Or Why Joel Comm's Monthly Adsense Templates Package Sucks

Something I've been doing the last few months is building websites with the sole idea of earning Adsense revenue from them.

The websites need to have 3 basic criteria for this idea to work:

1. They must be able to be built quickly

2. They must have a reasonable amount of content to make visitors stay, read (and click ads).

3. Search engines must be able to pick up on the websites fairly quickly

The first criteria means using website templates that are pretty much plug-and-play. So no time wasting building header graphics. No time wasted designing each site uniquely. But something where you can easily plug in new content with the minimum of time and effort.

The second criteria is where most people fall down (including me). It takes a huge amount of time to write quality content for a website let alone 5, 10 or 100 websites! There's only one solution for this - PLR articles, Free Articles. PLR, if you don't already know, stands for "Private Label Rights". These articles allow you to attach your name as author and you can modify them in any way you want. Generally, however, you cannot repackage and resell them (if you were thinking along those lines!). Free articles come from various article directories. They're free to use so long as the author's bio/resource box remains attached.

Criteria number 3 requires that a website be updated frequently. That comes down to two possibilites - writing a page or two of new content on an almost daily basis or using embedded RSS feeds in your pages for constantly (and automatically) updating content.

Mix 'n' Match

Putting Criteria 1 and 3 together meant I needed website templates that allowed the inclusion of RSS feeds as standard.

Joel Comms's Monthly Adsense Templates (a cool $97 per month) seemed to fit the bill. You get 50 Adsense-ready website themes each month, in a number of formats (HTML, XSitePro, HyperVRE) with header graphics and 5 articles per theme to get you started.

Now I already have the Gold Edition of HyperVRE which lets you pull articles from various article directories, embed RSS feeds and affiliate links, so I figured that was the way to go with my website development.

I soon encountered some problems, at least as I saw them. Bear in mind that what I say below is a personal, subjective opinion...

While Joel Comm is unquestionably the Adsense Expert, I think his Monthly Adsense Templates are crap. And they're overpriced (I've cancelled my subscription). These are supposed to be professionally created website templates. Frankly, I can do (and have done) better myself. Secondly, they're cookie-cutter website templates. There's maybe 5 or 6 basic template designs. All they do is change the colors and maybe the Adsense ad placements. The header graphics are, again, supposed to be created by a professional graphic artist. Ha! They make a big kafuffle about you getting the Photoshop .PSD file to play with so you can modify the header but all they contain are some cheap graphics that you can move about. The templates are cheap, in every sense of the word (except for the price).

You may have heard that Google are clamping down on duplicate content on the web. Any site using duplicate content will get lower rankings in their listings. In the next couple of months, Google will be introducing new technology that will be able to analyze webpage content to see if it's duplicate or not.

What does that mean? If your webpage is less than 30% different from another page, your page is considered a duplicate. Think about that. There's no point in using/reproducing articles directly from the article directories. It's pointless, and actually counterproductive to now use that source of material.

Ok. back to Comm's Monthly Templates. These template packages are available to anyone who subscribes. There is a notice on the website that says subscriptions will be limited. His previous Instant Adsense Templates packages (which amounted to the same thing) were released in "limited editions" of 2, 500 packages. Yup, that 2, 500 people with the exact same website templates, header graphics and webpage articles. It's unlikely that Monthly Adsense Templates will be restricted to a number as low as 2, 500.

A Better Solution

With all that in mind, I looked around for another solution, and boy did I find one!

Adsense Real Estate (ARE) is the first one I found. They create pre-made websites (as does Comm's Monthly Adsense Templates) but instead of being released in a limited edition of thousands, they're released in a limited edition of only 30. You've far less competition to contend with from the outset.

Their website templates are fairly standardised but they look professional (unlike Comm's). You get 7 articles to start your website with (Comm gives you 5). What's more, the websites are keyword driven so your site pages will be picked up by the search engines. Keywords become page names and can be linked to a particluar article you have on your site, or set to randomly display any article on your website. So even though you start out with just 7 articles, you also get 50-100 keywords to get you going, each of which is a webpage in its own right, randomly displaying one of your 7 articles. That's just your starting point!

From there, you add new articles, link keywords to specific articles and add/delete keywords as you want.

These websites also come with RSS integration as standard. Plus they also come with Amazon integration - Amazon products are listed on your sites as an extra income stream - something that's completely lacking with Comm's offering.

You do only get 10 niche websites each month (Comm gives you 50). But I'd rather have 10 quality websites rather than 50 crap ones.

This Adsense Real Estate package costs $67 per month ($30 cheaper than Comm's). It's actually more than $30 cheaper. Comm sends out his templates on CD so you also have to pay postage over and above the basic $97 monthly fee. ARE's websites are all online and you can download them whenever you want. No waiting for a CD to arrive or worrying that it's gone astray in the mail.

You should remember that each website you create will need to have its own domain name and hosting package. That will get very expensive after you create more than a few websites, even using GoDaddy's cheapest $3.95 per month hosting package. Imagine eventually having 100 websites, each at $3.95 per month. That would mean you'd be spending $395 each month!

Adsense Real Estate allows you to host your websites on their webservers for free! So while the $67 per month they charge might sound a lot, it's buttons once you host a few websites with them. Again, this is something Monthly Adsense Templates doesn't offer.

ARE's package quite simply blows Joel Comm's package into the water!

Here are the Adsense Real Estate websites I've built so far. I've made some modifications to the basic templates provided, to add a couple of extra features (such as the SiteSearch) to make them a bit more unique:

Essential Blogging Guide
Las Vegas Expeditions
HDTV Home User
She's Getting Married
About Sky Diving