Cary Bergeron of Snap In Media and CaryBergeron.com has written a report called The Adsense Report.  In it, Cary outlines the tools, tips and techniques he uses to make money online with Adsense.

The Sale

Now, I know some folks might have given up on Adsense but with Cary’s recent sale of one of his Adsense sites, there’s proof that “it still works”.

Cary recently sold his School Grants site for $80,000.00 at Flippa.com.  Flippa is a site for buying and selling websites.

The Interview

I was lucky enough to grab some of Cary’s time to talk with him about making money with Adsense and related topics.  I was also lucky enough to view an early copy of his report.

Cary has also been interviewed by eTycoon.net where he talks about the sale of his School Grants site.  So make sure you check that interview out as well to get a more complete picture of how Cary makes money with Adsense.

Here’s the 32 minute interview.  You can listen to it here on my blog or download it as an mp3 and listen to it using your mp3 player.

One caveat: I’m not a professional interviewer!!  

Download the MP3 [32 minutes]

The Questions

Here are some of the questions I asked during the interview as well as questions that are answered in the report.

1. When did you get started with IM (Internet Marketing) using Adsense?
2. Had you done any other IM before using Adsense?
3. How long had you been on the Internet before getting into IM?
4. How did you make your first dollar online?
5. Was there ever an “Ah Ha” moment or moments that indicated to you that you were on the right track, doing the right thing to get your IM sites to make money?
6. Was there ever a moment that you went, “Oh shit I can’t do this anymore, I can’t make money at this?”
7. Who influenced you as an IM?
8. How many IM sites are you running?
9. How long did you do everything yourself, if you did do everything yourself when you started out in IM?
10. How many of your IM sites are making more than $100.00 a month, $500.00 a month, $1,000.00 a month, etc.?
11. How many sites have you started and then closed down because they didn’t do what you wanted them to do?
12. Knowing what you know about IM and Adsense, if you had to start over from scratch, what 1, 2 or 3 things would you focus on?
13. Is there anything related to the work you’ve done to learn IM that you feel like saying, “I wish I wouldn’t have spent so much time on…”
14. What would you tell beginning IMers NOT to spend time on?
15. Have you ever made money online with a blogger blog (blogspot.com)?
16. Do you use free blogging sites like wordpress.com, blogspot.com, posterous, etc., to create backlinks?
17. You’ve written a lot of articles on ezine.  Do you recommend article marketing/directories for backlinks?
18. Any rules you’d like to share like, “I only look at niches that have more than 1,000 searches a month and no more than x a month, etc.”
19. Are there any tips, tricks you’d like to share in this interview?
20. Did you have a schedule every day when doing your IM?
21. Did you have a “normal” day job when you started IM?
22. Do you use Google Keyword Search Tool?
23. Do you use any 3rd party IM tool for keyword research, etc.?
24. Are there any measurements about a niche that you’d like to share, that indicates to you, not to try that niche?
25. When did you start outsourcing and what was it that you started outsourcing?
26. What’s the future for IM’er Cary Bergeron?  Special projects for 2010, 2011, etc.?

The Report

What’s in the report?  Well besides answering some of the questions above, here’s a few items you’ll learn about in the report:

• 10 Thngs You Must Do To Make Money with Google Adsense Sites
• Wicked Awesome Tip for Getting High Quality Links Daily
• Cary’s Ninja SEO Tips
• Super Awesome Tip for Getting Repeat Visitors
• Website Design for 20%+ CTR (Click-Thru-Rate)
• Tools & Website Cary’s Uses on a Daily Basis
• Worksheet – This is not under-rated.  A lot of folks need a path, guidance on how to start and stay on track.  Well, the worksheet section of the report is absolutely necessary reading.  Why?  Because it gives you a clear path/plan to headed in the right direction with making money online with Google Adsense.

The Adsense Report is geared for folks who have online experience. It’s another way to make money online. It’s not a get rich quick scheme either. It will require putting time in for the long-term to get the results. It’s also based around creating quality content that will grow organically in the search engines.

