Buffering Your AdSense Income With an Email List

Do you remember the early personal CD players that would skip if you stepped too hard, or went downstairs, or hit a bump in the road, or just because they seemed to feel that what you wanted at that precise moment was to hear a skipping CD?

The later models didn't skip nearly as much (if at all), because of buffering. Those models would read a few seconds of music ahead of time and save it, and then play the music from memory instead of directly off the CD.

That way, if the CD skipped, it still had 15 or 20 seconds of music to play from memory before needing to read off of the CD again. This gave the CD time to get back into alignment. When it realigned, the CD player filled the buffer back up, and voila, there was no break in the music because of the skip.

No, this is not a history lesson in personal electronics. This is about buffering. If your income is based heavily on AdSense revenue, you need to be creating income buffers. Why?

AdSense has dramatically changed over the past couple of years, and the search engines that feed AdSense income have changed dramatically as well. Many people who were earning high 5 figure monthly incomes from AdSense have dropped back down to the low 4's. If they didn't have any buffers in place they were probably in trouble.

Smart Pricing can make sudden and drastic changes to your Earnings Per Click (EPC) as well, slashing your income in half, or worse. If you're one of the people who just use AdSense as extra money or to pay for your web site's costs, it's not a problem. Buf if you rely on your AdSense income, you need buffers.

The best buffer, in my opinion, is a list of names and email addresses of people who are interested in your web site's content. Even if your site stopped receiving any traffic from search engines, you could email your list and earn enough to keep your business going strong while you worked on other forms of new traffic.

It's common for sites that offer products to build a list, but content site owners often seem to think that it's not necessary for them. That somehow, because they are a content site, people don't need to be reminded of the great new article that was just posted or the latest discussion forum topics that might interest their past visitors. It's like they're thinking, "those visitors will come back because we have great content."

Wrong!

Some people will come back, yes, but most of us are very busy people and unless reminded we will quickly forget about your web site. Why do you think eBay and Amazon still advertise all over the place? Is there anyone on the planet who doesn't already know who they are and what they do? Not many.

But even eBay and Amazon need to remind people that they're out there. If I'm thinking that I need to buy a used riding mower for my lawn and I happen to catch an eBay commercial on my way home on the train, I might just go to eBay and see what they've got.

Or if I'm listening to an interview on the news about an author and his latest best seller, and Amazon has a commercial spot in between the news casts, I might go to Amazon to buy the book.

You have got to remind people that you are there. Have an opt-in box on every page of every web site you own. Let people give you their name and email address, and when you post a new article, let them know about it.

Or maybe once a week send out a list of the most active threads on your discussion forum. I did that with great success with one of the forums I ran. Traffic spiked every time I sent out that email. And more traffic means more AdSense clicks, which means more money for you.

Plus, the more people are reminded of your site, and the more they go back, the more it's on their mind. If it's on their mind they'll tell other people about it, which results in more traffic to your site.

Also, with a big list of people interested in your web site's topic, if you find a great product that matches the topic you can send a product offer out to your list. They'll be glad to know about the product, some will buy, and you'll earn more than just AdSense income from them. Limit the product offers or just work them into your other emails to keep your unsubscribe rates low and not annoy your list.

Your goal is to convert your visitors into users and customers, and to reach a "critical mass" of users and customers that would keep your business flowing even if your site dropped out of the search engines completely.

Like those new CD players, when your AdSense business "skips", you need a buffer. And the best business buffer is a strong list of your users and customers.