AdSense QuickStart Guide #2: Building A Site From Scratch

Creating a blog is the easiest w ay to get started with AdSense but it’s not for everyone. Create a complete website from scratch is going to take a little longer... but not a lot lon ger.

Step 1: Pick Up A Name
The first thin g you’ll need is a domain . You grab one of those at either GoDaddy.com or NetworkSolutions.com

Step 2: Build Your Site
You can build your site you rself or hire someone to do it for you. Or you can take a pre-built template and pack it with your own content. Yahoo! has a program called SiteBuilder (http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/index.php) th at’s packed with a good range of templates that you can use an d play with but you’ll have to upload the finished site onto their servers. If you’re in a rush, it’s a great way to get online and earning fast.

Step 3: Create Your Content
Keep it simple! You don’t have to pack your site with Flash images or anything fancy. Write about what you like! If you’re into fun at the beach, create pages with reviews of your local sand spots. Into skiing? Discuss your favorite ski equipment. Everyone’s got something that lights their fire. Find yours and put it on your first site. You’ll find that a site that interests you interests all the people like you... and gets you the sort of following that wins clicks.

Step 4: Apply For AdSense
Once your first pages are u p and bu ilt (and none of this shou ld take you more than a few hours) you’re ready to apply to AdSense. Fill in th e form and wait for the approval.

Step 5: Bring In The Traffic
While you’re waiting for the first ads, you can start submitting your site to
th e search engines and building up the traffic.

Step 6: Play With Your Ads
When the ads come in, don’t forget to optimize them for your site. It’s very simple and will h ave a massive effect on your CTR, even at this early stage .And that’s all there is to it, apart from the final step... spending the money! I don’t think you need my help for that, do you?

QuickStart AdSense: A Step-By-Step Guide

You can be up and run ning w ith AdSense in just minutes. Sure, you’ll need a bit more time if you wan t to use all of the advanced strategies an d techniques I discuss in the rest of th is book, but you don’t have to wait until you’ve figured everything out before you can start earning with AdSense.Remember, every minute that your site isn’t sh owin g online or isn’t showing ads, you’re tossing money down the drain.If you don ’t have a site yet, or if you’re not showing ads on your site, before you move on to the rest of th is book, follow one of these guides. You’ll be amazed at how easy it is to start making money with ads Blogging is probably the easiest way to get online with AdSense fast. The sites are already online, you don’t have to worry abou t graphics and the domains all set up.All you have to do is sign up, write an d earn!

Step 1: Surf to www.blogger.com
Complete the registration page, choose a name for your blog and pick a template.

Step 2: Apply For AdSense Throug h Blogger
Another form, another five minutes. It will take a day or two before your application is approved. In the meantime, you can play with Blogger’s AdSense preview tool, and...

Step 3: Write Your First Blog Entry
Not sure what to write? Start w ith your family, spout off about a story in thenews, put up pictures for your friends to see... it doesn’t matter. Everyonehas something that occupies their mind, that interests them or that they’re good at. Put up anything. You can change it later but for now just get in the habit of writing to the Web. Once you’ve done it once you’ll see how easy it can be — an d how addictive.

Step 4: Play With Your Ads
Once AdSense has approved your application, you ’ll be able to start playing with your ads. You can change the colors, fix the font size, remove the border and move them into the sidebar if you wish. You can get everyth in ggeared up and ready for...

Step 5: Bring In The Traffic
It’s taken you minutes to get your site set up. Now you have to let people know you’re online. Chapter 20 will tell you how to bring in the traffic bu t for now you can start by telling your friends, swappin g links with your favorite sites and submittin g your site to th e search engines. Hold off on th e paid advertising though until you’ve got enough content to make it worthwhile.You’re rolling

Don't "Look" Like An Ad

People don't visit your website for ads. They want good content.If you make the ads stick out with eye-popping colors, images or borders,th at makes them easy to recognize as ads — and people work extra hard to
avoid them.The same goes for ads that are tucked away in the top, bottom or some other far corner of the page. So easy to ignore! If you want people to click, make the ads look like an integral part of your content you a lifetime ban.

Ad Formats : “Dress” your ads for success!

