PART 1. GETTING STARTED WITH GOOGLE ADSENSE

1.1 The Basics: Building Your Site
Since this book came out lots of people started asking me how they can make money with AdSense. I’m always happy to help people make the most of Google, but many of these people didn’t even have a website! Here’s the bad news: to make money with AdSense, you’ve got to have a website. There’s no getting around that. The good news though is that it’s never been easier to create a website from scratch and use it to generate real revenue.
I’m going to give a brief introduction here to creating a website from the ground up. You can find plenty more information online and I’ll tell you where to look. A good place to start is my own book How To Build Profitable Websites Fast, available at www.buildawebsitefast.com. If you already have a site up and running, you can just skip this bit, head down to 1.10 and begin reading about how to improve your AdSense revenues.
1.2 Naming Your Site
The first thing your site will need is a name. That’s easier said than done these days. All the best words in the dictionary have either already been bought and built by developers or they’ve been bought and offered by speculators.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t create a good name and buy it for a song. Putting two words together with a hyphen can work (like http://www.adsense-secrets.com) and there are plenty of good names available if you’re prepared to move outside the world of .coms into .net and .biz etc.
Your first stop should be www.DomainAnything.com. This is a nuts and bolts service that lets you hunt and buy names, order hosting plans and even submit your site to the search engines. When you’re looking for a name, you can just toss in ten options and the site will tell you which (if any) are available. Find a good one, and you can either buy it there or pick it up at www.godaddy.com (they can be a bit cheaper). All in, buying a name from one of these service won’t cost you more than about $9 a year. If you can’t find a name you like and that hasn’t already been grabbed, you can take a look at sites like www.moderndomains.com and www.bestnames.net. These are companies that buy domain names and sell them for a profit. There’s a good chance you’ll find some good names here but they can cost you anything from $50 to $50,000. Before you part with a penny, think about the advantage that a good name can bring and ask yourself if you can’t get the extra traffic a cheaper way. Often, you can.
1.3 Choosing A Hosting Service
Your site is going to be stored on a hosting company’s server. (You didn’t want thousands of people dialing into your computer every hour, did you?) Again, there are lots of different options available depending on how much you want to pay and what you need.
In general, you’ll want to make sure that you have about 50 megabytes of space (that’s enough for 100 pages!), full statistics reporting and most importantly, 24 hour service. If your site goes down, you’ll be losing money every hour it’s offline. If there’s a problem with the server, you want to make sure it’s fixed right away.
You get what you pay for with Web hosting. “Free” services will cost you more than you save in lost revenue, and you can pay up to $200 a month for dedicated servers. Twenty bucks a month is a reasonable price to pay and GoDaddy.com and NetworkSolutions.com both offer good programs.
1.4 Designing The Site
It used to be said that absolutely anyone could create a website. That was true: absolutely anyone who knew HTML. Today, you don’t even need to know that. Programs like Microsoft’s FrontPage or NVU (which is free; you can download it at www.nvu.com) let you create sites without you needing to know your tags from your tables. If you can use Word, you can create a website.
You can either have fun playing with the programs and designing the site yourself or you can hire a professional designer to do it for you.
Freelance sites like www.elance.com and www.guru.com are good places to advertise. You can invite designers to give you quotes and pick the best based on price and talent. Be sure to check feedback and portfolios though; a low bid is often low for a good reason.
1.5 Creating Content
In Chapter 11, I talk in detail about building content and optimizing what you write to attract traffic and maximize your AdSense revenues. There are all sorts of ways to do that but for the moment just bear in mind that the ads that appear on your site will depend on the content on your pages. That’s how AdSense works: users click on the ads because they’re relevant.
And that’s why it’s not worth putting up a site just to cash in on particular keywords. Google doesn’t like it and neither do users. If your site doesn’t genuinely interest your visitors, you’ll find it hard to get traffic, links and clicks on your ads.
But there are still a lot of different ways to create content very easily that improves your income. I’ll tell you all about them in Chapter 11.
It’s also worth remembering that Google doesn’t place ads on particular types of sites, so if you’re thinking of building a casino site stuffed with AdSense ads, you can forget about it; it’s not going to happen.
Before you build a site that contains any content that’s remotely controversial, check out the AdSense Terms of Service (TOS) to make sure that it’s allowed. It will tell whether your idea is sound or whether you need to think again.