In my interview with Cary, he talks about how he made time to create Adsense sites while having a family and working a day job. That’s a feat in and of itself.

You’ll learn the criteria that Cary uses to decide on whether a niche or keyword phrases might pan out for a good Adsense site.

He’ll also explains his technique to get visitors to come back and click on the Adsense on your website.

There’s tools galore in the report that you can start using for free to get going on keyword research as well as researching the competition.

One of the best sections I like is the Worksheet section. Cary lays out the schedule for exactly what you need to do to make your sites successful.

The only downside to the report that I can see is that it is not for beginners. Cary tells you that in the beginning of the report that he’s not going to teach how to setup a website or use ftp, etc.

Now the upside to that downside is that Cary or someone could start a “pay for” forum where people could learn the details of setting up Adsense sites as well as become part of a supportive community while building Adsense sites.

Want the report?  Go get it at The Adsense Report.

Don’t want to use Adsense? You can still benefit from the report because it provides tips, tricks and techniques on how to build traffic to your website or blog.

Did you know you can buy and sell websites and domain names to make money online?  Well you can.  There are also websites that handle the buying and selling.

One site you can do this at is Flippa.  Flippa allows you to buy and sell websites and domain names.  It’s a site where you can review many attributes of the sites that are being sold.  Note: There are other sites out there that allow you to buy and sell websites and domain names.

The information provided about other sites can help you determine the direction of your site.

After reviewing many of the features at Flippa, I came up with a list of 10 things you can learn from website and domain names for sale.  I’m sure there are more but here you go.

1. Inspiration – You can view sites for sale by various listings such as featured sites, new listings, just sold, popular tags, and more.  With the information provided under these listings, just reviewing what’s for sale can be inspirational.  From what type of sites have tons of traffic to how much they’re selling for now and how it was done.  Along the way you can ask yourself whether the site is in a niche or sub-niche that you could possibly enter.

2. Source Code – You can take one of the sites for sale that look interesting to you and view the web page source code.  You can find out what the meta description says, what the meta keywords are, as well as links to other sites and whether they are nofollow or dofollow links.  You can figure out the keyword or keyword phrases used on a page.

3. Sitemaps – A lot of sites have a link at the bottom of their website that says “Sitemap”.  This will tell you how big the site is as far as how pages make up the site.  A sitemap can also show you the keyword or keyword phrases a site is trying to rank for by observing the title of the pages.

4. Incoming Links – You can go to Google and issue the command site:name-of-site.com to see what incoming links there are to the website for sale.  This can be a huge eye opener as you’ll learn if there are any other sites the seller has out there linking into the site for sale and how it was done.

5. Unique Visitors and Page Views – You can find out how many unique visitors and page views the site has every month.  You can use this information to set the bar for your site and how many visitors and page views it might take to be profitable.

6. Revenue – The revenue section of a site will show you how the site makes money from advertising, from sales of products or services, and affiliate sales.  This is an eye opener for you if you’re trying to figure out how to make money with your site or a site you have in or around the same niche.

7. Site Owner – The description section of the site for sale is great because it allows the site owner to explain more details about the site including revenue.  You’ll find information about how they are running the site and their outlook for future owners of the site.  Whether you plan on buying a site or not, you can use this information to model your efforts after.

8. Question and Answer – Another informative section is the questions and answers section where interested buyers can ask questions of the site seller.  Some of the questions you’ll find answers to are:

• How is the site advertising?
• How much is the site making from advertising?
• How much is the site selling products or services for?
• How will the site continue to make money with new ownership?
• What is the seller willing to provide that wouldhelp the new buyer promote the site?
• etc…

9. Domain Names – You’ll find many of the attributes of the websites for sale also listed with domain names.  What’s interesting to check out is what sellers do with domain names that just sit there for a long time.  Also, don’t forget that with an established domain name comes an already ranked, aged and indexed site that could prove better when starting a new site than starting from scratch with a brand new domain name.

