1.1 The Basics: Building Your Site

After the last edition of this book came out lots of people started asking mehow they can make money with AdSense. I’m always happy to help peoplemake the most of Google, but many of these people didn’t even have awebsite!

Here’s the facts: to make money with AdSense, you’ve got to have awebsite. There’s no getting around that. The good news is that it’s neverbeen easier to create a website from scratch and use it to generate realrevenue.

I’m going to give a brief introduction here to creating a website from theground up. You can find plenty more information online and I’ll tell you whereto look. If you already have a site up and running, you can just skip this bit,head down to 2.10 and begin reading about how to improve your AdSenserevenues.

1.2 Naming Your Site

The first thing your site will need is a name. That’s easier said than donethese days. All the best words in the dictionary have either already beenbought and built by developers or they’ve been bought and offered byspeculators.

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 (likehttp://www.adsense-tools.com/) and there are plenty of good namesavailable if you’re prepared to move outside the world of .coms into .net and.biz etc.

Your first stop should be to register a domain name and order a hosting plan.One of my favorite sites to do this is Globat. They frequently offer excellentspecials, such as free or reduced hosting for a year. Click here to see theirlatest offer.

Another stop is Network Solutions. This is a nuts and bolts service that letsyou hunt and buy names, order hosting plans and even submit your site tothe search engines. When you’re looking for a name, you can just toss in tenoptions and the site will tell you which (if any) are available. All in, buying aname from one of these service won’t cost you more than about $20 a year.

If you can’t find a name you like and that hasn’t already been grabbedthough, you can take a look at sites like moderndomains.com andbestnames.net. These are companies that buy domain names and sell themfor a profit. There’s a good chance you’ll find some good names here butthey can cost you anything from $50 to $50,000. Before you part with apenny, think about the advantage that a good name can bring and askyourself if you can’t get the extra traffic a cheaper way. Often, you can. Andremember, twelve years ago no one knew what a Yahoo, ebay or Googlewas!

1.3 Choosing A Hosting Service

Your site is going to be stored on a hosting company’s server. (You didn’twant thousands of people dialing into your computer every hour, did you?)Again, there are lots of different options available depending on how muchyou want to pay and what you need.

In general, you’ll want to make sure that you have about 50 megabytes ofspace (that’s enough for 100 pages!), full statistics reporting and mostimportantly, 24 hour service. If your site goes down, you’ll be losing moneyevery hour it’s offline. If there’s a problem with the server, you want to makesure it’s fixed right away.

You often get what you pay for with Web hosting from “free” services thatwill cost you more than you save to $200 a month for dedicated servers.Twenty bucks a month is a reasonable price to pay and Globat and NetworkSolutions both offer good programs.

1.4 Designing The Site

It used to be said that absolutely anyone could create a website. That wastrue: absolutely anyone who knew HTML. Today, you don’t even need toknow that. Programs like Microsoft’s FrontPage or NVU (which is free; you can download it at http://www.nvu.com/) let you create sites without youneeding to know your tags from your tables. If you can use Word, you cancreate a website.

You can either have fun playing with the programs and designing the siteyourself or you can hire a professional designer to do it for you.

Freelance site like http://www.elance.com/ can http://www.guru.com/ aregood places to advertise. You can invite designers to give you quotes andpick the best based on price and talent. Be sure to check feedback andportfolios though; a low bid is often low for a good reason.

1.5 Creating Content

I talk in detail about building content and optimizing what youwrite to attract traffic and maximize your AdSense revenues. There are allsorts of ways to do that but for the moment just bear in mind that the adsthat appear on your site will depend on the content on your pages. That’show 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 particularkeywords. Google doesn’t like it and neither do users. If your site doesn’tgenuinely interest your visitors, you’ll find it hard to get traffic, links andclicks on your ads.

But there are still a lot of different ways to create content very easily thatimproves your income.

It’s also worth remembering that Google doesn’t place ads on particulartypes 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 remotelycontroversial, check out the Terms of Service (TOS) to make sure that it’sallowed. It will tell everything you need to know.

