Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I've been here for so long, I feel like you are old friends! But I only lurked... never joined till today. Apart from wondering if I'm the only female here, I've also wondered how everyone began the AdSense adventure.
My story is interesting (at least I think so!) -- so I'll do a bit of show-and-tell.
I've been a webmaster in a rather large, however very *niche* market since 1996. I built communities and websites as a compulsion, mostly to drive traffic to a retail site that sells hard goods to this niche audience.
About 3 years ago a friend had built a site with 1200+ pages of excellent content on a now defunct network called "WebSeed". Before she lost the whole site, I offered to rescue it by transferring the whole bundle (what a job!) to my own servers.
After that, I basically forgot about it for 3 years! (Which was not really a bad thing, as you will see. LOL)
During that time, it rose and rose in the rankings... in silence, growing like a planted tree.
Last November I got an email from my server stating that I had a traffic overage. Thinking this was impossible, I checked my stats. Due to a fluke -- an old article about a *now* current topic -- (you know... like an article on terrorism before 2001) had triggered a massive amount of hits.
In order to justify paying more to run the site, I began looking into affiliate programs... and eventually AdSense.
Since last month it has been nothing short of a love affair! I'm approaching the triple digits per day and adding site after old site to my "tweaked for AdSense now" portfolio, as well as quickly duplicating my years of experience in web building to find more niche sites that can be fed by current traffic.
My big tip for the day is this:
Create new niche sites as subdomains on currently spidered URLs. They seem to hit the search engines overnight.
My hubby is pretty happy, to say the least. Our goal is to pay off the mortgage. ;-)
Glad to be here and to share all I can!
Cool story, congratulations.
There are a number of women here. With some forum nicknames it's hard to tell.
Mine is a niche topic too but not one that would bring in the $$$$ you are getting. I do appreciate what I do make though. Even though my sites started as a hobby they have been a lot of work and the AdSense income helps make it all worthwhile.
I think the moderator of this forum is female BTW.
oh, you mean Jenstar...
Re: women, there was a thread a couple of months ago about Female Webmasters [webmasterworld.com] - Lots of girls here!
LisaB
My big tip for the day is this: Create new niche sites as subdomains on currently spidered URLs. They seem to hit the search engines overnight.
Nice tip, if it works! Congrats and welcome.
Since I have a lot to say about sub-domains I will start a new thread about it in a different forum. Thanks.
I've always been confused if subdomains mean www.domain.com/subdomain or subdomain.domain.com
status: On Hold: This discussion is temporarily on hold pending administrative review. This simply means there was something about the post worth reviewing before public viewing. It could also mean work is being performed on the thread or forum."
Not sure why? Don't think it was anything negative I said, or against the TOS here?
Welcome, YesMom.
Yes, it's interesting how people get started. I was a freelance writer and knew little about programming (still have only bothered to learn HTML and CSS), but trouble with RSI made me realize it was going to be hard to make a living pounding at the keyboard 40 or more hours a week. Figured I needed to start a business or something, found and started reading these forums, and the rest... well, I only work a couple hours a day now, make much more than I did as writing for other people, and my hands thank me ;)
Create new niche sites as subdomains on currently spidered URLs. They seem to hit the search engines overnight.
Yeah, now that it takes so long to start ranking new sites in Google, I've been going back to old ones and just expanding their original purpose. The new articles rank well within a week when added to the established sites.
I've been running affiliate programs for a long time and selling direct advertising since the dawn of my web site over 7 years ago. However, last year some SCHMUCK (and I use the term loosely) which had been an advertiser on my site, turned out he liked my business SO MUCH that he cloned it and translated it into 10+ other topic web sites. The only major change they made was AdSense instead of the affiliates.
So, after having all those clone sites shut down, I tried AdSense to see how it performed and have been using it ever since.
Basically, it took a thief to introduce me to AdSense.
IncrediBill -- There is a familar Bible quotation I could apply to your situation -- "All things work together for good..."
I'm glad at least that you got some end benefit for all your heartache with that thief.
I had a domain hijacked a few years ago by some porn site in Russia. Had to pay $500 to get it back, but I consider that cheap now!
Protecting our real estate out here in the jungle is a full time business. ;-)
Re: Subdomains
A subdomain is in this form:
topic.cutenameorbroadtopic.com
This form is just considered a folder I believe.
cutenameorbroadtopic/topic/
I think both can work... but I now prefer the first example because I have writers working for me now and I can assign them ftp access individually without compromising the integrity of the whole domain.
Plus -- you can use a combination of descriptive words you could not otherwise "own" as a domain name.
Example: secretrecipes.toppsontheweb.com
Or: mortgages.whatever.com
Just my 2 cents. ;-)
I've learned so much here... thanks for sharing all the expert advice!
[edited by: YesMom at 12:47 pm (utc) on Feb. 22, 2005]
