Case Study - A Simple Adsense Blog
(Created, Ranked, and sold for $11,000)
Hello! My name is Steve Schafer, and I am a retired
plumber, turned Adsense blogger. I would like to share with
you the steps I took to start a simple blog, rank it #1 in
Google, and sell it for $11k.
People have been building blogs to collect passive Adsense
earnings for years. It used to be a great way to put in a little
effort for long term, passive income.
The problem came about when so many people started
building small, "made for Adsense" sites, that Google got
smart. They stopped ranking those "micro niche" blogs, and
started giving more weight to sites that they felt were actually
giving their searchers what they were looking for. The
"Panda Update" is just the most recent attempt by Google to
do just that - get garbage off their index, and "good sites" at
the front of the search results.
Does this mean that Adsense blogging is dead? The good
news is that it is not - not by a long shot. The bad news is
that it is going to take a little more work to get your Adsense
site ranking where you need to, to actually make money.
In this report, I am going to show you how I built a site that
actually benefited from the Panda update. I was able to get
this site ranked #1 in Google for some very competitive
keywords. This site was making a steady $600+ per month,
just on Adsense earnings, until I recently sold the site for
$11,000 on flippa.
First, let's talk about the site itself...
Solarlightssite.com
At the time of this writing, if you do a google search for solar
lights, solar lighting, or any number of other long tail
keywords, you will find one site sitting at number 1. That site
is solarlightssite.com.
It beats out Amazon, overstock, target, solarlighting.com,
and some other high authority sites. Here is what it looks
like on semrush:
It's a little hard to read in the picture above, so feel free to
look it up for yourself.
This next screenshot is the important one, though. This is
that same site being sold on flippa, with "Buy it Now" after
only 7 days, for $11,000. I could have most definitely gotten
more for the site. This was the first site I had ever sold, so
lesson learned there. :)
Like I said, I am an Adsense blogger. I am not a site flipping
guru, or an "SEO expert", or anything like that. I just took
some tools that were proven to work, added a bit of common
sense, did the work necessary, and got a great result.
This is not revolutionary, and many of these steps you may
already be doing. Still, I hope there is something in here that
will help guide you to similar success.
Let's get to it then...
The Concept
When I first started blogging, I got the information on how to
do it from two places:
1 - A guy named "Griz", who made a name for himself
ranking and making money with free blogger.com blogs.
2 - The Keyword Academy, that taught members how to
build and rank wordpress blogs. 90% of what I learned, I got
there, and I still use the tools today.
The main concept is that you want to build a site that Google
will see as an "authority" site in your niche, so that they will
want you on the front page for as many keywords/phrases
as possible. Pretty obvious, right? To do that, you really only
need four things:
1. Have good keyword research
2. Have decent on-site SEO (notice I said "decent", not
excellent)
3. Give the searchers what they want (mostly)
4. Be popular (strong link profile)
I will touch on all of these, as we get further into the method
itself.
1 - Keyword Research
You likely already know that building a site should always
start with keyword research. The problem is that a lot of
people have a lot of ideas about how keyword research
should be done. I will share with you the method that I know
works well for Adsense blogging (this also works really well
for sites aimed at selling Amazon affiliate products).
The first thing that I need to mention here, is that I could care
less about "competition" in the most common sense of the
term. I do not care about how many sites are competing for
my keywords. I really only care about a few things here:
1. How many exact searches does the keyword get?
2. What is the average CPC?
3. What is the strength of the top competing sites?
4. How can I monetize the site?
For my solar lights site, I just looked around Amazon.com for
ideas, and solar lighting products were pretty popular. It also
seemed like something that would be easy to blog about, so
I went to the Google Adwords keyword tool, and started
doing the research.
Determine Potential
First, you want to eliminate everything except the keywords,
global monthly searches, and the CPC. You also want to
make sure that you are using [exact] in the search field.
While the searches are never really accurate, you will get a
closer idea by using the exact match, rather than broad or
phrase.
You need to be logged in to do this. Here is what the page
should look like:
Use the following formula to determine your potential
Adsense earnings:
global searches x CPC x .25 x .05 = $ potential
That formula says that if you are ranked #1 for that term, you
get about 50% of searchers visiting your site, at least a 5%
ad click-through rate, for about 50% commissions on the
CPC (google actually pays 68% for Adsense for content and
much less for Adsense for search).
