Adsense 101 Bootcamp – Week 1

Last year I stumbled across Steve Crook’s $100 a day Adsense challenge over on the Warrior Forum and followed it with interest. His Adsense strategy is to build authority sites and I actually think this is a better long term strategy than the Xfactor model I’ve been playing with over the last couple of weeks. I’ve been subscribing to his blog and on Monday I saw that he was re-opening the doors of his Adsense 101 Bootcamp – so I immediately broke my ‘thou shalt not spend more money on IM training’ resolution and cracked open my PayPal account

The course will run for 10 weeks and was $67, there’s then a $6 a month fee to retain access to the lessons – which I may or may not do.

The lessons are delivered daily within a WP site and I receive lessons 5 days a week, with the weekends to catch up or take a break. I like this idea as it means you don’t have information overload and can do the tasks as they are set out; however the downside is that if you can fly through the tasks you then have to wait for the next set.

So far i have been impressed with what I’ve seen. Each day I watch a short video explaining the day’s tasks and there is also a PDF to download. On day one Steve provided a range of excel documents that we use throughout the course for business plans, niche research and keyword research.

Did you catch that first one? A business plan. Yep, this is Steve encouraging us to build an actual business and therefore on the first day we had to start a plan. This included some life goals, hobbies and interests which we then used over the next few lessons when we moved to market and niche research. The point is that it is easier to create an authority site if you actually have some knowledge or at least an interest in the subject!

So far this week we’ve walked through market research to find markets that interest us. We then looked at how to break these down into 100 niches. From there we further whittled the list down to ten viable niches and then finally picked one that we will work on for the next nine weeks.

I came at this from a slightly different angle because I have a stash of domains that I bought on a whim with no sites built, so I started with those niches to make sure I came up with something that wouldn’t require further investment. I’m also going to throw my travel authority site into the mix because as I’ve said previously it was built as a blog and sort of expanded, so I’d like to use Steve’s tactics to grow the site content, build traffic and increase Adsense earnings.

So I have three niches that I am going to work on during the course; it will be a challenge to keep up but I think I can do it. My main focus though will be on my travel site just in case I do find it too much to do all three.

I’m really excited about this – one of the sites does have a couple of posts on it but I was struggling to come up with content ideas – after reading these first few research lessons though I’ve already found some great sources of inspiration!

Next week we’re moving onto keyword research so I’ll let you know how it goes.