Start as a Blogger Grow to Publisher

So how should you start? How should someone who wants to make money from AdSense publishing, but who has never built a website, begin?

You can start wherever you feel most comfortable. If you’re confident enough to dive straight into WordPress or even create a site from scratch yourself, that’s fine. But most people are likely to find that the best way is to begin with Blogger. Sign up, play with the templates, write some content, join AdSense and add some AdSense units.Do it just for the pleasure of seeing your content online and of feeling the excitement that comes from receiving your first ad clicks.

Then, before you’ve produced too much content, copy your posts onto a Wordpress.com blog. Get used to the interface and the way it works, and once you’re comfortable with that, buy a domain.

Choose a hosting service. Install WordPress (and ideally, upload SocratesTheme too.)

You’ll have a professional site that’s all ready to make money — and you’ll be a publisher with a box full of money-making tools.However you decide to build your first site, people have to know you’re there. One of the most important ways to do that is get yourself a high- ranking in a search engine.

There are lots of different search engines, but only three are really important: Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Bing. In Chapter 17, I’ll talk in more detail about improving your search engine rankings.

If you want to take a shortcut, there are plenty of companies which will make the submissions for you, and they’ll even optimize your site to get you as high on the rankings as possible.

In general though, your search engine ranking will depend on a number of factors. One of those factors is the number of sites that link to yours. As far as Google is concerned if lots of sites about model railways link to your model railway site, that must be a pretty good sign that people who like model railways think your site is good. So they’ll want to offer it to people who search for model railways, bringing you lots of free traffic.

It’s a model that Google’s founders, Sergei Brin and Larry Page, based on academia: the more researchers refer to a paper or a professor, the more important that paper or professor must be.

Once you’ve got your site up and running then you’ll want to persuade other sites to give you links. You could offer to exchange links with other websites and you could even set up a page that contains recommended links so that you’ll have somewhere to put them.

Guest posts on other blogs can help as well, as can a “lens,” a kind of expert Web page, on Squidoo, a site created by marketing expert and author Seth Godin.

Links are only one aspect of SEO though. Metatags — keywords that someone might use to search for a page like yours — are important, and so are the titles of pages and their headings.

Search engine optimization is a field in its own right, a practice that will be ongoing and time-consuming for a publisher. There’s a reason that many companies choose to outsource it. Initially though, just focus on getting your website up, filling it with content, and making money from AdSense.