1.6 Search Engine Optimization

Of course, once you’re up, people have to know you’re there. One of themost 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 reallyimportant: Google, Yahoo! and MSN. I’ll talk in more detailabout improving your search engine rankings.

If you want to take a shortcut, there are plenty of companies which will makethe submissions for you and they’ll even optimize your site to get you as highon the rankings as possible. Submit Express has a free service that youmight find useful.

1.7 Links

Your search engine ranking will depend on a number of factors. One of thosefactors is the number of sites that link to yours. As far as Google isconcerned if lots of sites about model railways link to your model railwaysite, that must be a pretty good sign that people who like model railwaysthink your site is good. So they’ll want to offer it to people who search formodel railways, bringing you lots of free traffic.Once you’ve got your site up and running you’ll want to persuade other sitesto give you links. You could offer to exchange links and you can even set upa page that contains recommended links so that you’ll have somewhere toput them.There’s a range of other strategies and services that you can use.

1.8 AdSense — Making The Money!

Once you’ve done all this, you’ll be ready to start using — and profiting from— AdSense. The application process is very simple and straightforward.

First, you’ll have to tell Google whether you’re a company or a one-manshow. That’s important because it tells them where to send the money. (Ingeneral, it’s better to get your money by direct deposit; Google charges for express mail checks.) You’ll also have to choose whether youwant content-based ads, search ads or both. (Content-based ads arebetter but I’ll tell you how to benefit from each.)

Once you’re approved, you’ll just have to copy and paste a small piece ofcode into your website and you’re done!

1.9 Google Policies

AdSense works. I know it works because I’ve got the stats, the checks andthe bank balance to prove it. And all of the methods that I used to increasemy AdSense revenues are completely legitimate and in line with Google’spolicies.That’s important. It is possible to cheat AdSense. But you’d have to be crazyto do it. You can make so much money working within Google’s rules that torisk getting thrown out by putting ads on pages without content or bypersuading users to click on the ads is just plain crazy.You can find an excellent run-down of Google’s do’s and don’ts (mostlydon’ts) at https://www.google.com/AdSense/policies. The things to look outfor in particular are:

Code Modification

You have to paste the AdSense code onto your site as is. And you don’t needto do anything else! Your AdSense account will let you play with colors andplacements (and getting those right is what will really rocket your income) sowhy bother playing with Google’s HTML? It’s not necessary and it could getyou a lifetime ban.

Incentives

When the ads appear on your page, you have to leave them completelyalone. You might be tempted to tell your users to “click here” or support yoursponsors but if Google catch you, they could well cut you off. They wantpeople to click because they’re genuinely interested in the ad. Get yourstrategy right and they’ll do just that.

Content

Google is pretty picky about where the ads are displayed. They don’t wantadvertisers complaining to them that their services were being promoted ona site that supports gambling or is filled with profanity or contains more ads than content. If your content doesn’t come up to scratch, you’ll need asite that does.

Prohibited Clicks

And nastiest of all are the people who either click on their own ads or createprograms to do it for them.The bottom line is that you don’t need any of this stuff. Maximizing yourrevenue within the rules is easy!

1.10 As Easy as 1-2-3!

The bottom line is that there are three ways to increase your AdSenserevenue.

1. By Tweaking the Ads
to make them more appealing to your visitors;

2. By Optimizing your Website

for better AdSense targeting (or what the Google folks call 'contentrelevance');
And the only sure-fire way to get 1 and 2 right is by

3. Tracking Visitor Response.

If you don't know what works (and what doesn't work) in trying to increaseyour AdSense revenue… you're shooting arrows in the dark!The right tracking tools can reveal a great deal about your visitors andanswer fundamental questions such as what they're looking for andwhat makes them 'click'. Once you've figured that out, bingo! You're onyour way to big AdSense bucks!But it isn't as straight-forward as it seems. If it were, there wouldn't be somany grumpy people on AdSense forums, complaining about their lowAdSense earnings.It's not that they aren't doing anything about it. They simply aren't doing theright things. Let me assure you that in the time that I have been using AdSense, myearnings have only gone up — and so will yours, if you apply all mytechniques seriously.