I’m not a huge petrol head, car fan or status symbol type of guy and I always swore I’d never drive a brand new car. It totally pisses me off that a the value of a car can depreciate so fast that you can lose up to 30% of your investment just by driving it out of the showroom! To me, a car is simply a means of getting from point A to point C, preferably without breaking down at B along the way, so I always took advantage of the depreciation and would only buy cheap, reliable, second hand cars – reasoning that if they got stolen, smashed or broke down I’d simply pull out my credit card and buy another one – and I’d never have to face monthlypayments of any kind.
I’ve had my current car for (which I totally love) for about 8 years (a ‘78 “S series” Beetle – the one with the curved windscreen 
) but even though it goes like a dream, I knew I’d have to take it off the road for many months to give it the make over job I want, and I’d need to buy something else to keep me mobile while the VeeDub was being worked on.
So anyway – I started shopping around and spoke to a friend of mine who works at a VW dealership that sells both new and secondhand cars if he had anything decent in stock. Well, when you buy from an official dealership, even though you know you are getting a very good second hand car, the difference in price between new and secondhand isn’t a million miles and so I started considering a brand new car (shock and horror!)
I liked the VW Golf TenaCiti 1.4i and we worked out that the monthly payments would be about R2000 per month (that’s 2000 Rand – South African currency) Now, I HATE the idea of paying for something monthly and almost chucked the idea and went to look for something cheap and cheerful that I could pay for in one lump sum without totally draining my bank account. But then I thought “Hey – Google sends me an AdSense check for about R2000 every month so it wouldn’t actually be like I was paying for it”
I must add here that I am not an AdSense power player. AdSense is not my main source of income and I always considered any money from them to simply be a bit of extra beer money and so I never really worked on maximising it. Anyway – I did a bit of tweaking which pushed my Google income up to around R3000 per month which means that I am now driving a brand new car and never have to put my hand in my own pocket! Google covers my monthly repayments, insurance AND satellite tracking and recovery without me doing any extra work at all!
I mentioned this one one of the forums which lead to a flood of people asking me how I did it, so I decided to do a post explaining everything, and here it is
Like I said – I’m not an AdSense power player, it is not my main source of income and I do not put up any Made-For-Adsense type sites. Most of my sites are e-commerce sites selling physical products – the kind that the experts say you should never put AdSense on because it will lower your conversions! But here is the key… I know that every single visitor that comes to my site (or any other site for that matter) will leave my ite. And I want to control how they leave!
Preferably, I want them to leave from my receipt page after making a purchase but if they don’t want to buy my products then I’d rather that they left via an affiliate link, Adsense ad or any other monetized link rather than simply hitting the back button, starting a new search, closing the browser or anything else that doesn’t at least earn me a few cents.
I craft my pages in such a way that I almost force visitors through a series of “obstacles” in order of which will earn me the most money. 1) Newsletter opt in. 2) Buying my products right away. 3) Leaving my pages through a monetized link such as AdSense. I mostly put the AdSense code at the bottom of my pages – if a visitor doesn’t opt into my list, if they don’t buy my product – then I’ll damn well put AdSense ads at the point where they are going to leave my pages anyway!
I also put a fair number of auto-generated Traffic Equalizer type pages on all my sites. It’s a much maligned piece of software and the forums are full of assholes who don’t know how to use it properly crying that it doesn’t work. But here’s how I use it and make money from it.
Firstly and most importantly, I don’t use it to create millions of pages with nothing but shitty scraped content and AdSense ads! I use it to create a lot (but usually less than 1000) of valid pages that target long tailed keywords related to my site. Call them doorway pages, call them bait pages, whatever… the fact is that they are real valid pages and I craft my templates in such a way that visitors have to pass through the same series of steps that they would have to on my “real” pages. Ie. 1) Newsletter opt in. 2) Buying my products right away. 3) Leaving my pages through a monetized link such as AdSense.
The reason this works so well, is that for many long-tailed keywords it doesn’t take much more than some basic on page optimisation to show up on the first page (sometimes even first position on Google). I don’t stuff my pages with nothing but SERPs harvested by Traffic Equalizer, but I do use it to generate 100s of pages that have proper title tags, H1’s, H2’s, <strong> tags, anchor text etc. All pages have the same navigation bar as the rest of my site so all my pages are easily navigable and I pull valid content from my own products database as well as RSS feeds from related sources.
I don’t do all that keyword research that the experts advise – I simply make sure that AdSense displays related ads and manually remove any ads that are not relevant to my sites. The point is – that if people arrive on my site looking for “blue widgets” and don’t buy my blue widgets for what ever reason, they are more likely to leave my site via a “blue widget” AdSense ad than an ad for “Travel in Hawaii”
So that’s it in a nutshell really, put AdSense ads where people are probably going to leave your site anyway and manually remove any ads that aren’t directly related to the content of your site!
I’ve made this a DoFollow blog so feel fee to comment or ask questions, but DON’T abuse it with fuckwit comments like “Nice post” or “Thank you I learn much”. If you’re going to comment, make it something sensible or ask a valid question. Dumb bombing for links will not be tolerated!
