Building An AdSense-Ready Website

I’m always happy to help people make the most of Google, but many of these people didn’t even have a website!

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.

There are all sorts of ways to build that site. The option you choose will depend on the level of your knowledge, on the size of your budget, and on the speed with which you learn and get to grips with the Internet and the way it works. I’m going to discuss all of those options here.

If you already have a site up and running — and you’re happy with it — you can just skip this bit, head down to Chapter Two and begin reading about how to improve your AdSense revenues… but I don’t recommend you do that just yet.

Few people use all of the methods now available for building websites. Most people will pick one — such as hiring a designer or using Joomla, a content management system — and go back to it each time because it’s familiar and because it worked the first time. But each of these methods produces a different kind of site. Knowing at least about all of the different options will let you know that you have more tools available for growing your business.

If you want to get a new site up and running in a couple of hours — to test an idea perhaps or catch traffic from a specific link — you’ll know how to do it. And if you want to branch out into a new niche with a slick, professionallooking website that you’ll still be able to control, you’ll know how to do that too.

The more you know about the different ways of building websites, the more power you’ll have over your Internet business.

Up and Rolling with Training Wheels

Let’s begin with the easiest methods. One of the most dramatic changes to have taken place on the Internet over the last few years has been the simplicity of creating certain kinds of website. Today, it’s possible to have Web pages online, publicly visible and even AdSense-ready in the space of minutes.That’s a real revolution. It’s one of the changes that has put the Internet into the hands of anyone who wants to make the most of it. You don’t need to spend months poring over an HTML manual to learn how to create websites any more. You don’t need to find a developer and shell out thousands on a site if you don’t want to.You can simply write what you want, put it online and everyone will be able to see it immediately.It really is that simple.And there’s no shortage of ways to do it. 

Simple Blogging Services: Blogger and Wordpress.com

Probably the simplest method is by blogging.While traditional websites have tended to need unique designs and layouts, and required developers who know their way around code to create novel pages, blogs place a greater emphasis on content than on appearance. That doesn’t mean they’re ugly. But it does mean that users come to a blog expecting to read words on a page.And that means that it’s possible to use templates that allow publishers to simply type in the posts they want to write and publish them directly onto the Web.There are no technical requirements, and nothing more complicated than the ability to choose and click. Success or failure depends primarily on the quality of the writing and the ability of the publisher to build an audience.
Although weblogs in one form or another had been around for a while the term “blogging” really originated with Blogger.com.The service was created in 1999 by Pyra Labs, a San Francisco firm formed by a couple of freelance developers who had come together to create some project management software. According to co-founder Meg Hourihan, Blogger was originally an internal weblog used by the firm’s employees whose codebase was spun out with the aim of making it “easier for people to publish online no matter where one’s content was hosted.”

Blogger’s rise wasn’t smooth. It ran out of money, shrank to the size of cofounder Evan Williams’ bedroom, grew again, until by 2002 it had several hundred thousand users — and six staff supported by a paid version of the software.Then, in 2003, Google bought it.The sum that Google paid hasn’t been revealed but it was certainly a good deal for the cash-strapped company. It was also good for publishers. The kind of financial support that Google could supply meant that Blogger could be made free for everyone again.And it was good for Google too. Making it easy for everyone to create Web pages meant more spots and easier integration for AdSense. (Money aside, the deal was also pretty good for Evan Williams. He worked for Google for a while before leaving to form Obvious Corp., then podcasting company Odeo. There, he would go on to create Twitter with Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey.)Simplicity remains Blogger’s greatest strength, but since Google’s acquisition, that simplicity has been enhanced by the ease with which it’s possible tointegrate AdSense onto Blogger’s pages.Rather than think of a blog on Blogger as a website, it might be best to think of it as a notebook that’s online and which anyone can read.

All you have to do is choose a name and title for your blog, take your pick of the good range of templates available and start writing.

You don’t have to worry about coding or design work or images or anything else. If you change your mind about the way your blog looks, you can just pick a different template. Even rearranging the elements on the page is a breeze.Blogger provides a range of different layouts to choose from. Make your selection then drag in the elements you want to place on the page. All that’s left for you to do is create the content… and add AdSense. Even that’s been made easy for you.Blogger.com lets you apply for AdSense directly from its site. It even gives you a choice of locations to place the ads, with one option clearly recommended: a layout that places one ad beneath each post so that the reader sees it as soon as he’s finished reading, and another ad in the sidebar. You can certainly use that option to begin with. It’s a great way to get started, but there are plenty of limitations with this layout and with Blogger in general.The layout, for example, leaves plenty of additional monetization strategies behind, and it doesn’t touch on optimization. It only deals with two ad formats in two spots. There’s a lot more to making money with AdSense — even on blogs — than that!