Basically that says that if you can get your site ranked #1 for
that keyword, you should make xxx amount of money per
month from Adsense earnings. I have found this formula to
be pretty accurate.
The best way to do this is to download the results into an
excel file, and enter in a formula for the equation. This will
give you a list of keywords, and their potential, that you can
use for the next step.
Once you have your spreadsheet, you will want to gauge
your competition.
Competition Research
This step is the easiest, yet the most time consuming.
Having a browser plugin like SEO for Firefox will really help.
The first thing I am going to do is logout of Google, and
make sure that in the google search settings I have all of the
search enhancement features turned off. I do not want my
results tainted by any of their little "smart" search helpers,
like using my location or search history, or anything like that.
Once that is done, I am going to start doing searches for the
keywords on my list that have good potential. I am going to
look at the top 4 sites that come up on the search. If any of
those pages match the following criteria, I mark them as
"red".
" PR5 or higher
" PR4 with the exact keyword in the title
If any of the top 4 sites have either of those, that keyword is
dead in my opinion. If all of them are PR3 and lower, or if
the PR4 results do not have the exact keyword in the title, I
consider that KW viable.
Obviously, if you can find a KW that has all PR1 and PR2
results, it will be even easier to rank for. Choose the 2 or 3
keywords with the top potential, and use those as the main
KWs for the site. You will also need to find a good number
of lower potential KWs as well (10-20).
Now that we have our keywords, it is time to built our site,
get some links, etc.
2 - Setting Up the Site (on-site SEO)
I am going to assume that you already know how to set up a
wordpress blog, so I am not going to go into every detail
here. There are some things that I think are important
though, and I will focus on those.
The Ping List
A lot of people put a lot of importance in the ping list. I am
not really one of them. I started using a fairly short ping list,
and I have never really found a reason to change that. Any
time I post an article to one of my sites, that article is
indexed almost instantly.
This is the ping list I use:
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2/
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://www.bloglines.com/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://rpc.copygator.com/ping/
That's it. I have never really seen a point to adding more
than that, but you can have more if you want.
Plugins
Everyone has differing opinions about what plugins should
be used on a wordpress blog. While there are quite a few
that I use for different purposes, there are a few that need to
be mentioned here for the purpose of SEO:
All in One SEO Pack
Google XML Sitemaps
SEO Smart Links
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
You can really use any "related post" plugin for your site.
that is just the one I like.
All in one SEO, you are probably familiar with. If you prefer
another SEO plugin, you can obviously use that one instead.
Google XML sitemaps is a great plugin for creating your
sitemap. Sitemaps are 100% necessary for good SEO.
The one that is most important here is SEO Smart Links (or
equivalent). What this plugin does is create an internal link
web. Internal link webs are hugely important, and not
enough people use them. In a nut shell, a link web is the
process of linking your pages together with the correct
anchor text.
If you want a great example of link webbing, check out any
page on wikipedia. They are masters at it. I will go into
further detail about link webs in a bit.
Site Structure
The theme I use most often for my sites is called atahualpa.
It is a free theme, that is very SEO friendly, and highly
customizable. It is actually TOO customizable for some
people.
Regardless of the theme you use, one thing that is very
important is the "h" tags. On the home page, you want your
main keyword to show up wrapped in "h1", and your post
titles to be wrapped in "h2". On the single post pages, you
want your post titles to be wrapped in "h1".
Now, I like to use a graphic logo for the header, so that strips
away the title. The way I make up for this is pretty simple...
The first post on my new site is 300 words or less, contains
my main 2 or 3 keywords, has the main site keyword as an
"h1", and is used as an intro for people that land on the
home page. I make it a sticky post, so it stays on the home
page, and all of the following posts, will go below that.
One important note is that for this to work, you will need to
save the post without a title. Then, the first line of your post
would be the main site keyword (or the site name that
contains the main keyword). Make that first line an h1. Only
do that with the first post (the sticky post). On the single
post pages, the title of the post should be h1 anyway if you
configured your theme properly.
