OK -- so now I sound like that reverse funnel guy or Jeffery Lant. After all, the great promise of something for nothing is what fuels a lot of the scam artists out there. I am not really interested in talking about "something for nothing." Rather, I want to do some math. Those that know me know that I am an engineer. I do more math before breakfast than most people do all day. So, let's do some AdSense math.

$5000 A Month Is Really Cool

Honestly, I just picked that number because it sounds cool.  Who wouldn't want an extra $5000 per month?  I mean, if I told you that you could make $5000 a month working only an hour a day, would you do it?  Well, that is what I am going to tell you.  Of course, there are no guarantees.  Your ability to make money on the internet has to do with your abilities and your personal situation.  I am not able to promise that you will make money online.  You mileage may vary.  Not valid in Nevada.  You get the idea.

I'll also tell you that the hard part is the traffic.  You can trade off click through rate for traffic, so if you think my traffic assumptions are too high, you should know that my CTR is low.  If you assume a higher CTR you can use less traffic.  You can also use less traffic if you assume higher earnings per click (EPC).

I've been thinking about this because I have been looking at FirePow (which is even cooler than I imagined).  It is so easy to make sites with that system, you can easily imagine making a ton of them.  FirePow also has some automatic traffic stuff -- so it looks really appealing for the creation of AdSense Sites.

Let's Do Some Math About Making Money Online

The vision is about passive income.  By passive income, I specifically mean websites that are set up for generating income via AdSense revenue.  As you probably know, AdSense are those little ads that show up on sites and say "Ads by Google".  If you own a site with those ads and visitors click them, you get paid.  How much you get paid depends on the following factors.

• How many sites do you have? For the purpose of this analysis, I am assuming that you have 30 sites.  I choose 30 because I will recommend that you get to the point where you can work on one site per day each day of the month for about an hour.  So, for site #13, you will work on it for about an hour on the 13th of every month posting new content, doing promotion, etc.  You may want to outsource the generation of 4 or 5 articles per month per site so you can post them on that day.  Of course, you'll probably want to work more at first to set the sites up.  I am currently working in October to get my 30 sites set up.  But once they are set up, you should be able to "invest" 1 hour a day to continuously improve the sites.  This is really cool for people that have a "day job" like me.
• How many people will search for the terms that your site is ranking for each day? I am going to assume that you have set up your sites to optimize around 5 or so keyword phrases, and that those phrases have a total search volume of about 1500 searches per day.  That's 1500 people searching for your keywords, not 1500 people visiting your site.  Maybe your site is targeting 5 keywords with 300 daily searches each.  This is pretty conservative.
• How many of the people that search will click on your link? I am assuming that you will choose keywords and do search engine optimization that will allow you to rank on the first page of Google for each of your keywords.  If you can get in the first 5-6 listings and you write a great page description for page, you should be able to capture 10-15% of that search traffic.  If you are in the #1 position, you might get as much as 40% of the traffic.  For this analysis, we will assume that you only capture 6% of the search traffic.  This will get you about 90 visitors per day.
• How much traffic can you get from Article Marketing? I am personally a fan of article marketing.  It works well with AdSense because it complements organic traffic and provides backlinks which improve search engine performance.  For this analysis, I am assuming that you can get 10 visitors a day from article marketing from 4 or 5 articles published to 15 directories each.  If you want to know more about Article Marketing, check out my blog post on that topic.
• Just 100 visitors total per day. So, I am assuming that you can create a 5 or 6 page site that can get 100 visitors per day using search engines and article marketing (social media traffic not included).  Think you can do that?  I think you can.
• How many people will click your ads? I have assumed for this analysis that 8 out of every 100 visitors that visit your site will click an ad.  For an AdSense site, that would be pathetic.  I have see conversions using my Niche AdSense Themes for WordPress between %10 and %20 (your mileage may vary).
• How much will clicks pay? For this analysis, I have assumed that clicks only pay a measly $0.55 per click.  That is terrible.  You can easily find higher paying niches on SpyFu.com.  When I look at SpyFu, I assume that I can get 20% of the average that the report.  So, for "home mortgage" where the average is around $10.00, I would expect to get about $2.00 per click.  That is just an estimate, but $0.55 is a very conservative number in this game if you are careful about keyword selection.

