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Earn revenue from your website or blog with Google Adsense |
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December 2008 |
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 Internet |
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If it’s a bit of cash on the side you need during the tough times – or any time – consider becoming an affiliate using Google Adsense. An affiliate is basically the middleman between internet surfers (potential customers) and the merchants (sellers) plugging their products and services online. A large percentage of businesses now advertise and sell online which is fantastic, but conversely, fuels the dilemma of saturation and overcrowding – just where should you go to shop on the internet? If you were to wind back the clock several years and take a look at online advertising methods, you’d see that large banner adverts and obtrusive pop-ups advertising cars or bingo, for example, appeared on totally unrelated sites, meaning sales success rates were hit and miss. Whereas now, a car advert will appear on a car enthusiast’s blog, or a bingo offer is shown on a gambling website, increasing the chances of attracting clicks and sales from interested surfers. The popular method of advertising today is called “contextual advertising” or Pay Per Click (PPC) because the adverts displayed on appropriate websites and blogs are remarkably accurate. The merchants pay the advertising networks in return for their ads being displayed automatically all over the internet but only on relevant websites. When a website visitor visits an ad link (even if a purchase isn’t made), the advertiser pays out to Google, and a cut is given to the publisher who’s site the ad appeared on. PPC ads come in all shapes and sizes and occupy designated areas on millions of webpages. Some sites feature huge banners stretching right the way across the top of the site while others modestly reside at the bottom of an article. How does PPC click work? How do you get paid? It’s down to a tracking method known as an affiliate link built into every single advert displayed by publishers. If you visit a random site containing ads and move the mouse cursor over one of these adverts, you’ll see that a long link full of nonsensical digits and characters appear in your toolbar. It may look like gibberish to the untrained eye, but this code is what identifies the publishers of the ads and ensures they are rightfully paid their revenue share when a visitor clicks. Introducing Adsense Google Adsense is the most popular contextual advertising program and first choice among most publishers starting a website or blog with monetisation in mind. Yahoo, being the second largest search engine, has its own advertising program similar in look and feel to Adsense known as “Overture”, but which hasn’t managed to replicate the success or gain as larger a slice of the targeted advertising market. It is also currently only available in the U.S., so Google, with its broader distribution, tends to be first choice among publishers here in the UK. Content is all Most importantly, and before you apply to Adsense, you must generate some original content to attract visitors to the site or blog you intend to create. This could be in the form of articles, reviews, advice, stories, hobbies, or just about anything in which you have an invested interest. Where content lacks but advertising is abundant, there exists the perfect recipe for spam, and nobody likes it. It’s also common for lazy webmasters to plagiarise other content, such as by copying and pasting Wikipedia entries into their own site and slapping advertising all over the page to try and generate cash. This isn’t looked upon kindly by Google and they will simply reject your application to join the Adsense program. Besides, by writing genuine newsworthy articles which help people, the content fuels the site’s growth and attracts more traffic. Earnings of £1000 a month have been reported by the more successful Adsense publishers. Creating a site Assuming you have a few articles under development, you can begin cultivating a web presence to display your content and advertising. Of course, you don’t have to take the “one man band” approach which entails setting up hosting and domain names in addition to uploading your pages to a server. Instead you might want to consider signing up to a free blog or website where the design aspect is taken out of the equation leaving you to focus on actually getting the content online. Customisation of layout and feel is relatively straightforward and in a manner similar to that of Myspace or Facebook. Understandably not everybody wants to spend time learning design software or wrestling with HTML code. If on the other hand you’d prefer to exert greater control over your efforts and truly create your own identity, Frontpage (bundled with Microsoft Office XP and also available online) or Adobe Dreamweaver are fantastic solutions for quickly creating entire websites. The beauty is, once you have a layout and design you are happy with, it can be copied and pasted many times over with new content simply inserted in each page. Domain and hosting Assuming you’ve now got a website together and have broadened in quality and quantity of written content, you need to think about with whom to register in order to upload your site. As mentioned previously, you can avoid paying anything at all and just a get a free site or blog, but what you gain in these free services is ultimately a compromise. It is definitely worth paying a small fee to have ultimate control over your own site. There are hundreds of hosting and domain packages available. For a yearly fee, it is usually easier to register an all in one deal which includes your website address (.co.uk, .com, .biz etc) and your hosting (webspace, bandwidth, email addresses). It is worth shopping around for the best prices as the market is quite competitive. “Buy one get one free” on domain names seems quite attractive, yet frequently does not include any type of hosting for your pages. File Transfer Protocol Once you have your website built, and hopefully well organised in terms of file and folder structure, you can begin uploading the pages to your designated server space included in your web hosting package. File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is basically a piece of software generally used for uploading rather than downloading data. Avoiding pitfalls Your site must be search engine friendly. The description of the site and the keywords it contains are embedded in the HTML code, but don’t worry about it too much at this stage, because Google and the other search engines crawl the actual page content for keywords which contributes to how the site is indexed and ranked. The last thing you want to do is insert hundreds of irrelevant keywords in an attempt to pull in extra traffic. If anything, you’ll simply destroy any long term chances of success for your site and Google will penalise your ranking. As pretty as it is, Flash serves only to hinder the visibility of your site in the search engines. Stick to text as it is easier for indexing and ranking purposes. When I first submitted my site to Google, it was rejected on the grounds that the graphical content was unreadable. If you use Dreamweaver, don’t go over the top with CSS. This again, confuses the search engines where simple HTML would suffice. Lastly, tone down the use of images. It severely affects the website loading time, and if you have adverts on there too, may take too long to fully display itself to your viewers. It’s worth noting about 15% of Amercian users still surf the internet with a dial up connection, and although this may seem relatively low, that 15% represents millions of potential readers, and subsequently, possible customers for your ads. With a slow loading site they’ll simply assume the site is not working and go elsewhere. Keep it simple! Don’t alienate people who don’t have high speed connections! Submitting your site to Adsense By now, your site should be looking good, be easy to navigate, not contain large images, excessive video, audio or any extraneous elements. It should be clean, consistent and content-driven. Do not become too precious over HTML code and search engine optimisation; there will be plenty of opportunities to fine tune it later down the line. Google are notoriously (and quite rightly) strict about where their ads appear. They have a reputation to uphold, and to be associated with spammy websites or immoral views puts the entire brand in jeporady. It is not unusual for publishers to be kicked out of the program if they insert Google Adsense into a website in breach of the terms and conditions set forth in the agreement. Behave or be banned. Duplicate yourself Once you are an Adsense publisher, you can copy and paste your choice of ad code into as many websites and blogs as you like, with customisation options available to match different design and branding schemes. Many webmasters set up multiple sites and blogs each with unique content, but preferably in a niche subject area. It would be difficult to justify maintaining so much content if everyone else was writing about the same thing; your efforts would only be saturated to ambiguity in the millions of websites already out there. Click Fraud Do not even consider clicking your own ads, also known as “click fraud” Google takes this very seriously and monitor publisher’s IP addresses for evidence of foul play. It is the advertisers who have to pay when an invalid or poor quality click occurs, and should you be responsible, you will be banned from Adsense. To read more about Adsense submission guidelines, and to apply to join the program, click here. Tips
Useful links Streamline – Well priced hosting and domain pacakages. 3 month free trial. Blogger – Sign up for a free blog. Compatible with Adsense adcode NVU – Free open source website editor Flash FXP – Thirty day trial FTP software Official Adsense Blog
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