For the posts below that, I usually choose to show 10 on the
home page, and I only show the excepts. The result is that I
have my main site KW in "h1", with a KW rich intro, and
below that, I have 10 keyword targeted posts tiles in h2
under it linking to my inner pages (less than 10 is okay for
smaller sites).
Another little trick I use is, rather than having a recent posts
widget that shows the posts that are already on the home
page below your main post, I will list posts that are not on
the home page. You can call it "further reading" or whatever
you want. I used the "YD Recent Posts" plugin.
Let's take a look at another of my sites to give you an idea of
what I mean:
You can see h1 tags here in the source:
The following screen shot show's the post excerpts that are
beneath the sticky post on the home page, as well as the
recent posts widget.
Here you can see the single post page.
The post title is h1. You will also notice that there are a few
internal links. This is the "link web" that I will explain further
in "Onsite Linking" below.
3 - The Content Itself
If you recall, in the keyword research section, I mentioned
getting a bunch of lower potential keywords as well. We are
going to use these for our posts. For my site, I had quite a
few of them, and I used each one for a separate post. If one
of my "cousin" keywords was "solar patio lights", I would
write a post on solar patio lights.
Another KW was solar driveway lights, so I wrote a post
about that. Most of those posts would also include one or
more of the main site KWs as well, but they usually just
popped in there naturally, as a part of writing the article.
I am not too concerned about making sure that the keyword
shows up x number of times, or that I include this keyword or
that. I just want to make sure that the keyword I am targeting
in the article is within the first sentence, so that it will show
up in the page description on its own.
The main focus is always to write the best piece of content
you can for that topic. So, if my keyword is "solar patio
lights", I want to write the best article I can on the topic of
solar patio lights. The rule here is that you do KW research
for the search engines, but write the content for the reader.
The easiest way to do that is to ask yourself, "If I did a
search for (KW), what would I be hoping to find?" Then just
write your content accordingly. That will usually give you
some pretty long posts, but that is a good thing.
I usually aim for a minimum of 650 words per post. That
seems like a lot of work, but to be honest, I would rather
have fewer posts that are longer than a bunch of posts that
are shorter. Google seems to agree. Longer posts naturally
contain more keywords in them that you may have not even
found in your research, and they give the posts more
"authority".
Some Great Ideas for Post Topics
Reviews - Review posts are awesome. Be careful with
these though because they can get you into trouble if you do
them wrong. An example of doing it correctly would be to
(using the solar patio lights example) go to amazon.com and
do a search for solar patio lights.
Sort the results by customer ratings. Now choose the ones
that have the best ratings and do a post about them. Just
list the products, give a synopsis of what the customers had
to say about them (in your own words), and you are good to
go. that kind of post gives value to your readers, because it
helps them to get an idea of what is popular, and what
people are saying about them, without having to look up
each product individually.
How To - Another very strong topic is the good, old
fashioned "How To..." posts. There is a lot of flexibility here,
as long as your content is delivering on the article title's
promise. Also, now that they know how to use a product in a
unique way, make sure you have affiliate links for the
products themselves, or to a guide with even more how to
ideas, etc.
Creative Uses For - Same concept as above, but with a
slightly different spin.
Those are just three examples of good ideas for topics. Just
remember; bring value to your readers, and you will find it
easier to rank than you may think.
4 - Link Profile
There are basically two types of linking that need to be done:
Onsite linking - Linking your pages together within the site
Offsite Linking - Getting links from other sites pointing to
your site/posts
Onsite Linking
Okay, so you have your main post up, set up as a sticky.
You want to take the FIRST INSTANCE of your keyword and
use it to create an anchor text link to your home page.
On your second post (the one that focuses on your first
cousin keyword) you want to take the first instance of your
cousin keyword and use it as anchor text to the article for
that keyword.
Next, you are going to go to your SEO Smart links, and start
setting up your link web. In the settings, you should set up
some custom link profiles. Basically what you will be telling
it to do is whenever it sees a certain keyword on any of your
posts, it should link that keyword to the post that you wrote
to target that keyword.
For instance, after setting up your intro post and your solar
patio lights post, from now on, every article that mentions
"solar lights" will automatically link to the home page. Every
post that mentions "solar patio lights" will link that phrase to
your solar patio lights post.
