and Garden" and repost them to a blog called "Another Monkey: Yard And Garden". This "new" blog would then exclusively feature ads that are relevant to the posts there - all about gardening and yard work - and would also attract visitors who were looking specifically for information on these topics. More focused content + readers specifically interested in that content + ads specifically relevant to that content = more people clicking on ads that they find interesting. All without needing to generate new content.

Ah, yes. Content.

I've done some searching on the Internet for information on making AdSense work better for your site, and I found one list of instructions (UPDATE, June 25, 2007: the article is "How to boost your AdSense revenue" by Allan Gardyne on AssociatePrograms.com) that was level-headed and clear, yet at the same time made my skin crawl.

The trick to making lots of money using AdSense, the author said, is fairly simple: first get lots of people to visit your site. Say, something like 10,000 visitors per day to start. (If you can't do this, he says, then don't even bother reading further.) Then republish your blog numerous times throughout the day. Oh, but there's the issue of content. Yes, the writer says, people don't like sites that consist solely of ads. You need to have content to fill up the spaces between the ads, to attract readers who will click on the ads, and to provide relevant subject matter for the ads. No problem, he says: there are plenty of sites that will sell you content. For as little as $5 a post, you can buy content for your site.

Yow.

Blogs can be a lot of things. An open-ended letter, an autobiography in a million parts, a soapbox to rant, a newsletter for your organization, a place to post links to other sites. But I've never conceived of blogs that exist solely to push ads, where the content is secondary (at best) to the ads. I recoiled at the very notion.

Then I realized that that's not too different from the way magazines work. A magazine publisher identifies a market, lines up advertisers, comes up with a title and concept for their magazine, and then purchases content that will steer "readers" towards the advertisers. As long as the advertisers are happy, they will continue to pay for the magazine to publish. A successful magazine will attract more and bigger advertisers. The content is secondary, nearly to the point of irrelevancy. What brings in advertising dollars is what works, and the publisher will be wanting more of the same.

(What, you thought magazines made their money by selling magazines? Honey child, check the annual or bi-annual publication statement that may be tucked into the magazine in fine print - now that I think of it, I haven't seen one in a while. Most indicate that roughly half of all issues published do not get sold. If you were paying to cover the cost of publication, you probably couldn't afford the cover price. And on the subject of content: There are, I suppose, a few magazines that publish on topics because the people who publish them love the topics. These magazines, I suspect, generally struggle for a while and then either find a niche market and sell, or fair entirely.)

So I suppose I could do something like that: carefully salt my posts with words and phrases that currently rank high on search engine searches (HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS IS COMING OUT SOON! PREGNANT WOMAN DISAPPEARS! VINCE McMAHON MURDERED IN WILKES-BARRE!!!...oh, wait, I did do that one.) I could abandon any shred of integrity in my writing and become an advertising whore.

But that's not me. I write. I create content, I don't buy it. And I write about whatever it occurs to me to write. What I write about tomorrow may be completely different from what I wrote about yesterday.

So maybe I won't get rich anytime soon using AdSense. But I guess that's OK.

*Maybe I'm being a bit too cynical here. Maybe content purchasing isn't such a horrible thing, especially if it helps get relevant content to readers. And maybe AdSense does work well for some people. But it seems to me that the article I've mentioned above, which for some reason I can't locate now, suggests a corruption of the art of blogging that flies in the face of everything I believe. But what works, works, I suppose.