A brief follow up as promised on last weeks attempt at a bit of Adsense arbitrage, I did say I would follow up with how it went.
Basically, not very well! In terms of making money anyway, but there were many positives and I did learn a lot about how to do it better.
What I did discover is that even with just an information article as a landing page, you can get click through rates (CTR) of 30 - 50% on the Adsense ads, which is pretty good.
In my chosen area though, which was sinusitis, the payout on the adwords was not high enough (top costs approx $2). This meant that my adword costs were not being covered, so I was actually losing a little money. This is obviously not good.
The good CTR’s and high traffic that I was able to generate was encouraging and did illustrate to me that the principle could be sound. With the right keyword research, to uncover some very high paying ads, ideally at least $5per click, it should be possible to make a profit using this method.
You also need some good Google adword copy and to know what you are doing with adwords. There is one definitive guide to Google adwords which is a must for anyone getting into it by Perry Marshall, and he even does a free email course on google Adwords which covers the basics.
I’m going to try again in a different area, and hopefully can make it pay this time.
John McGuire
www.TheGardenLovers.com
www.ObtainsSolutionsLtd.com
September 14th, 2007
I think arbitrage is fascinating word, it has a kind of esoteric air of intrigue and mystery. Perhaps because it is not a word in common use and I would hazard a guess that if you were to conduct a survey in the street, you would find more people who don’t know what it means than who do. Before I started in internet marketing I had heard the term only vaguely, on some stock market report or other on the news, and I had no idea what it meant.
When it cropped up again in association with the word Adsense i.e. Adsense arbitrage, at an internet marketing seminar recently, I took a good deal more interest in it than I had before, but I had absolutely no idea what either word meant, and had to work quite hard to conceal my ignorance. I left the seminar wanting to know a lot more about a lot of things but “Adsense arbitrage” was certainly pretty close to the top of my list.
Since then I have learned a lot about Adsense. This is where you get the chance for Google to have to pay you money per click, for a change! Although, unless you really know what you’re doing, it never seems to amount to very much ;-) Adsense can be thought of as the opposite of Adwords where you pay Google to advertise your product and you pay them per click.
Arbitrage, on the other hand, I had to look up in a dictionary and here is an example definition.
“Arbitrage: the nearly simultaneous purchase and sale of securities or foreign exchange in different markets in order to profit from price discrepancies”
Having gained a working knowledge of Adsense and at least a broad outline of what arbitrage was. I was very interested to read of an internet marketers results recently in combing a Google adwords campaign with a landing page containing Google Adsense ads, who managed to make $4000 in his first month in an Adsense arbitrage project!
What he did was to identify a topic in a subject area where the keyords are expensive, so Adsense clicks would have a high payout. He then published an article rich in keywords in this area, put adsense ads on the article website and mounted a Google Adwords campaign to drive traffic to the article page.
Theis whole arbitrage concept relies on the cost per click of the adword costing you less than the payment per click for the Adsense. Also you have to bear in mind that the conversion rate will not be 100%. That is to say, that not everyone that clicks your google ad and is taken to the site (for which you pay) will click a Google Adsense ad (for which you get paid). The percentage that do is called the conversion rate and can vary from less than 1% up to greater than 50%. In general 5-10% would be accepted as very good conversion rate. So to make this profitable you have to get low cost adwords and have high payment adsense.
Getting this to work is not easy and Google also have some rules which have to be observed, such as having some quality content relating to the adword on the site, the usual privacy, about, site map etc pages and a legitimite informative exit link on the page being the main ones.
Probably the most important skill to acquire to have any chance of this arbitrage working is to study Google adwords in depth to be able to identify affordable keywords from which you can profit. There are many keyword research tools to help you do this and I’ve tried Keyword Elite, which makes it a lot less laborius and time consuming.
Having seen the results referred to above I was very keen to have a go at this method. Especially as it could be set up quick, with no product to develop, just an article to write. I decided to have a site up within a day and see how it goes. I did this eariler this week and chose a common condition call sinusits and I am monitoring the performance closely and will update with results in about a week or so.
John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
www.TheGardenLovers.com
September 6th, 2007
