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Are there any suggestions as to how I should get started in such a venture while maintaining my current freelance work? Do I need to become a SEO expert or do you use Adwords to market yourselves? Thanks
-stlwebs
Clickthru rates and ad relevance will vary dramatically from page to page. I have one page that earns me a big fraction of my total income, and a half dozen pages that go a whole month without a single click. I've been removing adsense from these pages because I worry the ads will discourage my readers from linking my articles.
There are different strategies you can use.
- optimize for keywords that pay a lot per click
- publish pages that get a lot of traffic
- optimize for keywords that produce ads that get a high clickthru rate
I am very fortunate that my highest-traffic page gets a high clickthru rate, so it makes me a lot of money even though I don't get much per click.
You are better off developing a website that is actually of some use to the people that read it. You want visitors to want to come back for more, and to promote your website for free by telling their friends, and most importantly, giving you links of their own free will.
It is very expensive to build significant traffic to a site through paid advertising. Paid advertising works well if you're pretty sure anyone responding to an ad will follow through by buying what you've got to sell. That's not going to pay off if the only way to get money is if they then click on another ad, this time on your page.
Instead, if you pay for ads, focus on getting readers who will be excited about what they find on your site, so they want to link you. In time these links will build your search engine ranking, which will get you lots of search engine traffic, so you don't need to pay for advertising.
Come right out and ask your readers for links on each of your pages. Many people will if you ask - politely and respectfully - but most people don't think about it unless you ask.
Your best bet is to develop content based on something you know about in some depth. It can be anything, there is sure to be SOMEONE paying for ads on just about any conceivable topic. It can be a hobby, something you learned in school, your favorite TV show or what have you. But what will make people return to your site is that your site is genuine and useful to them. If you can make your visitors' lives better somehow because they visited your site, then you will succeed.
Someone pointed out in another thread that it is not the repeat visitors who click adsense ads, so you don't want to focus on them. That may be true, but I assert it is short-sighted. If someone clicks on an adsense ads, you earn a few sense, maybe even a buck, but then they're off to your advertiser's site and you've lost them forever.
But I tallied up how much money I've earned as a direct result of my website over the years, first by promoting my business and more recently by publishing adsense, and considering they way that other people's links have boosted my search engine positioning, and how many links google says I have, I estimate that EACH LINK someone has given me has ALREADY been worth from ONE HUNDRED to ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS.
That's why you don't want to just stick up a page with some random nonsense and an adsense ad. You won't make money that way. You WILL make money by providing real value to your visitors.
I am in the same boat as you. I was actually a consultant in a different discipline who got into web design a bit by accident. I had a good site on my niche and last year I decided to try Adsense. All I can say is that it works well. I won't be retiring on the income I receive but it is a good supplement to my other income.
As a webdesigner creating and SEO'ing the site costs you only your time. Choose the subject, build the site, SEO it, run it up the flag and see who salutes.
I'm familiar with adwords & overture/yahoo and have used them both to advertise myself and my clients.
Why are you familar with this services?
I had never any thought to talk with my clients about AdWords. They have all enough visitors by search engine in the natural free way
Do I need to become a SEO expert or do you use Adwords to market yourselves?
Shure. My best paying site makes 10 Cent per visitor.
Impossible to buy traffic at such a price. The over all average is 3 Cent EPV.
So You have to know how to design search engine friendly to make something with AdSense.
Your clients have typical PR2 or PR3 only one with PR4.
What is the best way to go about asking for links? By this, I assume you all are talking about linking to me. The best source I know of for high CPC links is Overture. I know this is separate from adwords, but do you think it will provide some source of relevancy?
How do you find out how many links google says I have?
jetteroheller, I am familiar with adwords and overture/yahoo because I use them all the time for my development services and for my clients. I have found it a sure-fire solution when it comes to multiple key phrases. Most of the time, it is very very cheap for my business clients since the general traditional business population is relatively unaware of CPC search marketing.
Thanks for your posts!
What is the best way to go about asking for links?
One way that seems to be used surprisingly rarely is to simply ask your visitors. Somewhere on each page, you can say something "Please recommend this page to others by linking it from your website" or some such. Be POLITE, and don't be blatant about it!
Another is to just ask all your friends and business associates for the favor of linking you. Explain that you're starting a new website as your own business, and that they could help you out in a big way if they were to link to you. Some businesses won't want to link you, maybe because they worry they would lose visitors, but some will, and anyone would probably be willing to link you from their personal homepage or weblog.
How do you find out how many links google says I have?
Enter your homepage url in google and search for it. If a single hit comes up that's your homepage, it means google has crawled it. If it doesn't come up, or you just see the url and not your title, it means google knows the page exists but hasn't crawled it. In that case, it has crawled another page that links you.
There will be several links at the bottom, one of them will be to find the pages that link you.
Unfortunately, google somehow seems to never know about all the links that I know my pages have, even though I can see that they're on popular sites. Sometimes the reason is that they have a robots.txt so some of their pages are not indexed. In other cases, it just doesn't seem to notice.
For as long as a month or so after your page appears in google's index, it will say that it can't find any links. When the next update happens, it should find some, and then find more on the next update. In general google will be about a month behind, and even then it won't have crawled the whole web, so some of your links may take several months to show up, and I'm afraid, some never will.
You need to learn about search engine optimization. DO NOT use the SEO scammers and spammers. You'll pay them thousands, maybe you'll get some traffic, but if google discovers what they've done, or if you stop paying their fee, you'll lose all your traffic. What I mean by search engine optimization is to make your website as easy for google to digest as possible. There is a ton of information at webmasterworld about how to do this.
