2017 Splogging Adsense Journey

Yarharharharhar said:

Hey, been following your journey a while now, and it's had my white-greyhat ass jealous. I've been wondering if you've even setup your adsense units right.

You sound like you've had your turn around the IM block so I don't want to pretend to know more than you.

BUT, as a follower of the journey I want to help you push the envelope as far as you can go.

One of the easiest ways to increase CTR, and possibly also RPM is to add link ad units to the top of each post.

You can further increase the CTR by increasing the size of the link ad box. This increases the link ad units from 4 to 5, on mobile.

That's done by targeting the grid-ad-box with a simple css addition to your sites:

Code:

.grid-ad-box {
height: 180px;
}

I've seen an increase from 1% to 5% ctr by doing this. Of course, RPM can also improve, but that measure is always niche dependent. You can improve RPM by dropping categories, which I think you've tried.

The best way to optimize is to go from placement of units > to type of units > to color of units > to category of units.

I know people that only focus on RPM, but they started with huge levels of traffic.

It makes more sense to optimize ctr, because without ctr you don't get paid.

To all those worrying about running ads on sites with "little traffic" or doing this at all? Do you know how long it takes for a warning notice to be sent? NO? I'ts because you NEVER TRIED, SO SHUT THE FUCK UP.

If you want to see what ad placement/category is performing the best, then you need to install the publisher extension for chrome. Though, its kinda something you only would use if you run an authority site.

Don't ever use matched content, that speeds up fold notifications.

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batiatus said:

Hey. First of all this is a really great way to milk adsense, old but gold. I also tried to make a journey with spun/translated content with 3 expired domain but I got failed. I was also thinking generating thousands of websites but I haven't sorted out how to automize this process. Tried to create some macros but it is much complex than doing some basic stuffs actually. There should be a way to build numerious WP websites with some necessary plugins in a couple of minutes. I got 1and1 hosting and it allows up to 1000 subdomains. I may try this too actually.
Another problem is getting RSS sources. Did you scrape RSS feed urls for thousands of long tail keywords? I know this is not a method thread but it'd be cool if you give some ideas about automation Thanks.

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• Total accumulated earnings: $1.3k, expenses: $410, profit: $890
• Everything is passive, except for manually removing pages (see DMCA bullet below)
• Peak earnings are on weekends. As of the last 7 days I'm now averaging $26/day on weekends and $20/day on weekdays.
• Traffic on the entire site network is steadily increasing in a linear fashion. I've broken 100k pageviews per month, on my way to 150k PVs/month
• While these earnings are good, looks like I will miss some of my targets come month 4 (using forecast function in Excel is very handy once you have enough data points). At the rate it's going it will take me another 12-18 months to reach my original target of $100/day. Definitely won't happen this 2017 as this thread originally aspired to do.
• Got a DMCA takedown notice in my adsense policy center about a week ago, so I simply took down the pages in question and followed the instructions to file a counter-notice (indicated that it was an error of one of my writers), and my policy center is back to zero violations after about 5 or so days. If ever you get a DMCA notice should never ignore it otherwise your account would be at risk -- file a counter notice ASAP. Stay away from niches with aggressive DMCA companies (i.e., music, movies).
• Adsense text color experiments: I've been running experiments simultaneously on 4 ad units, turns out that the best setting is to leave it at Google's default color setting (green blue gray white). There's one ad unit though that is doing better with custom colors (about 20% more RPM). It's a header link unit and I matched it with my site's link colors.

• This is week 11 update, and me and my GF just found out that she's 11 weeks pregnant! Talk about coincidence. Happy days, but now I gotta grind harder! Where I live C-section by a reputable doctor costs around $2k, and I've spent about $100 in tests and check ups, more to come -- babies are a happy money sink. So the plan now is.....
• .....given this journey's success, I am in the process of starting a big project to the scale of 5,000 fresh sites so I can saturate my niches even further. Even with the automation tools it's a real grind, started a few days ago and I'm still at 10% progress. After this first batch, will further grow in to 20k sites total. I will no longer document these via journey thread since the general idea is the same. The best thing is I've found ways to lower costs further!!
• If you're planning to start something like this, I suggest using Google Tag Manager. This way, in the worst case adsense bans you, you can switch up your ad network and continue making money with PPC/CPA/CPM/contextuals/whatever... even insert your own stylized CSS buttons, sell them as tiered links, etc. It surely takes the fear of instability away. This is how I am setting up my new sites moving forward. Unfortunately I wasn't smart enough to apply it on this thread's journey. I know better now, maybe this will help some of you too!
• To those messaging me, sorry but I cannot collaborate or work on any joint projects due to 2 things:
  • Doing so will automatically reveal my niches and content sources
  • This is just a side stint on top of my offline business and so I'm afraid I won't be able to give you the time and effort
  • I'm also probably super noob compared to most of the tech heads on here and won't be able to contribute much

ritafairclough said:

Love these automated journeys...

Anyway my question is (if you are using wordpress) is shared hosting powerful enough for this?

I did this method about 6 years ago and my shared hosting account got continuously suspended for using too much resources.

Thanks!

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seyer said:

I am in the process of starting a big project to the scale of 5,000 fresh sites

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living2xl said:

You mean 5000 domains or how many domains vs how many subdomains or do you mean pages? Sometimes unclear
Sorry if this was obvious and I didnt see it

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