So, the bottom line is that if you do some search engine and article marketing so that you get 100 visitors per day, you can get 8 AdSense clicks.  Those 8 clicks could be worth $5.60 for each site that you have.  If you have 30 sites, you can make $168/day or about $5000 per month.

30 sites not the right number for you?  Here are the numbers for 1, 10, 20, 30 and 50 sites.

Once you are up and running, you can maintain the rankings an traffic with a little content and link building each month -- maybe one hour every month.

Don't like AdSense or have a site with traffic but low EPC?  Consider converting that traffic to affiliate sales using something like phpBay.  I am actually doing that with a couple of sites that have a low AdSense EPC.

What do you think?  Can you do it?  I am off to build a couple of these sites in FirePow and see what happens.

Regards,

Mark

I hear a lot of debate in the internet marketing community about whether or not to cloak links. Usually, the discussion about cloaking links is motivated by discussions of commission theft and other issues. Often, the people that are talking to you about commission theft are also trying to sell you some link cloaking solution, and increased revenue by decreased commission theft is one selling point they use to separate you from your $47 (a $997 value, of course).

In my next post, I am going to tell you how to cloak links for free. In this post, will cover the basics of how and why to cloak your links.

What is Link Cloaking?

If you are new to internet marketing, you might not even know what link cloaking is. For the purpose of this article, link cloaking is any technique you use to link to something that obscures the real destination link. For example, I can link to my favorite search engine. As you can see, the link is to "http://www.masonworld.com/recommends/search" and lands you at "http://www.google.com." The link to Google is "cloaked." You don't know where you are headed until you click on it.

Why Cloak Links -- The Wrong Reasons

There are several reason that people use to cloak links that I think are just plain wrong. Here is my personal standard for stuff like this: If you don't want to see it on the front page of the New York Times, don't do it. What I mean by that, is that if you are not comfortable with lots of people knowing about what you are doing, you should listen to that little voice and walk away.  Internet marketing is already full of slimy scam artists -- no need to add to that.

Here are a few wrong reasons to cloak links:

• To hide the fact that you are getting paid for the referral. Look folks, if you recommend a product and get paid for that recommendation, you need to tell people. Failing to tell people that you get paid if they buy something is dishonest.
• To stuff cookies. Cookie stuffing is a trick beyond the scope of this article. If someone tries to sell you cookie stuffing software, run the other way.
• To mislead people about the destination link. If you are cloaking links to trick people into clicking, you are doing the wrong thing. Stop doing that.

Good Reasons To Cloak Links -- The Right Reasons

Because so many people cloak links for the wrong reasons, link cloaking gets a bad wrap. I think link cloaking is very important and ethical (I use it on my blog) if done in the right way and for the right reasons. These are the reasons that I cloak links:

• To count clicks. This is critical to any business. If you don't know what people are clicking on your site, you cannot grow your business effectively.  Marketing is about running experiments, testing and making adjustments.  (For example, see also my post on the impact of StumbleUpon on my stats).  If you cannot count your clicks, you cannot determine what is working (and what is not working).
• To manage affiliate programs. Some times, affiliate programs die, change links or change sites. If you have 30 direct links to an affiliate program out there and the program makes a change, you suddenly need to edit 30 links. However, if you are cloaking that link, you only need to change the destination link in one place!
• To make clear that you are getting paid for something. I use the word "recommends" in all my affiliate link URLs. In my disclosure page, I explain (in case it is not already obvious) that the word "recommends" in the URL usually means I get paid if people buy.
• If link cloaking has any impact on theft, I'll get that advantage too from cloaking. I don't think it does have much impact, but people argue that it does.

In most successful businesses, transparency is a critical key to success.

So, cloak your links -- but do it for the right reasons

Later this week, I will discuss how to do the cloaking ABSOLUTELY FREE.

Best regards,
Mark