Building Your Site
To use adsense, you need a website. Many people stop right here. They are itimidated because they have no idea how to make one. Don't worry! Making a website has never been easier!
Site Naming
The very first thing you need is a site name. These days, almost every dictionary domain name is take, and many two name combinations are taken. The reason? Domain name resalers. However, if you venture outside of the .com world into .info or .net, you will see many quality names that you can register for less than $10 at GoDaddy.com .
If you find a domain name that you absolutely have to have, contact the owner for pricing. Prepare to pay a lot more the registration fee. There are other auction sites such as Sedo.com or Afternic.com where you can bid on the domain name of your choice.
Picking Out a Hosting Service
If you want a website, you need to have it stored onto a hosting company's server. There are many different options depending on what you need. Make sure to shop around, and find out the best hosting service for your site. Make sure you have at least 40-50 megabytes of space. That should give you enough space for about 90-100 pages. Make sure you get full statistics reporting, and 24 hour service. Why 24 service? If you website is down, they can work out the problems immidietly. Remember, for every hour your website is down, you are losing money. GoDaddy and Network Solutions offer great hosting services for around $15-$20 a month.
Your Site Design
Today, you don't even have to know HTML to design a site! Programs such as Microsoft's FrontPage or the free http://www.nvu.com/, lets you create websites as easy as writing out a letter.
You can also hire a professional to do it for you. A great site for this is elance.com. Put out your criterias, and what you want. Now your job is done, wait for professionals to bid for your project, now you can pick and choose.
Start With Blogger.com
Do you want to skip all the above steps, and go right into Adsense earnings? Go to Blogger.com and open an account.
Blogs at blogger.com are made for Adsense. They are professional, sleek, and it only takes minutes to put together. Just pick a name and title for your blog, pick a template, and start writing articles.
The best thing about Blogger is the drop dead easy way to put ads on your site. Just click on Templates, Page Elements, than to Add Adsense. Drop in your code, and your golden. Now you can just click and drag where you want your ads to go on a blueprint of your site provided. You can even preview what it is going to look like.
Search Engine Optimization Of course, if your on the internet, you want people to know where you are. The best source of traffic is from Search Engines. The three biggest are Yahoo, Google, and MSN. Make sure you add your website url to each of these Search Engines index.
The art of SEO is extensive, and we will not go too far into it. However, we will give you the basics, and it will explained in more detail later on.
Of course, if you don't feel like learning SEO, you can always hire someone to do it for you. There are tons of company's on the Internet that will optimize your site to get the highest Page Rank possible.
Links
Many factors determine your Page Rank on websites. One of the major factors are how many sites link to yours. Search Engines think if a lot of sites that are similar to yours are linked to you, you must have a good site. So they will want to refer as much traffic to you as possible through a higher Page Rank in their Search Engines.
Once your site is up and running, persuade other sites to exchange links with you. Put the links up on your site, or you can even have a page dedicated to links so they don't clutter up you website.
Later on, we will go over more detailed strategies that you can put into use.
Until Next Time,
Adsense Maven
**Next up: "Google Adsense - Making the Cash"**
