GETTING STARTED WITH GOOGLE ADSENSE (Part 1)

1.1 The Basics: Building Your Site )

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 http://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
http://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 moderndomains.com and 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.

source : www.joelcomm.com