About Jay

I'm a 30-something guy who's obsessed with breaking away from his day job. I'm tired of working, plain and simple. So I started this online experiment to find a way to earn money online so I could spend more time with my kids and enjoy my life. It can be done, I know it.

Text Only vs. Text and Image Ads?

Ever since I started working on my AdSense niche sites, I’ve always used one 336 x 280 text-only AdSense ad block right under the post title. The primary reason why I’ve been using text-only AdSense ads is because that’s how it was shown in the Micro Niche AdSense Course, one of the primary guides that I am using to develop my niche sites. And Although my click-through rate (CTR) has not been stellar, I’ve been happy with it.

But I’ve been hearing people talking that enabling AdSense ad unit to display both text and image ads can significant increase your AdSense ad revenue. Some have even received emails from Google encouraging them to enable text and image ads to the same effect.

Here’s why your AdSense revenue will increase if you enable both text and image ads, according to Google’s email:

Opting into text and image/rich media ads increases the pool of advertisers competing to appear on your site. More competition means a higher eCPM for you. Units that are opted into all ad types typically see an eCPM that’s 80% higher than text or image only units.

I got tired of all the talk, so I’m giving it a try.

As of today, I have enabled text and image ads on all AdSense ads units on my niche sites. I’ll be monitoring the CTR and revenue over the next few weeks, and I’ll post there results here.

Check back again soon.

First AdSense Sniper Site Started

I spent a few days reading the AdSense Masters Course and playing around with Micro Niche Finder (at the same time looking for niche keywords that I can use to build my niche websites on).

Here’s the hard truth — it’s not easy to find a niche keyword that is has a high enough search volume but with low competition. Maybe it’s because I’m just starting. I hope I get better at this.

I couldn’t find a “green” keyword (one that Micro Niche Finder recommends that you go for because of low competition) so I decided to try my hand at a “yellow” keyword (one that has moderate competition — not as easy as a green one to rank for).

My Chosen Niche Keyword

This is my first AdSense sniper site. So I decided to take it slow.

I picked a keyword in the gaming niche. And since I couldn’t find a green main keyword, I picked a yellow one (moderate competition) with a monthly search volume of 500 and an ad cost of $0.46.

I know, I know. The course teaches us to pick a main keyword with at least 1000 global searches and an ad cost of at least $0.50. But again, this is my first site and I just want to get a feel of the entire process before really diving into it.

My Niche Website Plan

The course recommends using HTML files to create the website. It’s been a long time since I worked with HTML files and I, frankly, feel that WordPress will do just as well. Especially because search engines love WordPress. I’ve built sites before and it’s amazing how much faster the search engines will index your site when it’s running on WordPress.

So I’m using WordPress to build my first niche website. I’m tweaking the WP theme that I am using a bit, so it will have two columns (just as the course recommends) and use similar colors (green and black). I’ll try to make it look as close as the AdSense Master Course template.

For this site, I’m planning to write five to six articles — one article for the main keyword, and then four or five others based on related long-tail keywords with low-to-moderate competition.

Wish me luck!

The Ultimate PLR Article Collection Review

When I purchased Micro Niche Finder a few days ago, I was asked for my mailing address. The purpose of the request for my mailing address was so that James J. Jones, creator of Micro Niche Finder, could send me a USB drive that contains the MNF application.

Today, I received the USB drive and with it came an offer letter for “the BEST private label rights software on the planet”. Yes, that’s exactly how it was worded. Called “The Ultimate PLR Article Collection”, it’s a software that you can install on your computer with a database of private label rights (PLR) articles that you can use as content for your niche websites.

I was offered a $20 discount for The Ultimate PLR Article Collection, which usually sells for $67. There are supposedly over 32,000 PLR articles in this collection.

And because I think Micro Niche Finder is really an awesome tool, I guess I expected the Ultimate PLR Collection to be at par with MNF in terms of quality and usefulness. I was wrong.

With my high expectations, I purchased the PLR collection and downloaded the 110MB application. I was excited when I installed it, expecting that it would really help me build my niche websites quickly since I no longer have to worry about content. Wrong assumption.

After I installed the application, I tried doing a search for articles in the niches that I was targeting. I came up with a lot of results and it looked promising at first.

But when I copied parts of the articles and pasted them into Google search, the reality that The Ultimate PLR Article Collection is just like any other PLR collection struck me. There were thousands and thousands of other pages that contained the exact same articles that I retrieved from The Ultimate PLR Article Collection.

It was worthless. Over 32,000 articles that have been duplicated several thousand times over.

Some people will probably say, “Hey, it’s PLR. What did you expect?” Well, I expected more because I thought that the same great company that came up with Micro Niche Finder would not produce a crappy product.

Others would again say, “PLR articles are meant to be rewritten.” If I wanted to rewrite something, I’d just run a search on Google, find a good article, and then rewrite it. And if PLR articles are meant to be rewritten, how come there’s thousands of duplicate copies on the Internet of the articles that I found from the “ultimate” PLR collection?

So if you’re thinking about buying The Ultimate PLR Article Collection, I would recommend that you don’t. Save your money.

If it’s PLR articles (of the same quality as this article collection) you’re after, check the Content forum on DigitalPoint. You can find PLR collections there with the same number of (duplicate) articles for dirt cheap prices (I remember buying a collection of 50,000 PLR articles  for $5).

You might ask, “If it’s crap, why are there so many websites out there that are telling me to buy it?” It’s because these websites that are recommending “The Ultimate PLR Article Collection” will get commissions from your purchase. Welcome to the world of Internet marketing.

If it’s really quality content that you’re after, your best bet is to either write the articles yourself or outsourcing it to someone. Duplicate articles, such as the PLR articles in The Ultimate PLR Article Collection, will only negatively affect your niche website’s search ranking.

Fixed: Unable to Add New Website to Piwik

I’ve heard people saying that if you are creating an AdSense sniper site (or even affiliate sniper site), you’re better off not using Google Analytics. The reason behind this is that if you use Google Analytics to monitor your niche sites, it will be very easy for Google to track all your niche websites and penalize (for example, remove them from the Google index) them for whatever reason.

Maybe these people are just paranoid. But if they’re right, I wouldn’t want Google to wipe out all my websites from the face of the earth. I plan to devote a significant amount of time and sweat to these niche sites, so I must do everything I can to protect my investment.

So I went off and looked for a Google Analytics alternative. And then I found Piwik, an open source (free) website monitoring script. The installation process was pretty easy — I finished installing Piwik in about 5 minutes, just like they said on the Piwik website.

The domain on which I installed Piwik was automatically added to the list of websites for monitoring. Now, I just needed to add my other sites.

So I tried to add a new website, and then I clicked the Save button at the bottom of the page. It showed Loading data.... But when the page refreshed, the new site that I added did not appear in the list of sites for monitoring. I tried again. Same results.

I thought that there was something wrong with my Piwik installation. Until I accidentally scrolled to the right of the page.

There it was — a separate Save button that was not visible without scrolling to the right. I’ve included a screen shot below to show you where it is.

Unable to Add New Website to Piwik

It looks like a bad user interface design job. But then again, it’s an open source software.

So if you, too, are unable to add a new website to Piwik, this is probably the solution. I hope this helps you, too.