Ask Laura About Adsense and Articles

This email writer is asking how to make money online with free articles and a Google Adsense account. Although this may have been a great way to make some decent cash a few years ago – too many competitors exist now and the work getting any site established in the search engines using duplicate content is very difficult.

Earning With Adsense and Free Articles – Ask Laura (May 22, 2006)

Hi Laura,

I have a question that never has been answered clearly by others so I thought maybe you might be able to enlighten me.

My daughter and I are working together …edited location… and we’re getting ready to use the RSS. Here’s my question. We’re still basically “newbies” so I hope this question will make sense to you.

We’re getting all this content information from the free article directories and adding them to our website. Each article has a resource box with a URL at the bottom. When I do a feed and showcase a particular article and people decide to go there, when they read the article they will come to the resource box at the bottom – isn’t it human nature then to click on that URL – which will take them away from our site to someone else’s?

It just seems like the chances of them clicking on Google Adsense Ads, or an affiliate link or coming back to our home page (if we were selling a specific product) is very slim.

How do people make money when it seems to me they are basically advertising for someone else (whoever is listed in that resource box) when they use the free articles?

My daughter’s question: Can we put RSS on content pages which are being used specifically for Google Adsense?

Thanks,
Therese

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Therese:

You asked: “How do people make money when it seems to me they are basically advertising for someone else (whoever is listed in that resource box) when they use the free articles?”

To be honest, I truly don’t know. Your comments and thoughts are right on the money – and your skepticism. This truly isn’t the best or easiest way to make money online. Yes, a lot of people click the author’s website link at the bottom of the article. One way to overcome this is to place an adsense block part way into the article – if they get bored with the author’s writing, your site visitor will click an adsense ad. Depending on the market, your readers may also recognize Adsense blocks and ignore them just as they ignore big flashing banner advertisements.

I do believe the ’secret’ to making money with adsense by generating free article content sites is volume and targeting. A finely defined target market with a mega site (thousands of articles) and a lot of traffic. Still, if you’re using the same articles that thousands others are using, you won’t get much traffic because the search engines (google especially) dislike duplicated content as a rule. Original content is truly the only way to go for traffic.

I’m happy to answer other questions if you have them so feel free to email again.

You also asked if using RSS on Adsense pages is okay. It’s a little gray at the moment. Google’s TOS says no scraped content, but it all depends where you’re getting that scraped RSS content from. If you’re getting it from Google Search results, that’s a no no, but you’re not likely to be ‘caught’ unless someone alerts Google to the activity. On the other hand, if you’re grabbing articles through RSS that the author or site feed owner specifically created for webmasters to use, you’re okay. Again though, this is duplicate content that likely thousands of other websites are using.

These are tough questions to answer fully, without knowing your market, your content source, your site’s url, etc. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more specific, but write back anytime.

Laura Childs
www.makemoneywithyourideas.com

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Parts of this correspondence have been edited to protect the identity of the querant. Last names, locations, urls or email addresses are never published. Each letter has been stored in my private files to supply to web authorites if need be. You should follow similar practices whenever you publish, sell, or reference an outside source.

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