The Big Adsventure

One of the latest big things in website promotion is promotion by publishing articles. Theres hundreds of websites available where you can submit your aricle. It works very simple: you write an article, preferably on a subject related to your website, and submit it to some article websites. The articles always contain a little box at the end with ‘about the author’ info, this is where you can place a link to your website. Once your article is accepted by the article website you have a one-way incomming link to your site. Since there are a lot of article sites around, you can get a good number of incomming one-way links this way. Whats even better is that since you are writing the article, you can elegantly mix in the search terms you want to be found by. If people don’t find your site directly thru the search engine, they could land on one of your articles published somewhere else. If they like your article they will probably use the link in the ‘about the author’ box to check out your website.
It doesn’t stop there! By submitting to article websites, you allow others to use your article free of charge, as long as they leave in the author info and link to your website. If your article is good other people might want to use it to fill their own website with content or maybe use it as content on a mailinglist. This will give you even more incomming links and exposure!
Getting your article published on all the article sites can be very time consuming. A lot of the article websites require you to sign up before you can submit articles, the signup process usually doesn’t take very long, but if you have to sign up with 100 sites it adds up pretty fast… Another time consuming task will be finding the article sites in the first place, although there are websites that keep lists of article sites like: publish-your-article But there is also software available to help us get our articles published.
I’ve tried out one piece of software and I was really amazed at how well it worked! The software I used is “Article Submitter Pro” I must say it looks very user friendly. You can create articles in plain text or html. After you have your article ready you can select from a list the article sites you want to submit to. The list currently contains 780 article websites and you can add your own if you know any that is not in the list yet. Since a lot of article sites require you to register and login to submit your article, they have added a link right to the registration page of the sites, you can sign up with the sites and ArticleSubmitter Pro will store your user/password to use when submitting your aticle. Ofcource the signup process for all the sites will take a long time, but once you have an account on the article sites you can just submit your next article with a click of the mouse. Since I was only trying this software out with a single article I did not sign up with any article sites. I just selected to submit to the article sites that don’t require you to sign up. This still leaves 223 article sites that my article will be submitted to.
After starting the auto-submit the selected sites will open in the application and all the fields will be filled in for you, after a quick review you can hit the sumbit button on the site and move on to the next one. Some sites are not working correctly because they have changed recently, just hit ‘next site’ to move to the next article website in the list.
Getting your article submitted to all the sites still takes quite some time, but a lot less then manually doing it. The thing I like most about this software is that you will be taken to the websites and manually have to hit the ’submit’ button, instead of the software just submitting your article without you seeing what is happening.
My article has now been submitted to about 50 article sites. The whole thing (including the software installation) took about one hour. Try doing that manually!
My article was already accepted and published on some sites, lets wait for the others to process my submission and for the search engines to find the article. I’ll be monitoring the number of websites found with my article closely. Current count:
Google:1
MSN:3
Yahoo:0

In order to get people to visit your site you need to have something to offer them. With the millions of websites arround its hard to think of something truely unique you can offer your visitors, but since there are so many potential visitors surfing the web your website doesn’t have to be unique, we can do with a small slice of the pie.
If we want traffic to be comming in for a long time we need something that is not only interesting for surfers today but also in the long run, ie. we could get a good number of visitors in if we would have a website about the torino 2006 olympics, but after the games are finished the number of visitors would almost certainly drop to zero instantly. To keep yourself motivated to keep the site up to date you could make the website on a subject that really interests you personaly, maybe about your hobby. Whatever subject you choose, you will need content and a lot of it.
Original content is the best way to go, write your own text or have someone do it for you. One or two articles are not much content for a website and visitors will be gone fast, so you need some more content to put on your site. To fill your site with additional content you can use articles found on article websites I talked about earlier.
We now have a website filled with content, people interested in the subject could spend a good time on our site reading all the information. But they will have to find our website first…

I just noticed that I now own 12 domain names. The domains I’ve had a couple of weeks are really starting to get some visitors, not hundereds a day, but still… An article site that has been started as a personal collection of articles while doing research for a hobby has had over 150 unique visitors so far this month. A good share of the visitors are returning and reading several pages on the site. Some have even signed up for the sites newsletter so they won’t miss site updates.
So how do all these people find my site? Most find the site thru search-engines, I have noticed that the site shows up quite high in the result pages for the search terms I was aiming for! To get the high ranking you have to get links to your websites. One way links are the best, the more the better. I’ve submitted the site to a lot of directories, the good thing about them is that they are mostly categorized meaning that your incomming link will be comming from a page with more text (from other people) on the same subject as your own website. A lot of the big directories require you to pay to get listed or let you wait in the queue for months. Like webhosts and blogs, new directories are also started by a lot of people every day. To get listed in a lot of directories, look for the new ones they will have you added mostly within a day after submission and without a charge!
Having links from pages with matching subjects works very well, once the search-engines have indexed them you can even show up in the result pages for searches on terms that are not even on your website (but on the ones linking to it)
Another good way to get links (or so ‘they’ say…) is getting articles published on article sites. People use article sites to get content for their own website or ezine. The deal with the articles is this: you can use the article on your website, but you must leave in the authors info and link. Now if you write a good article and submit that to a good number of article sites, chances are that your article (which is ofcourse elegantly filled with the search terms you want to be found by) will be copied onto new sites, which will make the number of oneway incomming links to your site even bigger.
I will try the article submission out soon and keep you posted on the results!

