What I am about to reveal may be regarded by many as heresy. But I will expose evidence to prove that the Adsense strategies of 2005 are dying fast - and reveal what will *really* be the driving force in Adsense profits over the coming months and years.

Today's trend with most Adsense publishers is to exploit the latest software and search engine trickery to draw free traffic. They aim to build hundreds of "minisites" often using auto-generator software to create thousands of pages at a time whilst barely lifting a finger.

Due to the nature of the this process, these pages generally consist of "scraped" (a polite word for "stolen") content or legitimately reproduced articles from article directories or private label membership sites. Oh, and as many Adsense ad units as humanly possible.

They argue that if you build just one of these poor quality, cookie- cutter sites a day that brings in just $1 a day, by the end of the year you'll be earning over $10,000 a month. Whilst I can't fault their math, as we'll see this method is ill thought out and at best a short-term solution.

Without easy, free sources of traffic, you're never going to make much money with Adsense, and this is the first major stumbling block of the minisite concept. By their very definition these auto-generated sites use junk content. You couldn't physically create a high quality site filled with useful, original information in a day.

And the search engines are getting more and more trigger-happy when it comes to deleting duplicate and/or poor quality content.

Google's own advice (found at http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/guidelines.html) states:

- Don't create multiple... domains with substantially duplicate content. - Create a useful, information-rich site.

And where Google leads, others follow.

Even if in the short term you manage to avoid the search engine spam- filters you're not going to have a lot of luck with the directories.

Just a few guidelines from DMOZ (http://www.dmoz.org/guidelines/include.html):

- A site should not mirror content available at other sites. - Sites... whose sole purpose is to drive traffic to another site for the purpose of commission sales provide no unique content and are not appropriate for inclusion - If the... content is poor, minimal, or copied from some other site, then the site is not a good candidate.

And Yahoo's (help.yahoo.com/help/us/submit/submit-18.html) minimum requirements include:

- Site contains substantively unique content.

So it would be fair to say that the days of generating free traffic to minisites from search engines and directories are limited at best.

But what about other forms of free traffic such as links from other websites, word of mouth and repeat visitors?

Certainly there's a chance when a visitor arrives at an auto- generated site for the first time that they'll click an Adsense ad and make you a few cents, but unless you provide a real, useful site with plenty of content they're unlikely to return ever again.

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