June 12, 2007

Don’t Read This If You Want To Keep Wasting Time With Adsense

Don’t get me wrong, I think Adsense is great. It allows pretty much anyone to start monetizing virtually any type of website very easily. But let’s face it, unless your website has boat loads of traffic and is in a lucrative PPC market such as mesothelioma, refinancing or drug rehab, Adsense is not likely going to make you rich.

So what are our other options? Sell an ebook? Become an affiliate marketer? AuctionAds? Chitika? These are all fine and swell, and when done right can definitely make you a bunch of money. But I want to talk about Eli who took an entirely different route and rocketed from $0 to $25,000/month in 2 minutes and 21 seconds. That’s $300,000 a year in just 141 seconds. Think about it.

Now that you’ve picked yourself up off the floor, I think you’d agree that that sure beats making pennies on each click through with your Adsense ads.

How Eli accomplished this amazing feat is quite simple; he offered a subscription to his readers to access his SEO toolset subscription for $100 a month. What is amazing about this is not only that he sold 250 subscriptions in just over two minutes, but also that he created a bona fide feeding frenzy. To get a better idea of how hungry his readers were, check out his posts on the subscription including the tease, the announcement, the launch, and the recap.

So how can we take what Eli accomplished and apply it to our own sites? I think it boils down to two things.

Create value. Eli increased his site’s value by doing two important things. First, he always genuinely wanted to help; never did he seem like he was selling anything for his own benefit. Second, he divulged some of his best SEO secrets that some just couldn’t believe he was mentioning.

Limit Access. Eli initially limited the subscriptions to 100 people(which jumped to 250 in the end). This fueled the demand for the subscriptions exponentially. If he had just said, “Hey I have this subscription for $100/month and anyone can join,” how many people do you think would’ve waited for a few weeks to see how the first few people had fared? By limiting the subscription, people felt that if they wanted to get in on this excellent value, it was now or never. Brilliant.

So stop using Adsense by default and start thinking up unique ways to monetize your site. Don’t worry, you’ve got plenty of time to figure it out while you’re diligently working on getting your readers drooling. And once you do figure it out, create a feeding frenzy and offer your premium value to only a select few.