How would you like your ads served? Banners? Skyscrapers? Rectangles?Squares? What about borders and background colors? The choices can be overwh elming. Many people let Google decide for them-preferring to stick with th e default settings. Big mistake! From my own experience I can tell you that it’s like swappin g a hu ndred-dollar bill for a ten-dollar on e.For almost one year I settled for just a tenth of wh at I could have been making — ju st because I didn’t bother to control the looks and placement of my AdSense ads.
The various ad formats, colors an d their placemen t on the w eb page can be done in th ousands of combin ations. You can literally spend hours every day experimenting with every possible combination. But you don’t want to, do you? Let me give you a few ‘ground ru les’ that have sky-rocketed the CTRs on my
top-grossing pages:

Googl e Policies

AdSense works. I know it works because I’ve got the stats, the checks and th e bank balance to prove it. And all of the meth ods that I used to increase my AdSense revenues were completely legitimate and in line with Google’s policies.

That’s important. It is possible to cheat AdSense. But you’d have to be crazy to do it. You can make so mu ch money working within Google’s rules that to risk getting thrown out by putting ads on pages without content or by persuading users to click on the ads is just plain crazy.I’ve put a detailed list of Google’s “do’s and don’ts” at the back of t his book.The things to look ou t for in particular are: Code Modification
You have to paste the AdSense code on to you r site as is. An d you don’t need to do anything else! Your AdSense account will let you play with colors an d placements (and gettin g th ose righ t is what will really rocket your income) so why bother playing with Google’s HTML? It’s not necessary and it could get

Signing Up Made Easy

First though, you have to sign up. Here’s how you do it. The sign-up page asks for a relatively small amou nt of information, not all of which is as obvious as you might like. First, you’ll have to tell Google wh ether you want an “individual” account or a“company” account — whether you’re a company with more than twenty
employees or practically a one-man show that’s just you and up to n in eteen others. That’s important for just on e reason : it tells Google where to send th e mon ey. Take a busin ess account and the payments will be made in the name of your company; take an individual accoun t, and they’ll be paid directly to you.You’ll also be able to choose between three differen t ways of receiving you r mon ey: Electron ic Fu nds Transfer, local currency ch eck or Secured Express Delivery. In general, it’s better to get your money by direct deposit
using the Electronic Funds Transfer; Google charges for express mail checks.

What Is AdSense?

Before signing up to AdSense, it’s important to understand what you’re sign ing up to. Many of the principles an d strategies th at I describe in this book make the most of the way that AdSen se works. If you can understand where AdSense are getting their ads, how they assign those ads to Web pages and how they fix the prices for clicks on t hose ads or for ad appearances on those pages, you’ll be in a great position to 

manipulate AdSense in a way that gives you maximum revenues.Unfortunately, I can’t really do th at. Much of the way th at Google runs the AdSense program is kept u nder wraps.I kn ow a few things — and enough to do a great deal with our AdSense ads.But I don’t know it all. No one ou tside Google does. And for good reason. If it was clear how Google figured out the content of each website and which ads suit th at site best, th ere’s a good chance that the Web would be filled with sites created specially to bring in the highest paying ads instead of sites built to brin g in and in form u sers.People do try to build sites for ads not content, but they tend to make less mon ey than high qualit y sites t hat attract loyal users who click on ads.The fact is, we can make the most of both AdSense an d our own ad space without knowing the algorithms that Google uses to assign ads and pay sites.That’s becau se AdSense is pretty simple. At the most basic level,AdSense is a service run by Google that places ads on websites. Wh en you sign up to AdSense, you agree to take the ads that Google gives you and receive a fee each time a user clicks on that ad (or for each thousand ad appearances the ad receives on your site, depending on the type of ad).The ads themselves come from another Google service: AdWords.

If you want to understand AdSense, you will need to understand AdWords.Advertisers submit their ads to Google using the AdWords program. They write a headline and a short piece of text — and here’s wh ere it gets interesting — they choose how much they want to pay.Advertisers decide on t he size of their advertising budgets and the amount th ey’re prepared to pay for each click they receive. Google then decides
where to put those ads.So a company that has a website selling handmade furniture might create and that looks like this:

