March 25th, 2009 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

In my ongoing mission to find any MMO (make money online) product that actually delivers even half of what it promises I threw a few notes at this. We all want to make more money with Adsense right? Well I was getting that much spam about Adsense Treasure that I had very little doubt that it was in fact going to be average at best but the price was cheap enough. A little while later and I think I’ve got enough information to give an opinion.

What Is Adsense Treasure?

So the story is like this. Some dude claims to be making $40,000 a month from this huge content website. The website contains hundreds (about 1500 in total I think) of articles woven into an Adsense friendly template and kept fresh by a couple of auto updating comic of the day, news feed style gimmicks. The topics covered are finance, travel, car, computers, shopping and video. The articles are designed to attract search traffic. The site also contains it’s own Google custom search engine – I’m guessing that’s how you are supposed to make most of your money.

Because he’s making so much money from this website he decides to package it up and sell it to you, the lucky lucky public! Sweet deal I hear you say?! So what you get is an entire website ready for the uploading, all you need to do is change a few basics parameters using a text search and replace tool included (for Windows users). You then upload it and wait for the cash to roll in, now how easy is that?

Problems With Adsense Treasure

Where to start! OK I’ll go with the uploading problem – it takes freakin ages. Thousands of files all around 40,000 bytes. Depending on your ISP upload speed this can take several hours, it certainly did for me. But that’s a minor problem and just a consequence of having a badly designed website with a slow(ish) internet connection.

My first real problem with Adsense Treasure is with the way the website is built. Rather than using scripting each individual page is a static set of HTML. I have no idea who thought this was be a good idea. There’s no header or footer includes so when you want to change anything you’ve got to change hundreds of pages individually and upload them again.

But why would you want to change the pages, this is a fire and forget system? Not quite. Ever heard of a duplicate content penalty? This is a very real part of Google and in my opinion you’ve got a snowflakes chance in hell of ranking this content unless you can add something unique in there. It would be so much easier to do this if the design used includes!

The next problem is one that is so stupid I can’t believe it wasn’t included, unless omission was deliberate. Tracking. You have no way of finding out how much traffic the Adsense Treasure system is attracting. Well unless you go through and manually add some sort of analytics code to each of the thousands of pages and then upload them all again. Yawn. This is vital, how are you supposed to know how well your website is doing (or even if it’s worth keeping) if you can’t see how much traffic it’s getting? I don’t think you’ll be seeing any massive boost in Adsense earnings early on so you need to monitor down to visitor level to know if it’s working at all.

How I Fixed Adsense Treasure

After about a week I got severely pissed off with not having any data and the same pages as many other people.

The first thing I did was amend my .htaccess config file so that files with a .html extension were run as PHP. I then used the global search and replace program that came with Adsense Treasure to replace the /html tag with a PHP include. I created a new footer file that included Google Analytics tracking as well as a few other things (in-text advertising from InfoLinks being one).

I then did the same global replacement with the /body tag, this time adding some content to each page based on what the page was already about. Eventually after an afternoons work I have a website that whilst based on Adsense Treasure now contains unique content and full tracking.

Have I Made Any Money With Adsense Treasure?

This is very hard to work out, yet another problem with the system. Luckily for me I think I use channels for all my Adsense except the Adsense Treasure one so I can have a stab in the dark. Bearing in mind that I dumped the Adsense Treasure content onto an already established domain with decent back links and some traffic the results have been far from spectacular. I would guess that I’ve made roughly $2 in 2 weeks. Not so hot when you think I put an afternoons work into changing things and have spent about 8 hours in total uploading files. The good news is that some of my custom content is now getting some search traffic so I expect there’s a slim chance I may start making some real money with this. It’s certainly an easy way of building a content site of this size.

Overall

I couldn’t recommend this to anybody who is NEW to the world of MMO. I just can’t imagine how by simply uploading this you’ll make much money? If any talk of modifying the .htaccess file and PHP includes makes you go “huh?!” then I’d stay well clear. If on the other hand you don’t mind getting inside the guts of something and messing around (but are too damn lazy to source your own 1500 articles) then Adsense Treasure could be a useful starting position for building a profitable website. It’s certainly cheap enough.

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