Using Blogger with your own domain name, with all of the search engine benefits that can bring is difficult, and some publishers have reported that their sites were deleted by Google who mistook them for spam sites.When you use a free service to build your site, you’re always a guest, which means you can be asked to leave at any time.But Blogger is still a great place to begin. If you’ve never built a website before, it will let you feel the thrill that comes with seeing your content online for the first time, and it can even give you the buzz that comes with your first paid clicks.

And it’s fun to use too!

Wordpress.com

The biggest like-for-like rival to Blogger is probably Wordpress.com, a free and simple offshoot from Wordpress.org. I’ll come back to Wordpress.org later because it’s the next step on the publisher’s development path. It’s publishing with the training wheels off.

Unlike the original open source program, Wordpress.com doesn’t require the publisher to already have a hosting service. There’s no installation and no documentation to read through before you can call yourself a “Wordpress expert.”

Like Blogger, it’s just a matter of signing up, choosing a template, writing your content and having the pleasure of seeing it online right away.

But… there is a very big “but.”

There are also no ads. At least, none for the publisher. Wordpress.com supports itself and pays for the hosting by placing ads on its publishers’ sites but it doesn’t allow those publishers to support themselves by putting ads on their own sites.

If you’re getting 25,000 views a month, Wordpress.com will let you split any revenues 50/50 — so they’ll let you keep half the money your successful site makes. If you want to become a VIP member, you can put on all the ads you want in return for a cool $15,000 to $150,000 a year. I can’t imagine that there are even many big firms willing to pay that.

Wordpress.com is really for small-scale bloggers who don’t want to make money from their websites. If it offers any advantage at all over Blogger, it’s that it lets you play around with the site without paying so that you’ll be ready to dive right in when you want to move up to Wordpress.org.

Otherwise you can do exactly the same thing on Blogger.com, and get paid for it.

Simple Sitebuilding Services: Google Sites, Moonfruit and More

But blogs aren’t for everyone. Although they’re now one of the easiest ways to get online, they have to be updated regularly and aren’t the best option for static content.Fortunately Blogger isn’t the only way to get online fast. Google’s Sites, the replacement for its Page Creator available at sites.google.com, makes building a static website as simple as point, click and type.

Again, you get a choice of templates that you can edit freely and simply by clicking buttons and typing in text boxes. It’s little different to using Word or any other piece of user-friendly software. And because its run by Google, placing your AdSense code onto the site is pretty painless too. Just click the “Insert” tab and one of the options, hidden alongside the calendar, document, map, and photo widgets, is to place the AdSense code.Again, it’s all very simple stuff. The foundation of the site is ready. All you have to do is paste in the content and you’re online.

Google Sites give you a choice of templates and AdSense in the drop-down menu.

All you’ll have to do next is let people know where you are. And that’s where the disadvantages of creating a website using a free tool like Google Sites kicks in.

With a website created through Google Sites, search engine optimization becomes difficult. Your URL will be https://sites.google.com/site/[name]/, which is about as catchy as a ball of slush. It’s unlikely to get very far in search engines and when you try to spread it around, it will simply make you look unprofessional, however great the template looks.

Google’s instant website machine can be a useful place to get started but it’s really designed to help people like teachers display information to a closed audience. It’s not a good way to earn a lot of money, and even for professionals that URL is going to be so off-putting on a business site that you’ll be better off buying your own domain name and finding a host.

Moonfruit

One way to do that and still keep the simplicity of Google Pages is to use a service like Moonfruit. Like Google Pages, Moonfruit — and there are plenty of other companies now offering similar services — provides templates and an editor that lets you move elements around on the page, write text and upload images, all without ever seeing a line of code — except for the AdSense code which you can also handle through the site itself.

You’ll have to figure out a design, something that might take a little effort but it’s good, creative fun, and you can do it for free as well, provided you’re willing to go in and make a change every few months. Moonfruit deletes free sites that it thinks aren’t being used.

If you’re willing to pay as little as $4.49 a month though, you can also buy a domain name (again, you can do that without even leaving Moonfruit, if you want) and pay Moonfruit for the hosting.

You’ll have your own site, with your own domain, with AdSense and even Google Analytics, without seeing a line of code or going anywhere near an ftp account.

One disadvantage with Moonfruit and its competitors though is that the reason you don’t have to see any code is that it’s built with Flash. You’re working with a graphic interface rather than the website itself.

That matters for two reasons: search engines can’t read Flash sites; and Apple devices such as iPhones and iPads can’t display them.

Moonfruit gets around those problems by translating everything you put on the site into an HTML version. That keeps the search engine robots happy but the translation isn’t great so the small number of people who reach the site with an Apple gadget are going to see something pretty unattractive.

But that’s not the biggest problem. If you’re looking to set up a simple business-oriented website, perhaps to sell services or pitch products, then a template service like Moonfruit’s will be fine. But if you’re looking to earn from advertising in general and from AdSense in particular, you need your visitors to keep returning so that they can continue clicking the ads. That means presenting dynamic content, articles that are updated and refreshed regularly. You’ll find that easier with a blog.