The company’s owner might then say that he’s prepared to pay $1000 a month for his advertising budget but not more than $1 for a click. He can be certain now of getting at least a thousand leads a month.But that’s where his control over the ad ends. Google will figure out which sites suit an ad like that and pu t them where it sees fit, charging the advertiser up to a dollar a click until the advertiser’s budget runs out. (Of
th at dollar, how much the publisher receives is a Google secret. Th e New York Times has reported Google pays publishers 7 8.5 percent of the advertising price per click. The figure hasn’t been confirmed bu t it is around what most people in the industry expect that Google pays.) That makes AdWords different to more traditional form of advertising. In the print world, an advertiser chooses where it wants to place its ads and decides if the price is worth paying.The newspaper too decides how much it wants advertisers to pay to appear on its pages. Any advertiser that meets that price gets the slot and the publisher always knows how much his space is worth. Neither of th se t ings is true online.When an advertiser signs up to AdWords, he has no idea where his ads are goin g to turn up. When you sign up to AdSense, you’ve got no idea how much you’re going to be paid for the ad space on your page.You leave it to Google to decide whether to give you ads which could pay just a few cents per click or ads which could pay a few dollars per click.Google says that it always assigns ads in such a way that publishers receiv e maximum revenues, and that advertisers get the best value for their money.

So if you have a site that talks about interior design and which mentions “homemade furnishings” a great deal, Google will assume that your readers will be interested in the sample ad above. But that won’t be the only add that could appear on your page. There could be dozens of others. Google will give you the ads that it thinks will give you the highest revenues.That might n ot be the ad with the h ighest possible click price though . If a lower paying ad gives you more clicks and higher overall revenues, you should find yourself receiving that ad instead.In theory then, you could just leave it to Google to decide which ads to give you and at which price.In my experience though, that just cuts you out of a giant opportunity. You can in flu ence the choice of ads that you get on your page, both in terms of content an d in terms of price. You can certainly in fluence the n umber of clicks you receive on those ads. Google leaves that en tirely up to you — an dit’s a crucial part of the difference between earnings th at pay for candy bars and earnings that pay for cars.In short then, while signing up for AdSense can be both the beginning and th e en d of turnin g your site in to income, if you’re serious about making serious money with your site, it n eeds to be the beginning. You’ll want to make su re you ’re not getting low-payin g ads, and you’ll w ant to make sure th at you ’re getting the clicks that turn those ads into cash.

AdSense — Making The Money!

Once you’ve don e all this, you’ll be ready to start using — and profiting from — AdSense. I’m going to talk you right through the process of signing up to AdSense from reaching Google to being ready to place your first ad. If you’ve been putting off signing up until you get time to figure out how to do it, you’ve just run out of excuses.

Links

Your search engine ran king 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 mu st 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 an d ru nnin g you’ll want to persuade oth er 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

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, Yah oo! and MSN. 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 th e submission s for you
and they’ll even optimize your site to get you as high on the rankings as possible

Google 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.Fortun ately Blogger isn’t the on ly way to get online fast.
Google’s Page Creator makes buildin g awebsite 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 th e AdSen se 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

Getting Started With Blogger.com...

Want to get up and running with AdSense really fast? One way is to open an
account at www.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 wan ted. 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 th at’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 ad will appear (at the top of th e page) and how
it will look. Wh ile you ’re waiting for you r approval, you can play with fonts
and colors so that you’re all set u p 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 clickin g
th e Template tab and looking for the lin e that says:

Just paste the AdSense code directly beneath it.

Hitting the AdSense Jackpot! -2

I’m going to give a brief introduction here to creating a website from the
grou nd 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 AdSen se
revenues.
1.2 Naming Your Site
The first thin g your site will need is a name. That’s easier said than done
th ese days. All th e best words in the dictionary have either already been
bough t an d built by developers or they’ve been bou ght 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
) an d th ere are plenty of good names
available if you’re prepared to move outside the world of .coms into .n et and
.biz etc.
Your first stop should be
http://www.DomainAnything.com
. Th is is a nuts
and bolts service that lets you hunt and buy names, order hosting plans an d
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
http://www.godaddy.com
(th ey 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 moderndomains.com and bestnames.n et. These
are companies that buy domain names and sell them for a profit. There’s a
good chan ce you’ll find some good names here but th ey can cost you
anything from $50 to $50,000. Before you part with a pen ny, think abou t 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

Hitting the AdSense Jackpot!