1.6 Getting Started With Blogger.com...
Want to get up and running with AdSense really fast? One way is to open an account at Blogger.com. Blogger is like those old free websites that you could set up in a flash but which looked like they’d been cobbled together from bits of left-over graphics that no one else wanted. Except that the blog you create at Blogger.com is the real McCoy. It’s professional, it looks great… and it takes just seconds to put together. All you have to do is choose a name and title for your blog, take your pick of the good range of templates available and get writing. You don’t have to worry about coding or design work or images or anything else. If you change your mind about the way your blog looks, you can just pick a different template. All that’s left for you to do is write… and add AdSense. Even that’s been made easy for you. Blogger.com lets you apply for AdSense directly from its site. It even gives you a preview of where your ads will appear and how they will look. While you’re waiting for your approval, you can play with fonts and colors so that you’re all set up and ready to start earning. Of course, once you’ve done that, there are all sorts of ways to play with the layout and content. You can easily move the ads into the sidebar by clicking the Template tab and looking for the line that says: <!-- Begin #sidebar --> <div id="sidebar"><div id="sidebar2"> Just paste the AdSense code directly beneath it. But that’s certainly not all. In Chapter 11, I explain lots of different, advanced strategies that you can use to maximize your AdSense earnings on your blog. You should certainly use them but more important is that you make a start. With Blogger.com, you can do that in seconds. It’s a great way to get started, but you should think of it as blogging with training wheels. After a bit you’ll want to move to your own domain so you can really pick up speed!


1.7 ... Or Google’s Page Creator
But blogs aren’t for everyone. Although they’re now one of the easiest ways to get online, they have to be updated regularly and aren’t the best option for static content.
Fortunately Blogger isn’t the only way to get online fast. Google’s Page Creator makes building a website as simple as point, click and type.
Again, you get a template that you can edit freely, and you can also break into the HTML to paste the AdSense code. Check to see how it looks, publish, and all you’ll have to do next is let people know where you are. And that’s where the disadvantages of creating a website using a free tool like Page Creator kicks in. With a website created through Page Creator, Search Engine Optimization becomes difficult. Your URL will be [yourname].googlepages.com, which is about as catchy a ball of slush. It’s unlikely to get very far in search engines and when you try to spread it around, it will simply make you look unprofessional. Page Creator can be a useful place to get started but it’s really designed to help people like teachers display information to a closed audience. It’s not a good way to earn a lot of money. If you’re keen to get started though, if you have an audience already set up... or if you just want to see your stuff online fast — and with ads — then it’s a fun toy to play with. And you can always move your content onto your own URL when you’re ready.


1.8 Search Engine Optimization
However you decide to build your first site, people have to know you’re there. One of the most important ways to do that is get yourself a high-ranking in a search engine. There are lots of different search engines, but only three are really important: Google, Yahoo! and MSN. In Chapter 21, I’ll talk in more detail about improving your search engine rankings.
If you want to take a shortcut, there are plenty of companies which will make the submissions for you and they’ll even optimize your site to get you as high on the rankings as possible.
1.9 Links
Your search engine ranking will depend on a number of factors. One of those factors is the number of sites that link to yours. As far as Google is concerned if lots of sites about model railways link to your model railway site, that must be a pretty good sign that people who like model railways think your site is good. So they’ll want to offer it to people who search for model railways, bringing you lots of free traffic.
Once you’ve got your site up and running you’ll want to persuade other sites to give you links. You could offer to exchange links and you could even set up a page that contains recommended links so that you’ll have somewhere to put them.