As your site grows, so will your link web. The result will be
almost every post you write linking back to the home page
and/or linking to other post pages. Trust me, Google LOVES
that.
External Linking (Offsite SEO)
There are really only two steps I use to gain "popularity".
1. Get plenty of "good quality" links from a variety of
sources
2. Get links to my links
The first one is the easiest. I started off searching on the
web for places I can link to, and sent the site owners emails
asking for link exchanges. I tried to keep them 1-way links
as much as possible. Basically, they link from their site to
mine, and I link back to theirs from another one of my sites.
there are many variations of this, as I am sure you are well
aware.
I also use article directories, but not as much as you would
think. Linking is a popularity contest. 142 links from
ezinearticles just tells Google that you are popular with
ezinearticles. I would rather have 50 links from 50 different
sources. Diversify your link portfolio.
One way that I do this is with a tool called Postrunner. It is
another Keyword Academy tool, so you cannot join it unless
you are a member. There are similar tools out there, if you
do not want to join TKA, but they do have a 30 day free trial,
so it is worth looking into.
In essence, what Postrunner is, is a whole bunch of blogs
(over 800 last I checked) that allow you to guest post. You
login to postrunner, paste in your article with up to 2
anchored backlinks, and choose the blog you want to post it
to. The blog owner will check out the article and either post
it or decline it.
When I post an article on my site, I will usually have 300+
word rewrites done (less than $3 a piece at Content
Authority), and post them to different sites in postrunner. A
few things to keep in mind when doing this:
" You get two links, so use one to point to the article on
your site using the article KW as the anchor, and the
other link to point to your site's home page.
" Vary your anchor text for the home page links, and
even for the page links from time to time.
" Every once in a while, do not include a link to the home
page. Instead, only use 1 link, or link to a different
page on your site, so you will have 2 deep links.
Backlink "Boosting"
I use that term because it has recently become a popular
term used to describe the process of giving strength to your
backlinks (getting links to your links).
The problem with link building is that, no matter how good
the links are, if they do not get indexed, they are useless.
Unfortunately, many of them do not get indexed.
I found a way to take care of that little problem a little over a
year ago. I installed a script on my server that allowed me to
create a custom RSS feed that I could add all my backlinks
to. I then pop that feed out to the major RSS aggregators
via RSSBot.
I found that by doing that, the vast majority of my backlinks
were not only getting indexed, but cached as well, and some
of them even picked up page rank.
The biggest problem with that little app was that it only gave
me 1 feed to work with. That means that while
solarlightssite.com got great benefits from it, my other sites
were left out in the dark.
Shameless Plug
I really wanted to be able to use this concept for all of my
sites, so I looked around for an alternative. I found a couple
of sites that would let me do something similar, but they
limited how many submissions I could do a month, or how
many feeds I could create. They also had a monthly fee (a
fairly steep one IMO).
The only alternative I came up with was to build my own...
well, have a coder build it for me. The result is RSSonator. I
install it on one of my domains. Then I can set up as many
different feeds as I want - each one targeting a different
niche. I can add any web page (be it a video, or an article,
or a forum profile, etc.) to any of my feeds completely on the
fly.
There is also a mass URL import feature with a dripfeeder,
so I can add hundreds, or even thousands of links to a feed,
and they will be added as many as I want, as often as I want.
I also incorporated auto posting to facebook, twitter and
onlywire just to get a little more exposure.
I released it as a WSO, and the feedback so far has been
great. I am currently getting ready to launch it on clickbank
for roughly twice the price.
If you want to grab a copy on the WSO and save yourself
about $20 or so, you can find it here:
Get RSSonator Here

Selling the Site
This is the fun part (mostly). When you are working on
getting a site ranked, the best feeling in the world is finding it
ranking #1 for your main keywords. The worst feeling in the
world is to see it slip down in the rankings once you have
been there.
Unfortunately, the sad truth is that most sites have a shelf
life. Unless you plan on spending a lot of time keeping your
site fresh, eventually someone will come along and beat you
at your own game. Then the fight begins.
When my site was really young, it was doing a good job
ranking pretty well in the serps, and along came a Google
update. I got crushed. All of a sudden Amazon was there at
the top of the serps with a PR6 page, solarlightstore.com
grew to a PR4, solarlighting.com grew to a PR5... I was
nowhere to be found.
