Adsense book review

Joel Comm:

“What Google Never Told you About Making Money with Adsense”

Funny enough, I bought Joel’s Adsense book and my Adsense revenue dropped to zero, nil, nada. Dude, you jinxed me!

Actually, I can’t blame the book in the least, it’s just a weird coincidence that my earnings choked. I imagine it will be back to normal shortly. I hadn’t even touched the code on my pages because I was reading the book.

Anyway, here’s a quick review:

It didn’t teach me a lot new but I’d have been surprised if it did. I bought it on the basis that it /might/ help. So, how has it fared?

By my own estimates, if I hadn’t learned most of the tricks myself recently then yes, I would reasonably expect something like a five-fold improvement on Adsense revenue. As it is

In real terms, it you are earning a genuine $5 a month running Adsense on your Blog or website and you followed the instructions in the book you /could/ be earning $50 a month after applying the advice. Certainly I’d be surprised it you didn’t at least triple it. All depends on your website(s).

Anyway, besides one good tip and a few interesting links it really taught me nothing new. However, it reminded me loads – mostly that I need to get my act together, mind you. (Bear in mind I’ve been around computers since before some of you were born!)

From my perspective it was probably a waste of money, though I believe even the little extra I learnt might cover the cost of the book in time. From /your/ point of view, if you are getting a reasonable amount of traffic and haven’t optimised your Adsense for your site(s) then yes, it’s worth considering and for a reasonably busy Blog or site you should recover the cost very quickly.

Besides the irritation of a few broken links* it is actually well written and an easy afternoons read. Could have had more content, but I liked what I read. At $97 plus vat I won’t give it a big thumbs up for value, but if you applied the knowledge then you’ll likely get your money back. How fast depends entirely on your site and traffic mind. This will probably affect my affiliate commission for his book (below) but unless there’s a free upgrade from v2 to v3 I’d say wait for the new version to come out in a few weeks (Around January 2006)

Read more about the book, or order it here.