Personally I use two distinct tools to help me sort the facts from the fiction and I strongly advise you do the same.



The first is to adopt a few of the "gurus" with proven results then stick to them like a leach. Buy their products, subscribe to their newsletters, add their blogs to your RSS feeder software and follow everything they do in great detail.

Among my own personal "hotlist" of experts I listen to and respect are Joel Comm, Neil Shearing, Phil Wiley, Michael Cheney and Michael Campbell but feel free to do your own research.

The second technique is to learn by trial and error. Not sure if something will work? Then try it out and see for yourself. Setting up new websites is quick and inexpensive so become your own marketing guru, get ahead of the wave and discover things with 100% certainty.

The aim of this article is to reveal some of my own experimental results to help settle some common Adsense myths once and for all.

1) Duplicate Content

Last year I built a site consisting purely of around 20 pages of freely available articles and added a simple RSS feed to each page to "bulk" them up a little. This site only has one link to it from a related site of mine yet still clocks up several hundred visitors a month and brings in a reasonable income to boot. Google hasn't banned it and it still continues to perform well even now.

Infact, in the last 12 months site has received 10,190 unique visitors with the only marketing being that one single link to get the search engines to crawl it.

Now that isn't a massively impressive number of visitors for in exchange for just a couple of hours work I'm not complaining.

So the fact is - don't be afraid of duplicate content at all - though try merging a simple RSS feed into the bottom of each article to make it appear unique.

2) Reciprocal Links

Reciprocal links aren't dead at all. Carrying out research into highly competetive markets as I do on a regular basis there is a clear correlation between either Alexa ranking or PageRank (PR) and the amount of reciprocal linking done.

It isn't dead yet so while it's still working (and thousands of trusted sites are still doing it) it's still a useful tactic to employ.

3) Blogs Or Websites

This old chestnut keeps on surfacing - should you build your network with blogs or static web pages?

And after my research I am 100% certain the answer is blogs.

Here's why...

By submitting a new blog to the free RSS and blog directories (which you can do automatically with a range of different low-cost software applications these days) it will commonly achieve a PR of 4 the first time Google indexes you.

As reciprocal linking still works and other webmasters generally don't like exchanging links with low PR sites as soon as you get your PR of 4 it makes convincing other webmasters to link to you much easier.

And the more that do link to you, the better your rankings in the search engines will be and the more traffic you'll receive. So it's essentially a free and easy way to "kickstart" your marketing.

Add to that the fact that blogs are super-simple to set up and update, and that your submissions to the free directories will themselves send your new sites plenty of traffic and I think the benefits of using blogs rather than static websites speak for themselves.

So there you have it. A blog with an in-context RSS feed, free content and a link exchange directory is the proven setup that virtually guarantees your Adsense success.