Needless to say, I was PISSED! That was back in October
of 2010. I was so discouraged that I just completely stopped
working on the site. I allowed a couple of people to guest
post in the site, but that's it. I just let it sit there.
Towards the end of April 2011, I decided that I am not going
to just give up on the site, so I added a post or two, started
posting to postrunner for some links, and using my RSS tool.
By the beginning of June, I saw the site starting to grow
again. By July, I was ranked #1 for solar lighting, followed
shortly by #1 ranking for solar lights.
I decided at that point that it was time to sell. I made up my
mind that I would not take less than $10k for the site, and
that $10k now was worth more to me than the $600 a month.
The biggest deciding factor was a simple question:
"How long will this site stay ranked #1?"
From that point, you just have to do the math. Now, I did get
a little lucky. You can usually expect to sell site for 12-14
months worth of revenue. I got a bit more than that. Part of
the reason was because the site was in an ever growing
industry, and the site had potential for much more
monetization.
The guy that bought it also owns a lot of solar lighting sites.
In fact, the main keyword for the site that makes him the bulk
of his income was the next site on my "hit list". It turns out
he was watching my site for a while, and was surprised and
relieved to see it up for sale. I asked for a $12 BIN, we
settled on $11k.
As I said, this is the first site I ever tried to sell, so I was
bound to make some mistakes. In retrospect, I may have
been able to get even more money for the site had I
contacted my competition, letting them know I was putting
the site up for sale.
Along those lines, here are some excellent points made by
one of the members of my mailing list, after reading the
rough draft of this report:
"Use an Aweber signup form on the site and a popup form to
collect names in exchange for a bonus report or tips and
strategies. The list can expose the list members to various
ARTICLES the person wouldn t have ordinarily seen the first
time after clicking through. Plus, Aweber allows you to
transfer a list over to someone who has an Aweber account
 so the ASSET is transferrable upon sale. ;-)
Also  another thought that AROSE while I was reading your
report was the guy who was watching you.
Shoot  that s another avenue for people to do RIGHT
BEFORE putting it up for sale.
The site owner can hit up OTHER folks on the SAME Google
page the site ranks for. Site owners says in the email that  I
am just about to put up this site for sale, but I thought I would
give you a chance to get it at a SLIGHTLY DISCOUNTED
price before I put it up for sale at _______________. Let me
know if you re interested in having another property that s
ranked on the same Google page as you where you can
control the links and the content. I am putting up within the
next 72 hours, so I should hear from you before that time
because once it s listed, all bets are off. You can email me at
________________@______.com
It just occurred to me as you can leverage that angle easily."
Summary
To sum it up, there are really only a few things you need to
do to make this work. Unfortunately, there are not many
shortcuts, either. If you skimp in one area, making up for it
in another will not really do the trick. You need:
" Solid Keyword Research
" SEO-Friendly Site Setup
" Solid Internal Linking
" Posts That Offer Real Value
" Monetization That Fits Your Niche
" Strong Link Portfolio Involving
o A variety of links from a variety of sources
o Getting those links indexed or even ranked
I did not submit the site to a bunch of paid directories, or
anything like that. Nothing really fancy. I used mostly
Postrunner, link exchanges, and a few from BMR. I used a
few "Angela's packets" as well early on. That's basically it.
I hope that something in here was able to help you in your
quest to build, rank, and profit from your projects.
All the best!
Steve Schafer
Resources
The Keyword Academy - Full step-by-step tutorials and tools
to get you building a site and ranking it.
RSSonator WSO - Create custom RSS feeds, and add any
web page to your feeds on the fly.
RSSBot - Submit your RSS feeds to the 30+ feed
aggregators
Google KW Tool - What I use for my KW research
BMR - Great place to get some links
Postrunner - No link here, use the Keyword Academy link.
you will find postrunner in the members area.
LinkFinder Pro - Great backlinking resource from Paul
Clifford
SEOBook - For SEO for firefox and their other free tools
Atahualpa Wordpress Theme - The theme i use for most of
my projects, because it has great SEO elements to it, and is
customizable enough that every site I use it on looks a little
different. Oh yea... and it's free.
The Content Authority - These guys do all of my outsourced
article writing.