Making Money With Your 1st Or 50th Website Using Google Adsense
By Clinton Douglas IV,
E-Business writer,
Vasrue Travel
http://travel.Vasrue.com
Get the List of 4,400+ Translation Agencies Now!
No Recurring Membership Fees!
If you are just starting online with your
first website, you have quite a learning curve in front
of you. I know that your learning curve is still long, because
I have been making money online for years, and I am still
learning new stuff everyday.
Every year, more people are coming online. And every year,
people struggle to figure out how to tap into the economic
engine powered by the Internet. The one thing that newcomers
to the Internet frequently fail to realize is that those
of us, who are making the most money online, spent years
learning our trades.
The good news is that Internet newcomers have one major
advantage that my mentors and myself did not have when we
started our online enterprises. The newcomers have people
like us who are willing to teach others what they have learned.
First And Most Important Lesson To Learn
There are three kinds of commercial websites on the Internet:
product/service merchants, advertising providers, and non-profit
websites.
Now, the Red Cross and the United Way are non-profit websites
by choice and mission. But, the majority of non-profit websites
on the Internet were designed to be for-profit websites,
but the website owner will have been lucky to have earned
enough to pay their web hosting costs.
By the end of this article, I hope that I will have provided
you enough information to be able to turn any non-profit
website into a profit generating machine.
Merchants sell services. They also sell products made by
others or themselves. Some merchants produce their own informational
books and e-books, on a wide variety of topics.
Many people make the mistake of assuming that they do not
know anything of value that other people would want to know.
But, that just isn't true. Call me an optimist if you will,
but I believe everyone knows something that other people
would be willing to pay a certain amount of money to learn.
It is a fact that some of the smartest online entrepreneurs
I know make a lot of money by writing and selling books
and e-books, on topics ranging from cryptograms (http://www.cryptogramsbylouise.com/),
to how-to cure acid reflux (http://www.refluxgoneforever.com/),
to finding the hero within (http://www.herosoul.com/),
to how to be more successful with an online business.
I have bought many e-books and I have to say that some were
better than others, but all of them helped me to learn what
I needed to know in order to be successful with whatever
endeavor I was undertaking.
Advertising Providers build websites with the intent of
attracting a huge and loyal audience, so that advertisers
will consider their website to be a good place to spend
their advertising dollars.
In those dark days before Google Adsense (http://adsense.Google.com)
and Yahoo's Publisher Network (http://publisher.yahoo.com/),
we little guys were just tough out-of-luck if we wanted
to sell our advertising space through a larger network of
advertisers.
I remember having a website that was finally serving one
thousand unique page views per day, or 30,000 page views
per month. I remember thinking that it was time for me to
see whom I could sell advertising space. So, I started doing
my research.
I looked at one advertising network, and then another, and
another. Without fail, most advertising networks required
one million page views per month in order for a website
to participate in their network. I was just poop out of
luck.
So, I started advertising space on my site to my visitors.
I sold some advertising, but I did not make a living doing
it. The main issue here is that the people on my site are
looking to learn about travel and other things, and advertisers
generally spend their time on sites learning about doing
business online.
Then in 2003, it all changed with the rollout of Google
Adsense. Suddenly, all I needed to do was to apply to participate
in Google's program. On approval, I could add one little
piece of javascript code to my website, and I could start
earning money from Google immediately, by making their client's
advertising available on my own website.
Finally, my information website had a method for earning
money that did not require for me to spend all of my waking
hours chasing one sale after another.
Some Background
When I started my first online business, I had set up an
Yahoo store (http://www.yahoo.com).
I did very well with it, but after a couple years, I realized
that I did not want to keep doing the same thing for the
rest of my life.
Three rooms of my home were committed to storing merchandise
that I was buying for resale. When I made a product purchase,
I had to take photos and then sit down to my computer, upload
the image and make an appropriate product description. Then
I had to spend all of my spare time, making new listings
at Yahoo and running to the post office to ship the merchandise
I had sold.
One day I realized that the reason I had started my business
is to provide my family a better standard of living. I had
accomplished that goal, at the cost of time with my family.
I was literally working from the moment I got out of bed,
until I collapsed into my bed at the end of the day.
