My first stab at an Adsense & click arbitrage website

[JoshK]

John, You need to develop a way to collect leads. You really should look into building a mailing list. It's quite a bit of work to start up but the money is in a list. This is something I really didn't talk about in the adsense diary. But almost every site should of some form of email capture on it.

Just write a small ebook with golf tips or something of the sort. Make a pop under/float popup box and offer people your "free gift" if they sign up to your mailing list.

I'm sure I don't have to tell you the potential of a list in a niche such as this. The golf niche are huge buyers. There's so many opportunitys to cross sell products to this niche.

Cheers,

Josh

PS - I like your site quite a bit, and it definetly has potential. Just one thing though more content. Content (articles) are going to be landing pages for you. Those landing pages are going to show up in google, and you're going to get more traffic [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Content is King!

[Colt McCoy]

A couple of comments. You're talking about doing PPC arbitrage, but from the sound of it you've built a site that probably won't convert well for that. Arbitrage sites and content sites are very different.

Arbitrage sites generally have very little in the way of decent content. You don't want your reader to spend a bunch of time reading. You really want a crappy site with the Adsense ads being the only means of escape (other than the Back button or closing the window). The person already clicked your PPC ad and will probably be willing to click another one. You don't need a bunch of content for the search engines because you're doing PPC.

A content site is usually designed to rely at least partially on natural search, and therefor needs more keyword-dense content to please the engines since you're not paying for traffic.

[JoshK]

[ QUOTE ]
A couple of comments. You're talking about doing PPC arbitrage, but from the sound of it you've built a site that probably won't convert well for that. Arbitrage sites and content sites are very different.

Arbitrage sites generally have very little in the way of decent content. You don't want your reader to spend a bunch of time reading. You really want a crappy site with the Adsense ads being the only means of escape (other than the Back button or closing the window). The person already clicked your PPC ad and will probably be willing to click another one. You don't need a bunch of content for the search engines because you're doing PPC.

A content site is usually designed to rely at least partially on natural search, and therefor needs more keyword-dense content to please the engines since you're not paying for traffic.

[/ QUOTE ]

Very nice colt, I was just posting something very similar to this when I saw you already did it. Great minds think alike.

Cheers

[Colt McCoy]

[ QUOTE ]
Very nice colt, I was just posting something very similar to this when I saw you already did it. Great minds think alike.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm learning. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[Frinkenstein]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
So your plan is to pay $.10 a click for people to come to your site and hope that they click enough on your ads to pay for it?

[/ QUOTE ]

Buy low and sell high - that's the plan. I'm paying up to .10 per click and some of the ads on my site will pay me over 2.00 per click. (at least that's what it would cost for a 1-3 placement on adwords for the keywords I'm targeting.)
We'll see how it works out.
I'll keep you posted.

(I did put a 20.00 a day cap on adwords just in case.)

[/ QUOTE ]

I hate to be pessimistic, (and I do hope that you're successful) but I don't think it's going to work very well for the following reasons:

1. Golf ads don't pay well. Most ads don't pay $2 per click to begin with, and sports ads in general pay poorly (in my experience).

2. Assume you do get $2 per click on average. And you pay $0.10 to get visitors to your site. That means you need to have a 5% clickthrough rate (CTR) to breakeven. That's possible certainly, but not trivial. But, you WON'T average $2 per click anyway, so really, you'll need a MUCH higher CTR to break even. But, you'll be unlikely to get higher than 5-10% no matter what you do.

3. Plus, at $0.10 per click, you're bidding the lowest possible (as I recall) that google will let you. You may have trouble getting your ads displayed and generating traffic unless you've chosen very rare keywords. And if you're choosing very rare keywords that few people will search for, they're probably not going to be all that relevant to your site and you may get a low CTR. I am not positive about this point, just my thoughts at this point.

4. currently your ad placement isn't that great (IMO). When I open your site on my computer, I can only see 1 ad without scrolling down. I'd suggest moving your text slightly to the left and using a 300X250 rectangle or 250X250 square that is inline with your text similar to what john chow does on his blog (www.johnchow.com).

Other ideas:
Also, there are programs other than adsense that you might consider... Perhaps you can sign up for an affiliate program for golf swing aids? You will probably earn more for sales that your site generates, but your conversion rate will probably be pretty low, so it may or may not pay better than adsense. Just a thought.

Again, I wish you the best of luck. Keep us posted on your progress in this thread.

[Colt McCoy]

[ QUOTE ]
2. Assume you do get $2 per click on average. And you pay $0.10 to get visitors to your site. That means you need to have a 5% clickthrough rate (CTR) to breakeven. That's possible certainly, but not trivial. But, you WON'T average $2 per click anyway, so really, you'll need a MUCH higher CTR to break even. But, you'll be unlikely to get higher than 5-10% no matter what you do.

