Insightful Adsense Tips Worth Looking Into

--> James Colin is a guy I met a few years back on a website called shetoldme.com. He now owns several similarly themed sites including best-reviewer.com among many other things. I recently talked about him on a semi-feverishly written Goodblogs blog post where I engaged in my little hobby of analyzing website strategy and monetization.

Disclaimer: This blog post should not be intended as a matter of fact post. The opinions here are mere conjectures that may or may not help me in my quest to sustain the income generated by my blog. I am not endorsing anybody or anything for that matter. I am merely writing this for my reference.

James and I had an interesting conversation on Google Plus about how he focuses mainly on websites that rely on user generated content and promotion. He gladly gave me some tidbits and wrote about it twice - once on his blog and the other, on his other site. 

Danny on Google+

The James Colin Approach
The approach that he mentioned on his post on best-reviewer is one that I have seen done by many bloggers and most notably Indian SEO companies and some Filipinos too. This involved the extensive usage of Google Insights for Search to try and predict what people will search for on any given day. It's not that accurate but may prove to be useful when it comes to quite obvious seasonal occurrences like holidays.

Basically, you leave the fields in their default state except for  "specific date range", "country"  and "categories" which are the 2nd, 3rd and 4th boxes. You will then choose one topic from a category every day by clicking on search. The trends that appear should then be the focus of your blogging endeavors.

For his example, he set the country to United States, Specific Date Range field to the last 12 months and the category to Sports.

Second category should be United States

This is what appeared.





This was embedded on August 31, 2011. Just in case the information on the graphs have changed, here are the topics that have been mentioned:

Top Searches 

• football 100
• nfl 70
• basketball 65
• golf 60

Rising Searches

• Super Bowl 2011 +3,450%
• Miami Heat +250%
• fb +180%
• Bulls +160%

II. Choose a keyword from the list of Top Searches and Rising Searches

• Use creativity in choosing
• If a keyword is present in both categories choose it as the first keyword
• For the second keyword, again choose another keyword that appears in both. If there is none, choose anything
• In James' example he chose NBA and FOOTBALL

III. Repeat II but change Specific Date Range

• Last 90 days
• Last 30 days

He now has 3 pairs of keywords

• NBA, FOOTBALL
• GOLF, PGA
• FOOTBALL, FANTASY FOOTBALL

IV. Enter 5 keywords from the list derived in III. 
UPDATE: JC Corrected me about this, I'm posting his correction.

"In your blog post at IV. Enter 5 keywords from the list derived in III

It seems you think I got the keywords directly. No I once again picked one keyword from each list from each keywords.

For instance the first couple of words, NBA & FOOTBALL, for NBA I had two lists from which I picked one in each, that gave me NBA DRAFT and ESPN, then for FOOTBALL once again, two lists and one keyword picked from each one and that gave me FOOTBALL SCHEDULE and COLLEGE FOOTBALL

From your post it didn't seem like you got that part right."

• The following modifications in the fields apply
• Web Search
• United States
• 2004-Present
• Sports

This is what appeared in my search:

These are the results of James' query (I pasted them to avoid confusion)

• NBA & FOOTBALL: NBA DRAFT/ESPN 
• FOOTBALL SCHEDULE/COLLEGE FOOTBALL
• GOLF & PGA: GOLF COURSE/GALAXY GOLF & PGA TOUR/PGA SUPERSTORE
• FOOTBALL & FANTASY FOOTBALL: NCAA/NCAA FOOTBALL 
• RANKINGS & YAHOO FANTASY/ESPN FANTASY

• If I understood James correctly, what he wants to achieve is to write articles purely based on topics that are breaking out or Rising on Google Insights. 
• His results are quite different than mine, so feel free to visit the original post that he made.

V. Create 3 original articles every day

• Must be original and well researched. 
• "Write 500 characters minimum (that's characters not words) piece of text about those topics."
• The title must include the keyword pairings that you've made.

His sample:

TITLE: Is football better than NBA for TV?

TEXT: I watch a lot of sport on TV and yesterday I found myself asking an old buddy of mine: "what do you prefer watching? Football or NBA?"

He then came up with an interesting theory, that college football was far more superior to any ESPN match on TV because of the length of the number of players and the action.. The fact that those NBA Draft guys are so tall and the court so small make for too heavy TV action with wide angle and zooms, it gives him headaches. Instead the football schedule is very easygoing, well he ended his theory rather confusingly and we then talked about something else..

What do you think guys? Do you prefer to watch NBA or Football on your big screen TV? 

Keywords that he used were all from the 1st and set of keywords:

• Football
• NBA
• College Football
• NBA Draft
• Football Schedule

VI. Rinse repeat

• The website should have categories.
• 1 category - 3 articles each day
• Share those 3 articles on Social Media
• Google Plus
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Stumble upon
• Digg
• Reddit
• Delicious
• Do this for 27 days

VII. On the final day

• Check out Google Analytics and see the exact phrases or search queries that people are making to get to your site
• Get the top 3 queries that you have not yet written about and make a new post about them. 

My Comment on the James Colin Method

This is actually the first time I've heard of this method applied to the barest of details. I think that this is a very good guide if you want to put up a multiple user site just as James Colin has. Otherwise, you would be hard pressed to write about many topics that you may not be familiar with. Here are my concerns:

• SEO companies with news websites may be doing this already. So you're basically competing with big companies and even full time media outlets.
• I'm not so sure if I have done the queries correctly. I would have to do it again later. 
• I need to know whether this can be done with a one man operation or with a full time crew. James may be right and may be earning all those money - but why hasn't he improved it. Anyway, he mentioned that it was a theory and I don't know whether he has actually done it - or maybe I missed that part. 
• This is the second day I've written this particular post and my right eye is closing a little bit. LOL, I don't know why. So I might do this once I get better.