10. New Resources – One of the most interesting things you’ll discover are new resources (websites) that you can check out – UrlTrends, Compete, WHOIS, etc.  These sites include where all the detailed information comes from that a site like Flippa uses.  You can use these sites to gather information about your own site.

So I’m working at my computer the other day and the phone rings. I look at the caller id and don’t recognize the caller but I pick up, “Hello?” CLICK. Hmm? They hung up.

I check the caller id and search for the number using Google. Apparently other folks get called by this number and caller id description, and they also get hung up on when they call the number back. And there in lies the beauty of this. Why?

To read the rest of this article (over 1,500 words) and what’s going on behind the scenes, subscribe to my newsletter and I’ll send it to you straight away.

After you’ve read it and you have questions or comments, come back here and leave them in the comments section below.

If you’re a blogger, you have what are called popular posts on your blog.  How do you know this or find this out?  Run some type of analytics software on your blog and you’ll find out.

Popular posts are also referred to as your “Money Posts”.  Why?  Because you can leverage those posts to make money from your blog.

WordPress Popular Posts Plugins

There are quite a few popular posts plugins you can find if you browse through the WordPress Plugins Directory.

I currently use the WordPress Popular Posts plugin.  Below is the configuration screen and its many options you can set.

Click image for larger view

You can view how this plugin looks in the right sidebar on this blog:

Now, to drill-down a bit more, you can see what your most popular posts are over time by using the WordPress.com Stats plugin.

The WordPress.com Stats plugin will give you quite a bit of data and if you click on the Top Posts & Pages link, you’ll be able to see what blog posts have been the most popular (by views) over the last 7 days, 30 days, quarter, year, and all time.

Google Analytics is a popular analytics tool to use on your blog.  It will also let you drill-down and look at the details of your content.

Promoting Products and Services

After you’ve gathered the top 2 or 3 blog posts on your blog, you can display ads that are related more closely to that blog post.

For instance, if you have a how-to article about some techie topic that has been doing well over time, you could find an affiliate product to promote in that article or on the sidebar of your blog that only shows up for that article.

You could do this with 2-3 articles that are related to the topic of the product or service.  You could also do this by WordPress category.  So if any blog post is in a specific category, you always show the same affiliate products or services.

By doing this, you’ll be promoting a product or service that is more directly related to the blog post.  You can also do this with your own product or service.

Where do you find affiliate products?  You can find them on other blogs related to your niche.  Check out what those blogs are promoting (outside of Google Adsense) and see if that product or service has an affiliate program by visiting their website.

You can also find products and services at sites that specialize in affiliate marketing like ClickBank or Commission Junction.

I’ll be writing more details about this in my newsletter so don’t forget to subscribe to the newsletter.

I thought I’d do a Google Adsense photo (like a lot of other folks have done) since I received my first Adsense check the other day.

I didn’t do a whole lot to the site that generated this check.  It was mostly organic SEO, which is providing content that makes sense to humans who are reading the content, and thus makes sense to search engines.

One pdf that points this out succinctly is the Keyword Research Guide from WordTracker.  The example in the beginning of their ebook talks about using the keyword phrase “cheap filghts” instead of “low fares” and you’ll get more search engine traffic.  You and I talk about “cheap flights”, CEO’s talk about “low fares”.

If you don’t know anything about search engine optimization, it doesn’t really matter (well, it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish online) because good content will ultimately start ranking in the search engines.  With good content might come backlinks, which in turn helps you in the search engines.  So write the best stuff you can and make it popular somehow.  Keep an eye on how you write your content and how “normal” people  would search for it.

Certain articles became more popular over time and did well in the search engines.  It was a tech blog of sorts. I haven’t done an in depth analysis of what ads and why folks were clicking on, so I might need to do a bit of that.  After an analyzing the clicks and the articles I can tweak Adsense to hopefully work even better.

The great thing about letting a blog sit for a while is to watch what content receives more attention and rises to the top.  You can then drive more traffic to the better performing articles, monetize them different ways and tweak the Adsense for them.

