Adsense Biz Club

If you go into any Blockbuster Video store, you quickly notice the company’s use of a classic marketing technique – up-selling correlated products. This technique is highly effective at maximizing Blockbuster’s revenue and profit per customer. Moreover, this same technique can be applied to websites using Google’s AdSense program.

Up-selling is defined as selling additional, often higher priced, products and services to current customers. Ideally, the upsold products are correlated to the initial products – that is, they fill the same, or similar customer need that the first product did. Blockbuster up-sells its rental customers by offering them new and previously owned videos for sale. It also groups videos and posts signs saying “if you liked this video, you’ll like this video” spurring rentals of the new video.

To show how this technique can be applied to Google AdSense, let us look at an example of a painting website. To begin, it is critical to understand that by enrolling in the AdSense program the “product” that this website is selling is the keyword “paint” or “painting” as these keywords will show up in the AdSense results posted on their web pages. It is also critical to understand the price of these keywords, or how much the advertiser pays when someone clicks on one of their ads (a portion of which is passed on from Google to the owner of the painting website). In this case, top advertisers are paying approximately 19 cents for the keyword “paint” and 45 cents for the keyword “painting.”

By applying the technique of up-selling correlated products to the painting website, the website owner could dramatically increase the price of its products and the rate at which people buy (click on) the product. Like in the Blockbuster example, the key is to first determine expensive, correlated products to up-sell. In the painting case, one keyword that quickly comes to mind is “home remodeling” as painting is often part of a larger home remodeling project. Moreover, “home remodeling” has a price of $1.70, or nearly nine times the price of “paint.” Furthermore, finding keywords correlated to “home remodeling” yields even more expensive keywords such as “home improvement loan” which currently has a price of $6.50, or thirty-four times the price of the original term “paint.”

Now that the more expensive and correlated products have been identified, the website owner must create web pages with quality content about these products and entice, via text and links, visitors to go to these pages. The higher quality the content, the more enticing the product or service becomes, and the more likely a visitor is to click on one of the high paying AdSense ads.

In summary, by simply posting AdSense ads on their websites, most website owners are losing out on significant profits. Rather, they must identify the most expensive keywords that are correlated to their existing keywords and create web pages with quality content about these pages. While this requires some work, the returns on this investment are significant.

By knowing the most expensive keywords on the internet, you can create websites and web pages based on these keywords. On these sites and pages, you can serve expensive ads and/or promote affiliate offers that reap high bounties when clicked or completed.

The challenge lies in driving traffic to these sites. One way to drive traffic is through search engine optimization, whereby you create a website that ranks highly on the search engines and receive “free” traffic. Or, if you already have an existing well-ranked site, you can create new pages linked from your existing pages. A second way to drive traffic is through online advertising.

With regards to advertising, one key is to understand correlations between keywords. By determining correlations between inexpensive and expensive keywords, you can advertise on the inexpensive keyword (via pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on search engines) to drive traffic to your website that serves ads based on expensive keywords. For instance, advertising on the keyword “painting” ($0.20 keyword), and sending visitors to your site about the related topic “home remodeling” ($2.00 keyword) allows you to profit from the wide spread between the keyword prices of the two correlated keywords.

Likewise there are many opportunities to run banner and other ads through online advertising networks to drive traffic to your website. These ads can run on both “painting” and “home remodeling” websites. The cost of CPM (cost per impression) advertising typically does not reflect the price of the keywords. That is, a banner ad on a “painting” website typically costs the same as a banner ad on a “home remodeling” website. This sharply contrasts the price of PPC advertising on search engines which vary widely based on the keyword.

There are two other ways to profit from knowing the most expensive keywords. The first doesn’t even require you to own or operate a website. In this method, you advertise using inexpensive means (e.g., via pay-per-click advertising on inexpensive keywords or CPM advertising) and direct traffic to high paying affiliate offers. The second method is to set up your own search engine. There are several companies that allow you to easily set up a search engine that serves PPC ads syndicated from Google, Overture or other PPC search engine networks. Once you create your engine, you can drive traffic directly to your PPC results, and get paid every time someone clicks on one of the results. Likewise, on your search engine’s home page, you can include many links to expensive keywords, so that when someone clicks on it, the engine shows expensive ads based on those keywords.

Understanding keyword pricing is critical to the online advertising, PPC search engine and affiliate marketing businesses – businesses that combine for over $25 billion a year in revenues. With a market of this size, generating substantial profits, if you have the right information, is really not that challenging.