I’ve just a added a ClustrMaps map to be able to see where all the visitors come from. This free service is a very cool addition to any website. I’ve been using this service for quite a while on one of my other sites, ClustrMaps was still named HitMaps back then. I was quite pissed off when the HitMaps suddenly stopped showing on my site and they announced that a payed service would be launched soon. The service was renamed to ClustrMaps and to my joy it was still free. ClustrMaps also has a paid service, ClustrMaps+, which lets you zoom in on the continents for a more detailed view of your visitors locations. At not even $10 yearly I think the price of the ClustrMaps+ is very reasonable. If you want a map displayed on your own site, just click on the ClustrMaps map seen at the top of this site!

According to ipwalk there are over 50.000.000 .com domains registered, now that we have our own cool domain name we need hosting. Finding a webhosting service is a lot easier than thinking up that domain name that is still available. Just send an e-mail to any webhosting company you can find and I’m sure they will be happy to host you. So if we can choose to go with any webhosting company which one do we pick? The logic answer for many people would be: the cheapest one. Webhosting companies are emerging faster than the ‘net can handle! A lot of them are doomed from day one. People are hosting sites at home on a simple PC with a home-use DSL connection. There are certain hosts that we want to avoid. Our website can only generate income as long as it is online, to get the maximum income we need 100% uptime. I don’t think any hosting company can really guarantee 100% uptime (although a lot do!) but whatever… Apart from uptime, the hosting companies advertise with all the utils you get with your hosting, the question is: do you need them? Let me tell you right now: no! While some are really handy all I personaly use are: AWStats and phpMyAdmin, both are included in cPanel
I was lucky to get some free hosting when I just started my first website, thanks to checksum.org After registering my 3rd domain I decided to get a reseller account. The reseller account is big enough to host about 20 websites while only costing me the price of about 5 regular hosting accounts. Yes I know I didn’t want to spend more money then absolutely necessary, but since I don’t have 20 websites I figured I get some paying customers for webhosting and let them cover the complete webhosting costs. So another webhosting company was born: moduhost modular webhosting.

To get a good income from Google AdSense™ you need a lot of people clicking on your ads. You can not ask people to click on them for you, if you do you will be banned from the program! Also clicking your own ads is not allowed so be carefull the last thing we want is to be on Googles black list. So how do we get more people to click? One thing thats obvious is: get more visitors to your site. More visitors = more potential clicks on the ads = more income. Sounds very simple but anyone who has a website knows how hard it is to get visitors to a new website. I signed up with the AdSense™ program to make some cash without spending any, so buying links or traffic is not an option for me. The only cash I’m spending is on domain registration and hosting. This is money well spend: you can get your own .com for about $10 a year and if you haven’t seen any cheap hosting offers you must be blind! Once you have your .com and hosting your site will instantly look more professional: if I land on a page named
http://www.yourISP.com/personalfreewebspace/J.Doe/index.html
I’m gone before I read one single word on the site and I’m sure a lot of other people will too! I know a lot of domains are taken, but there are still good names available. To come up with a good domain name here’s what I do: Assuming you have allready picked a subject for your site write down words related to the subject. So maybe you want to create a website about skateboards, my list of words would be something like this:
board
skate
skateboard
halfpipe
kickflip
360
Ollie

I would also put down some words that might not be directly related to the subject but could work good in the domain name:
information
hideout
lunatic
central

Give it a couple of days and add some more words. Read the list over a couple of times a day and start making combinations of these words: SkateCentral, KickflipCentral, SkateboardLunatics. Make sure you have a couple of names you would want to use because some of the names on your list will not be available any more. With your list go to your favorite domain registrar and check if they are available. Once you find out that one of your names is available get it registered right away! If you wait a week the name could be gone, theres a lot of domain hijackers around that register new domain names every day just to sell them to you. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to pay $50 for a $10 domain registration… Thats all I have to share on domain names for now, next time I’ll get into the hosting.

Never thought I would ever start a blog, yet here I am… funny how things can change.
I’ve started this blog mainly for my own use to keep track of the things I’m working on, more specificaly: my trial and error path trying to make some money with Google AdSense™. I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of websites on this subject already, lots of them tell you how you can make a 6 figure income with only a couple of hours work a week. They will even tell you exactly how to achieve this, just buy their e-book and you’ll have all the tips and tricks from the pro’s.
I’m quite a sceptic about these offers. Doing my own research on the Google AdSense™ subject I’ve found quite some people who paid for the e-book but are very unhappy about it. They all tell me that the information they paid for was very usefull, but is also freely available. The great thing about internet is that you can find any information on any subject for free. It’s not allways easy to find the information you are looking for but if you know how and where to search you can find almost anything. If you are not very skilled in finding information on the net maybe you should just go ahead and buy the e-book but keep in mind that the e-book will be the authors view on the subject, your own search will give you a better view of the big picture. Ofcourse finding the information will take some effort and time. To me the search for information is part of the adventure, a part that I don’t want to skip.
So lets get rich with Google AdSense™! Oke, back to reallity: do you really think you can get a 6 figure income from Google AdSense™? I’m sure some people do make a small fortune with AdSense™ but I bet it takes a lot more work then those e-book writers tell you.
I registered with Google AdSense™ back in December 2004. After one year my total earnings had reached $25. Yes I know that is about the price of the amount of beer you drink in one hour while at the bar. Still this has been easy money: I don’t think it took me more then 20 minutes to sign up with Google and add the AdSense™ code to my website.
This year will be different: I will try to get some serious income from AdSense™, I’m not expecting a 6 figure income and I’m not giving up my job. My goal is to get a check from Google every month (for those of you who don’t know: Google sends out checks each month to people who have made over $100)