AdSense is the revenue source for the unimaginative.

People see the Google brand and think that they will get more (or more-guaranteed) revenue from Google Ads than from other sources. Knowing that people would rather make more, but don’t have the guts or the skill to test it, you have the advantage in negotiating partnerships with websites using AdSense. Here’s a trick I have used to successfully negotiate premium listings on popular niche websites.

Visit this script: http://www.untouchablemarketing.com/tools/adcrawl.php

You can change the ‘?kw=’ variable in the URL bar to whatever you’re looking for.

One quick note: I downloaded this script from ::emp:: of BlindApeSEO. He deserves credit for putting this out for the community.

What happens next is that the crawler looks through the first 50 or so Google results for that keyword and locates pages that have Google AdSense code on them. Do this a few times with a few of your keywords to get a list of 20-25 URLs.

Next, you take your URL list into AdWords and start a new site-targeted campaign. Use these URLs as the sites you want to target.

Note: when you first start the campaign Google will only let you pick a root domain, not a specific page. Go ahead and use the root domain from one of your URLs to start with. When your new campaign is up and running, use the ‘Quick Add’ link in the AdGroup view to add the specific URLs from your list (remember to delete the root URL you added, adding HowItWorks.com or WikiHow.com can blow a lot of money!).

Let the campaign run for a few days or weeks to generate some data. Once a URL has 100 clicks on it, evaluate its performance: are there conversions? If so, go to the next step. If not, evaluate whether the cost of the ad may be worth it from a PR or branding standpoint, then adjust your ad accordingly.

If you have received some leads from a placement then it’s time to forge a partnership. This can be done one of two ways, and which way you go depends on if you have an established affiliate program or not.

If you are already running an affiliate program (meaning you are the AM), then figure out how much money the website owner would have received for the conversions they sent you if they had been enrolled in your program, and send the owner an email. I suggest starting with a subject line like ‘Thanks for the Traffic!’ or ‘Thanks for the Clients!’ which will usually get people interested in reading your mail.

If you don’t have an affiliate program, figure out a dollar value you’d be willing to pay for each lead and present it to the site owner as a business proposition.

In the body of the email, respectfully convey to the site owner that you recently used Google to put an ad on their site, and via your tracking you have determined that you paid $x per lead for y number of leads (you can sandbag this number a bit, they won’t know what the actual dollar value is).

Since Google takes a cut, you know that they made less than that from AdSense, but the good news is you want to offer them $z (where z < x), and if they had been enrolled they could have earned (y * $z) instead of whatever AdSense gave them. Let them know that you will happily continue running the ad on their site, but you’d prefer to deal with them directly.

Upon reading your email, your prospective partner is going to check their AdSense earnings, realize that they didn’t make anything near what you’re offering, and immediately write back to partner up.

Once your partnership has been established, you can now make all kinds of suggestions to the site owner about how they can better advertise your program. This works especially well with niche directory sites. I once got a prominent banner, button and link on the homepage of a topically-related site, and an interior full-page with copy about my service and website, and I only paid when the traffic was worth it.