AdSense is still alive and well. I have been with the program since 2005 and learned a few lessons along the way.
I started with AdSense in 2005. When it was easy. When I lost a major client I needed to "do something" to make money. I had a couple of websites and came across AdSense. I applied, got approved and put some ads on the site. The next few weeks I watch it every day. By the end of 2 months my wife asked me "how much did you make"? I humbly answered - twenty bucks. In 2 months. Needless to say - that is not an income. But I thought - $20 on autopilot on one site - what about 100 sites? $2,000. So I started to build sites. Bought domain names. Scraped content from Wikipedia and went to town. In 2006 I made about $30,000 and it went up from there. My top month sometimes in 2007 was $8,000.
So I thought this is the holy grail. Then the bottom fell out. Google got smart and cleaned house. Most of my sites got canned. Revenues dropped to below $1,000 within months. Sites got disallowed and de-indexed en masse.
Today, late 2010 I am still in the game. I have deleted all sites that offer little value to the visitor. I have more and more unique content. I watch the sites. Tracking such things as keywords that get traffic and where traffic is coming from.
To survive in AdSense today - these are some lessons I have learned:
Search Engine Scripts
It is not recommended to put AdSense on search engine scripts that creates a page for each search. Because people will search using keywords that are banned from AdSense and thus create pages with unauthorized words. Google catches them every time. This happened to me several times. I got the email that un-approved content was on the site. Every time I simply deleted the entire site and have no more search engine sites. I wanted to start another search engine - I would monetize it with affiliate links.
Length of site
The more content - the more stable AdSense income.
I do have sites with only a few pages that generate some income, but they come and go. My best sites have about 20 pages. That's it. However, counting the RSS feed pages - they number in the hundreds. 90% of clicks come from the real content pages, NOT the RSS feed ones.
RSS Content
I do use RSS feeds several ways. I directly put the feed on the pages, and I also have software that creates pages from the feeds. It is very important you screen the feeds properly. Again, bad content will penalize you. But all in all - I use RSS extensively.
Keywords
This is most difficult to be creative. The best paying keywords like mortgage etc. are totally out of reach. Even the misspellings. All taken up by people with deep pockets for SEO. I simply use long tail keywords and looking at the keywords that get me traffic - most are long keywords. In addition, I keep my sites very focused. I'd rather have five domains covering the different aspects of say borrowing money than one with lots of variations. Razor sharp sites work.
Stay clean. Earn from AdSense. It's not easy, but earning while on vacation is kind of cool. Work at it when you want, but an AdSense portfolio needs a little TLC.
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