The second half of the show I took live questions over the chat and my call-in line.  Some greate questions were asked (and some great answers were provided I hope)

Watch the video below to see the entire broadcast:

Resources discussed during the live show:

Market Research Strategies:

By keyword:

NicheBot

Market Samurai

You can look for high paying AdSense markets or high paying CPA markets like insurance, mortgages, real estate, hosting, etc…

You can also look for high volume markets that are easier to get traffic, but harder to get top money. Example types of high volume markets: Celebrity, Pop culture & Television related

Use Google trends to research these.

These markets have lower cpc payouts & lower per lead payouts but can still be profitable since it’s easier to get traffic.  Test using CPA offers like Zip submits & email submits on these kinds of markets.

Browse commission junction & CB for new products:

Just search Commission Junction & ClickBank for the newest products and test promoting the ones that look like they’ll convert well.

Getting Started with AdSense & Affiliate Marketing:

Once you’ve picked your 1st market: go to Hubpages and create 2 or 3 hubs on this market.  Get links to them.  Then Sign up to AdSense via Hubpages.

Build your site:

Use WordPress installed on your own domain name.

Make sure you set up these pages: privacy policy, about us, contact us, terms of use & google sitemap. Here’s a: Terms Of Use generator (not lawyer reviewed). Here’s a: Privacy Policy Generator:

Use your keywords in your titles & body of your posts

Submit to blog directories

Get links

Only after your site has content and is indexed in google then put adsense or affiliate offers.

Test various affiliate offers and track which is converting better. promote it more.  Remove non converting offers.

Build a list: use aweber

Signup to: webmaster tools and submit sitemap:

Ad placement:

Determine up front what the purpose of your website is & stick with this purpose from top to bottom.  Including how you place your ads.  Some questions to ask yourself on ad-placement:

• What is the user trying to accomplish by visiting my site?
• What do they do when viewing a particular page?
• Where is their attention likely to be focused?

Take a look at: Google’s own guide on where to place your AdSense ads .

BASIC Google Adsense rules:

For tonight I’m assuming no blackhat stuff. Everything I’m going over is 100% whitehat and shouldn’t get you into trouble.

Focus on Google’s AdSense TOS they’re the most strict. Also: REVIEW webmaster guildelines

Further data:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Adsense:
https://www.google.com/adsense/

Sign Up To These Affiliate Networks I Mentioned:

• Pepperjam
• Hydra
• Affiliate.com (Used to be cpa empire)
• NeverBlue Ads
• Commission Junction
• Clickbank
• Copeac
• Primary Ads

Tags

Google AdSense

While out of town with my family I talked to a friend of mine and he told me about all the activity surrounding the video.  I had asked some friends and employees to go check out the video before I left and some of them had bookmarked it. This apparently started an avalanche.  It’s gotten an amazing number of video plays, more than 10 YouTube honors so far, made the top of its category, lot’s of people started talking about it online and then people began linking to it.

Although still on vacation (I’m in my hotel room at the Grand Canyon in AZ right now), I decided to fire up my laptop and check out what was happening. There seemed to be two different groups of comments.  The first group of people liked the video, and went to my site and signed up for my newsletter. Many of them have sent me nice comments and acknowledgements. I’ve received a ton of traffic, sign-ups and people sending me questions in the last 48 hours (I’ll eventually get to answer them all).

The second group of people are shocked by the amount of money my AdSense 1099 tax form shows and are skeptical.  And without all the background data I had planned to put in the upcoming blog post I guess it makes sense.  $3.5 million is a lot of money.

However, that document is 100% authentic and unaltered.  I really did make $3.5 million last year in revenue from AdSense.

Here is my attempt to answer some of the questions and comments surrounding the video:

I’m not promoting some get rich quick scheme.  In fact, I don’t even have anything for sale on my site.  I’ve had the domain name billmcintosh.com for a while and I decided recently to start a site where I’ll give away free coaching, tips, advice, wordpress plugins and scripts.  Does that mean I’ll never sell an internet marketing product ever?  I can’t promise that, but I definitely don’t have plans to release any kind of get rich quick scheme through this site anytime in the future.

I have so many websites I can’t even count them. they’re spread across 15+ dedicated servers plus more virtual private servers and shared hosting accounts. I buy some sites, I build some, but my staff creates most of them. My AdSense income came from a variety of places: Organic SEO, membership sites where I displayed AdSense to members while they are visiting the paid content section, sites that I drive traffic to with PPC, and on pages where I send people who I feel will not convert into customers for my own products, but might be a good match for someone else’s.

During 2007 I drove a TON of traffic.  Some days I had 150,000 visitors on just one of my sites.

And although you can see that I’ve made a lot of money using AdSense, I do not recommend someone relying upon 100% AdSense earnings for a business.  AdSense is volatile and Google is not an easy company to partner with.  I know of several horror stories where someone started making a nice income from AdSense, then overnight…SLAP! Google pulls the rug out from under them and bans their account for a silly reason.  And just like that they have no business.  So AdSense is a good start, but definitely not the only way you should earn income.I’m not claiming I made $3.5 million bucks in pure profit from AdSense. Nor is AdSense my only income source.  I have more than 20 full-time employees and probably 20 more outside contractors working for my various companies.  That along with marketing and promotion eats up a chunk of my revenue.When I get home (or maybe earlier if I have time while away) I’ll make another video and post giving you guys more details.  I’ll also provide some more proof for the skeptics out there. So if you feel you can learn something from me, go check out my video and sign up to my site.  If not, that’s fine too.  Either way I wish you luck with your adventures in the world of Internet marketing.

Tags

Google AdSense

Today Google announced the introduction of their new AdManager service. It’s described as an ad serving tool for publishers of small and medium sized websites. With it you can serve ads from AdSense and other networks along with serving in house advertising as well.

Google describes Admanager this way:

“It can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure directly-sold and network-based inventory. Google Ad Manager offers a wealth of features, including an intuitive user interface, automated yield optimization, and proven Google speed and reliability. Best of all, Google Ad Manager is free. Ad Manager currently addresses the ad management and serving needs of publishers with smaller sales teams and effectively complements the DoubleClick Revenue Center, which is focused on publishers with large sales teams. We’re excited to add DART for Publishers to our suite of products, and we’re committed to the continued development and enhancement of DoubleClick’s offerings.”

You can read more about Ad Manager here and here.

It sounds like a great tool for webmasters on a limited budget who want to have a high quality ad-serving system on their sites. After all the horror stories about AdSense publishers getting banned and losing access to their accounts I’m personally a little gun-shy about giving Google complete control over all the advertising. What happens if they start banning AdManager accounts too? Will I lose all my reports and data?

What do you think? Would you try this on your sites? Leave me a comment and let me know your take on Google’s newest toy.

I’ll be testing it out and will report back to you on how it’s working for me.

Tags

Google AdSense