Here’s my $100.00 (plus a few pennies) check:

To find an example of what you can make with Google Adsense search on Google Adsense Check.

In Making Money with Niche Sites – Part 3 I commented that I’m discontinuing the Discus Fish niche site because Adam Short recently created a site on Discus Fish.  I had gotten that topic from the Amazon magazines section on Pets->Fish.  But as I listened to the interview again, I realized that Adam had started a site on Discus Fish.  DOH!!  

As I discussed in Part 3, I also looked at how Adam’s existing Betta Fish site was listed on the second page of Google results which it still is and has been for a few years now.  If you look at the results, you’ll also see an article on “Betta Fish” listed at Ezine Articles called Ten Tips for Caring for Your Betta Fish.  That article is listed today in the United States as #10 on Google’s first page search results.  The article was co-written by, none other than, Adam Short.

At the end of the Betta Fish article there is a link to Adam’s Betta Fish Center.  This helps tremendously because article marketing is a popular way and in this case a successful way to get ranked in the search engines.

Part of creating a niche site using Adam’s approach is to create, for example, 11 articles for article directories.  Adam talks about creating 11 articles to submit over a 21-day period – 1 article every other day for 21 days.

I’m jumping ahead a bit here, but thought I’d mention article marketing because Caroline Middlebrook has been running a very nice series of articles on article marketing.  check out her February 2009 articles on Article Marketing and Distribution.

Okay back to a different step.  Last week I listed the site map of the Betta Fish Center site so we could get a feel for what goes into a small niche site.  The next step for our niche then, is to create a site like that or comparable to that.

In his interview with Yaro, Adam talks about creating 5-6 articles for the site.  These articles are not the same articles that are sent to the article directories.  They’re different.  I’m assuming some of the articles are “re-purposed” so they seem like new and original content and not duplicate content that Google might not like.

Creating the Site

You could try and use a free blogging service like Blogger or WordPress.com, or create and host your own domain based on the niche as well.  Using a free site would allow you to test the niche using some form of keyword.blogspot.com or keyword.wordpress.com in the URL.

If you use a free bloging or website ceation service, you might only be able to go as far as keyword testing and how your test blog gets ranked in the search engines.  I wouldn’t take this approach myself since you’re spending quite a bit of time trying to get a test or free blog ranked just to see how well it might rank.  Then if you decided to continue, you’d have to start over – in a sense.

Now that I’m NOT going to use Discus Fish, I’ve selected two niche topics.  I’ll do a bit more research on both and pick one and then start to create a site using a self-hosted WordPress blog with very limited content and no commenting allowed – I think.

Since I’m very familiar with self-hosting WordPress, this will be rather quick and easy for me.  We’ll see how things turn out.  Part of creating a niche site is creating the site and letting it bake in the search engines.

In this third installment of the Making Money with Niche Sites series (part 1 , part 2), I’ll move forward with a niche topic that I found using the “Discus Care” keyword phrase.  Discus are a type of fish.  I decided to use Discus as an example because I found it on Amazon.com in Making Money with Niche Sites – Part 2, and since it met some of the criteria for this method of making money online, I’m sticking with it, for now.

As a reminder, we’re looking for a niche that has at least 1,000 searches a month with less than 10,000 resulting search pages on that topic.  According to the course that was being offered in Making Money with Niche Sites – Part 1, there is a quadrant that you use to eliminate or continue on with your chosen niche.

I didn’t take the course so I don’t know what the other two quadrants are to determine if I move forward or not, but comparing “Discus Care” to the example of “Betta Fish” that was used, I think we can at least establish some next steps based on the information we have.

Some more stuff to remember – with this methodology, we’re not interested in finding a niche we know anything about, if we do know something about the niche then great, but if we don’t, that’s okay because we’ll be creating content based on someone else’s research.  This is one way to do this, this is not the only way.

As a reminder, if we check the Google Adwords Keyword Tool for Discus Care, we find approximately 1,900 searches for January 2009 and an average search volume of 2,400 queries per month over a 12-month period.  So that’s good.  It tells us that people are searching on that keyword phrase.  Now, go to Google and search on “Discus Care” (with the double quotes included) and we see the total number of competing pages (results) are “about” 3,810.  So that still looks good.