After parting ways with Yahoo, I researched other profit
models and settled on a membership site. In order to be
successful with a membership website, one must be willing
and able to add new good quality content to the website
at least three or four times per week. That is a job in
itself.
While my membership site did well monetarily, I found myself
in a position similar to when I had my Yahoo store. I was
spending all of my spare time with my business and not my
family.
Finally, I Wrapped My Head Around The Solution
What I needed for myself was a website where I could sell
other people's products and services, then let the other
person handle the entire process of collecting the money
and delivering the product or service. I needed to build
my business in such a way that I could build my website,
when I wanted to invest the time, and I could collect my
checks at the end of the month.
The advertising website is the best kind of site to have
when your goals are the same as mine.
So, I embarked on building a website that had information
on a wide variety of topics.
Three years after I started my current website, Google launched
their Adsense program. I applied to Google's Adsense program
and was accepted within just a few days. I then applied
my Google Adsense code to my website.
Over the years, I have been building links to my website
so that people could find me. The articles and directory
links have produced good traffic results for me on a consistent
basis, since I started the process of building them.
The Next Lesson Can Literally Double And Triple
Your Income
When you undertake to design a website that will host advertising,
don't be shy about it!
• Don't stick your advertising in a corner somewhere;
• Don't design your advertising to look like something other than an advertisement;
• Don't be afraid to test your advertising placement;
• Don't be afraid to tell people that they can buy advertising on your website;
• Don't be afraid to charge good money to advertisers to have a placement on your website.
Don't be afraid and don't be shy. Your reason for putting
advertising on your website is to give YOU a way to make
money from your work. But, in order to keep your advertisers
happy, you need to make sure that they get a good return
for their investment.
When you can help your advertisers make money, then you
will by extension earn money from your website. It is a
beautiful concept; when I help put money in my advertiser's
pockets, they put money in my pocket.
Specific Tips To Maximize Your Advertising Click-Through
Rates (CTRs)
The default link color on the Internet is blue; so make
the links in your advertising blue.
The default text color on the Internet is black; so make
the text in your advertisement black or whatever color is
the default text color on your website.
Make your advertisement block stand out from the rest of
the content on the page. Putting your ads directly in your
visitor's face is good. Within a text block, I have found
the 300x250 to be the most effective ad block size. To see
an example of the 300x250 text block in action, view my
blog here: http://www.clintondouglasiv.com
Other ad block sizes that we have seen good results include:
the 728x90 leaderboard, 468x60 banner, and the160x600 wide
skyscraper.
Be The Next Advertising Success Story
I advised a friend of mine to make these kinds of changes
on his own website. He already had great traffic, but he
was not making as much money as I thought he should be making.
On my suggestion, he changed his Google ads from the bottom
of his left sidebar to the main part of his pages. He told
me that his CTR increased from 0.8% to 2.4%. I told him
to change his ads from the 468x15 link unit to the 468x60
banner ad. He told me that his CTR increased from 2.4% to
4.7%. Then I told him to change his links from black to
blue. Within just a few weeks, he reported back to me that
his click-through rates jumped again, this time from 4.7%
to 7.8%. He even reported that on some individual days,
his new layout generated as high as 11.4% CTRs.
On my friend's website, his CTR jumped from 0.8% where it
had been for a couple years, since he started using Google
Adsense, to 7.8% on average. While most webmasters will
see an average increase of two- to three-times, my friend
has experienced a nearly tenfold (+9.75%) increase in his
advertising revenue through that website.
What could you do with ten times more advertising revenue
from your website? You will never know until you implement
these kinds of changes on your website to increase your
own advertising revenue.
About The Author:
Clinton Douglas
IV, writes E-Business articles. "In less than
7 Days" you could have your own Highly Profitable Website.
Visit our site now; Read the insider secrets to Building
an Online Empire ==> Learn how to make fast
online money by visiting: http://online-empire.vasrue.com
Copyright (c) 2007 Vasrue.com All Rights Reserved
|
Article Source: thePhantomWriters
Article Submission Service
Read
more articles - Free!
E-mail
this article to your colleague!
Need
more translation jobs? Click here!
Translation
agencies are welcome to register here - Free!
Freelance
translators are welcome to register here - Free!
Subscribe
to TranslationDirectory.com newsletter - Free!
Take
part in TranslationDirectory.com poll - your voice counts!
|