3. Plus, at $0.10 per click, you're bidding the lowest possible (as I recall) that google will let you. You may have trouble getting your ads displayed and generating traffic unless you've chosen very rare keywords. And if you're choosing very rare keywords that few people will search for, they're probably not going to be all that relevant to your site and you may get a low CTR. I am not positive about this point, just my thoughts at this point.




[/ QUOTE ]

Frinky,

Just a couple fo points. From what I understand, CTRs for most arbitrage sites is much higher than 5-10%. But those are sites that are designed for arbitrage. A site that's not designed for arbitrage will have lower CTRs, so he probably shouldn't be trying to do arbitrage at all with it. There are also plenty of people bidding on cheap keywords and making decent money at it.

[Frinkenstein]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
2. Assume you do get $2 per click on average. And you pay $0.10 to get visitors to your site. That means you need to have a 5% clickthrough rate (CTR) to breakeven. That's possible certainly, but not trivial. But, you WON'T average $2 per click anyway, so really, you'll need a MUCH higher CTR to break even. But, you'll be unlikely to get higher than 5-10% no matter what you do.

3. Plus, at $0.10 per click, you're bidding the lowest possible (as I recall) that google will let you. You may have trouble getting your ads displayed and generating traffic unless you've chosen very rare keywords. And if you're choosing very rare keywords that few people will search for, they're probably not going to be all that relevant to your site and you may get a low CTR. I am not positive about this point, just my thoughts at this point.




[/ QUOTE ]

Frinky,

Just a couple fo points. From what I understand, CTRs for most arbitrage sites is much higher than 5-10%. But those are sites that are designed for arbitrage. A site that's not designed for arbitrage will have lower CTRs, so he probably shouldn't be trying to do arbitrage at all with it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Agreed, his site is currently designed for content. If his site is left "as is" there's I highly doubt he'll be able to acheive higher than 2-3% CTR. If he makes some changes to his adsense placement, he MAY be able to get up in the 5-10% range (assuming all else stays the same). Admitedly, I don't know much about adsense arbitrage, so it's possible you're correct about higher CTR's on specially designed sites. However, if you consider that a CTR of 20% represents 1 click for every 5 visitors... That's pretty hard for me to imagine. But, you never know...


[ QUOTE ]
There are also plenty of people bidding on cheap keywords and making decent money at it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Fair enough. However, I don't think it's very easy to do... I suspect it's a fairly efficient market. There may be some money (or even lots of money) to be made on adsense arbitrage but I don't think OP is going to make any with his current set up.

[Colt McCoy]

[ QUOTE ]
Admitedly, I don't know much about adsense arbitrage, so it's possible you're correct about higher CTR's on specially designed sites. However, if you consider that a CTR of 20% represents 1 click for every 5 visitors... That's pretty hard for me to imagine. But, you never know...

[/ QUOTE ]

Higher...


[ QUOTE ]
Fair enough. However, I don't think it's very easy to do... I suspect it's a fairly efficient market. There may be some money (or even lots of money) to be made on adsense arbitrage but I don't think OP is going to make any with his current set up.

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree. I don't necessarily think that starting out with the cheap keywords is a bad way to learn though. If he started with higher-cost words, he could find himself losing a lot of money very quickly.

[WarBus]

[ QUOTE ]
I have a question here. A mod on a large golf forum will give me a sticky for my site as long as I don't have any "buy it now" type ads on my site - they have 50k+ registered users, so I'm not sure if it's worth giving up the potential traffic. Any ideas?

[/ QUOTE ]
You don't need to use banners or "buy it now" buttons. You have "Availability: 1st Edition: ebay; 2nd Edition: amazon.com". Why not use links. Make those your affiliate links.

[ QUOTE ]
I'm having a problem here also. There's a major jewelry site called "ernest jones" and whenever I put that name in the tags it pulls up a whole host of jewelry ads from adsense. I changed all the title and description tags to "golf swing" but I'm not aware of how I can filter the ads by keyword from my tags. Can I do this with tags? I tried filtering the urls on adsense, but it just kept feeding new jewelry ads in. Am I right on this?

[/ QUOTE ]
Start out by changing the tags on one of the inner pages. Keep filtering the URLs (don't use www.). Hopefully you can block most of the jewelry ads.

Once again, your really shouldn't worry about PPC on your site. You already rank well. Figure out how to earn more per visitor, then make more sites. In five years this site can still be making you money. I would rather have fifty sites like yours, than a bunch of PPC arbitrage sites. Your site produces passive income.

[Frinkenstein]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Admitedly, I don't know much about adsense arbitrage, so it's possible you're correct about higher CTR's on specially designed sites. However, if you consider that a CTR of 20% represents 1 click for every 5 visitors... That's pretty hard for me to imagine. But, you never know...

[/ QUOTE ]

Higher...

[/ QUOTE ]

Seriously??? It's hard to imagine there's that many suckers out there. Impressive.

Can you refer me to one of these sites? I'd like to take a look at one to see what they look like. Thx in advance.