Now, the next thing to do is take a look at the site that was used as an example – the Betta Fish Center.  Scroll down to the bottom and click on the Site Map link.  This gives us a good view of how the site is laid out.  Part of the course is to find niche sites and use the rinse and repeat method, which means to setup one site that works and use a template for your next niche site based on the previous niche site and so on and so on.

Here’s a summary of what we’re looking at with our Discus Care site.  I’ll list the site map we might use for our Discus Care site based on the Betta Fish site map .

Menu

• Free eCourse – this takes you to a one page landing page with an email opt-in for a free mini-course on Betta Fish
• Pictures of Bettas – one page of pictures of Betta fishies sent in by readers, a sidebar with the site map, a $15.00 ebook and the opt-in free mini-course
• Betta Care Tips – a page that lists 16 Betta fish and related articles
• Types of Bettas – a page with over 30 different types of Bettas with links to separate pages for each Betta fish

Site Info

• Affiliate Program – sell the eBook mentioned above for a 75% commission – Nice!!      This is a way to make your eBook go viral.  But with this niche I don’t know if we’ll be going viral.
• About Us – a couple paragraphs – about us
• Resources – a couple pet resources
• Contact us – contact information for the site owner
• Site map – the site map that makes up the website and how it’s laid out
• Privacy – a lengthy privacy statement about what they do and don’t do with the information provided by readers
• Disclaimer – a very short disclaimer

Note: at the bottom of each page is the Custom Google Search box.  Don’t know if that’s there just for Adsense purposes but there ya’ go.

What’s pretty impressive about the Betta Fish Center is that it’s coming in at #16, or page 2 of the Google search results using the keyword phrase “betta fish”.  That’s pretty darn good since the site was setup in 2005, according to a US Google search.

Your search may vary depending on what country you’re in.  If you want to test the search results for “betta fish” in Australia, you can use the Australian Google Search .  Today at this time, it looks like the Betta Fish Center shows up as #30 (page 3) on the Google search results for Australia.  That’s still pretty darn good assuming for now that it hasn’t been updated for a long time.

Well that it’s for now, stayed tuned for the next part where we can possibly map this site to a Discus Care site.  We’ll see.  Make sure you subscribe to my blog so you don’t miss a fish.      Have a great day!!

In my first article Making Money with Niche Sites – Part 1, I walked through how to find niches sites based on a formula that Adam Short has put together and shared in his interview with Yaro Starak.

I’m intrigued by this because I’ve walked through the 30 Day Challenge by Ed Dale, which is kind of like what Adam talks about, but sounds more appealing because of not having to work with Google Adwords campaigns and other tasks that take a bit more time to find out if a niche is really profitable.

Again, the idea behind creating niche sites, according to Adam’s rules, is to find a niche that draws at least 1,000 searches per month and less than 10,000 competing pages for that niche.  How do you do that?  You can use Amazon.com to review a bunch of different categories or niches in the magazines area to pick areas to research.

When you’ve found something interesting, you use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find those two numbers – at least 1,000 searches a month and less than 10,000 resulting search pages a month.

Don’t want to use Amazon.com to search for a niche?  Here’s a list of 6 sites to check out for niche ideas.

1. Yahoo Answers – Ruffle through the Categories list to get niche ideas from what folks are asking questions about.

2. wikiHow – wikiHow also has a Categories list on their home page.

3. Magazines.com – There’s a whole list of magazines to browse through for ideas.

4. How To Do Things.com

5. eHow

6. eBay Seller Resources

After you find a few niches that look interesting, do some keyword research using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and see if you can fit that niche in the – greater than 1,000 search per month and less than 10,000 search results.

A site that Adam’s talked about in the interview and you can check out and start reviewing is the Betta Fish Center.  Check out the Site Map for this site and you’ll see how he sets up these niche sites – at least the Betta Fish Center site.