The Basics: Building Your Site
Naming Your Site
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.
Choosing A Hosting Service
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.
Designing The Site
Creating Content
Search Engine Optimization
Links
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.
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 tell you where to look. A good place to start is the 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Creating Content
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.
improves your income.
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.
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 highranking in a search engine. There are lots of different search engines, but only three are really important: Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
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.
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. There’s a range of other strategies and services that you can use.