As you can see, today AdSense takes care of my car payment, mortgage,
cable bills an d a whole lot more besides

Aren't you dying to know…
WHAT was it I did to AdSense — and my website — th at turned it overnight
into a cash-cow on steroids?!
More importantly, what can YOU do to shoot your AdSense income th rough
th e roof- right NOW!
My advice to you is quite simple ...
Don't be passive about your AdSense income; work hard to increase it. But
before you try out that h ot new idea you read about at an Internet Forum, be
sure to check out Google's
AdSense TOS
. Some web publishers have forever
relinquished their fat AdSense paychecks, just because they were too bu sy to
pay attention to something so fundamental to their AdSense survival.
I like to play by the rules and h ave taken adequ ate care to ensure that my
AdSense tips and tweaks are legit. Making what I do from AdSense, I have
little incen tive to go on a rule-breakin g spree and get my AdSen se accou nt
suspended.
For many Internet site owners, AdSense is like the goose that lays the golden
egg. Take good care of your goose — don't slau ghter it in the mad rush to
increase your AdSense in come!

PART 1. GETTING STARTED WITH GOOGLE ADSENSE

1.1 The Basics: Building Your Site
Since th is book came out lots of people started asking me how th ey can
make money with AdSen se. I’m always happy to help people make the most
of Google, but many of these people didn’t even h ave a website!
Here’s the bad new s: to make money w ith 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.

Introduction -2

By the end of the day, I'd delivered several thousand AdSense impressions —
which netted me the princely sum of… $3.00. I didn’t exactly burn down the
house.
While I didn’t see a great deal of potential based on this initial figure, I
figured it couldn’t hu rt to place AdSense code on more pages. Over the
period of a couple mon ths, I increased my impressions 25-fold, but the clicks
just weren’t happening. That was when I hit my lowest point as an Internet
publisher. My click-th rough ratios were so bad, I needed thousan ds of
visitors to net about $30 per day.
At that point, I knew something had to change — and I was goin g t o change
it!
It was as late as April 2004 — ten months after I sign ed u p with AdSense —
th at I had my eyes opened to wh at I had been missing all along. It was on e
of the “Ah-Ha!” moments w here I felt as though I was being hit by the
proverbial two-by-four. Immediately, I began experimenting with my Google
ads, testing various placement and colors to see if my assumptions would
hold water.
The results were fast — and fantastic!
By applying the same easy tweaks discussed in this book, I nearly tripled my
click-through rate, and my income shot up to $6 00 PER DAY! I still
remember that golden day in April 2004 — and for me there's been no
looking back.
From my early days of bein g an " AdSense nobody" to becoming a leading
AdSense guru, when a five-figu re monthly income no longer surprises me…
it's been an eventful journey full of learning experiences.
Little cogs run the AdSense machinery!
It's easy to get carried away when you're making so much money. But I
never lose sight of the little things that make me big money with AdSense.
Every AdSense partner — however big or small — knows that at the end of
th e day, it all boils dow n to one thing: stats! Your AdSense stats might not
be amazing to start with , but make it a habit to go through it w ith a fine-
toothed comb. As you start making sense of those 'little nu mbers'… the big
checks with follow!

Introduction

How To Make More Money With Google AdSense
Google wants a slice of your traffic. And they're willing to pay big bucks!
For those who have been complainin g of h igh traffic and low sales, there's
simply n o better way to cash in on those hard-earned visitors to your web
pages.
AdSense makes it so easy!
There's no complicated software to install, no need to scout for affiliates,
nothing to buy and no need to even have a merchant account. So…
Why isn't everybody doing this? More importantly, why isn't everybody
making the most of it?
It's "Hidden Money"
"Seeing is believing", they say. Most webmasters love to obsessively track
th eir visitors, earnings an d CTR's several times a day. They love to see
what's there, but they often miss what can be.
AdSense doesn't give you ultimate control over which ads are served, how
th e ads are rotated or what each click is worth . That's a good thin g, because
it's hands-free income. (It does give you some control though, and I’ll tell
you how to use those controls in this book.)
But many webmasters still th in k that once you've stuck the AdSense code on
your page, there's little you can do except wait and watch.
Nothing could be further from t he trut h! Google gives you a great deal of
control over you r ads, and especially their visual or graphic elements. By
tweaking these elemen ts to you r advantage, you could easily — in as little as
a few minutes — mu ltiply your click-throu gh s many, many times over!
My Experiments with AdSense
I signed up with AdSense in June 2003, starting small by serving AdSense off
just a few of my pages.