Forum Moderators: mack
2. Do you have a web host?
Do you have a definate idea about the theme of your website. Knowing exactly what your site is going to be about before you start is a must.
You can then start searching for similar sites and doing your research. Find out what other sites are doing right and improve on their poor points. try and be the best site in your topic.
when you say free, is there realy such a thing in this industry. hosting and domains cost money. I know there are free hosts out there, but to be honest you are better paying a few bucks a month for paid hosting. Free hosting comes with no promises.
The domain you choose will vary a lot bepending on your site. To be taken seriously a top level domain is a must example.com not yourisp.com/users/yourname again there is no gurantee that the domain will exist in years to come. The true domain is a lot better because you control it.
Hope this gives you some ideas.
Mack.
What is your knowledge level at and how do you plan to make the site?
Do you have software planned (Coffee Cup, Dreamweaver, Frontpage / Web Expressions) or do you know HTML / CSS etc.. and plan on using notepad?
Do you want to use it to learn how to program? There are some great visual books out there by a Peachy publishing company that I think are great for learning, they can give you a quickstart on web publishing.
[edited by: WNxERIC at 10:17 pm (utc) on Nov. 9, 2007]
buy a domain name.
buy a website host for a year.
(at this point this will of cost you perhaps £30-40)
put it online.
swap a few links.
submit the site to all directories in your topic.
create as much content for your website as you can.
swap a few links.
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At this point your either bored of and forget about the site OR if you are interested and passionate about the subject and website you carry one getting links and creating content for the site.
At this stage you could perhaps add AdSense or a few adverts on your site if its getting some/any traffic.
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At this stage your site will either be getting 0-20 to 100k+ visits per day depending on luck/subject/SEO skill/luck/effort/luck/links
good luck!
1. Decide on your topic
2. Design you site with a pencil and paper
3. Download some page creation software to your PC. Do not expect your web host to provide an editor.
4. Build a first cut site on your PC. Check it in several browsers.
5. Now check out hosting and domain name deals
6. Get your hosting and domain name.
7. Upload your site
8. Check that it works. There are things that may work on your PC which will fail over the web.
9. Correct any problems
10. Publicise
A common cause for complaints by novice webmasters is when they sign up for a hosting deal,then start building and find that the hosting service doesn't support what they want to do.
Find out what other sites are doing right and improve on their poor points. try and be the best site in your topic.
That's copying someone else's topic or theme or idea. Bit risky ain't it.
Why run with the copycats and be a nothing, when you can be unique and No 1. Be Unique first, improvements can always be done later on.
Build is another matter, but your design should already exist before you cut a single line of code.
Language choice and toolset depend on content and function. Most sites manage perfectly well with html and a little javascript and css. You don't even need any special software for that, you can turn out a small site with Notepad.
As I said in a previous post a lot of problems occur when people pay up front without knowing exactly what they want.
If you *don't* know a lot about widgets, you need to find someone who does that can write these articles for you. That is what makes sites attractive, people come to a site to solve a problem. So make your content solve problems involved in your topic - and out of this rich content will come all the keywords you need to draw traffic to your site.
You're just making yourself a heap load of hurt.
Make a good website FIRST, get traffic, and content, and then maybe you might money of adsense.
[edited by: WNxERIC at 5:24 pm (utc) on Dec. 10, 2007]
There's no real point as a beginner in looking at lists of high-paying PPC terms. You simply are not going to get any traffic for mesothelioma or viagra unless you know what you're doing.
If your only reason for building a website is to make money, I have to agree with the person who said that focussing on Adsense is likely to be a long road unless you have
1. A topic that you know a lot about and care about
2. There is a significant number of people who are interested in the topic.
3. That topic has money involved in some way (people buy stuff, rent stuff, etc).
4. You are diligent about writing, writing, writing.
5. You have some patience.
Then I would start building a site, and put no adsense on it until you get some traffic. That's just my opinion, but if you have 20 visitors per day, there isn't much point in putting up ads unless you have 1000 sites getting 20 visitors per day. Many people, especially people on Digg and such, will have a negative reaction to ads on your site and it will make it harder for you to gain traction.
Despite what you may have seen on websites with long long pages promising that you will work 20 minutes per day and rake in riches, it just isn't so, especially for someone starting out now.
While you're trying to figure things out, you should also look into "affiliate marketing". If you do not have a topic that you know/care about, it will likely be an easier road to try your hand as an affiliate, rather than an ad publisher.
PS - also do a google search on "Made for Adsense MFA" (without quotes). I think that will help you out in understanding the landscape a bit, since you are obviously looking into building an MFA site.
At the risk of digging deeper, let me elaborate.
You said you wanted to do some "adsensing" and are looking for ideas about what sort of content to post:
im building up a site to use for my adsensing, what kind of content is good to work with?
This is basically the definition of made for adsense. Ipso facto, you are making a site for Adsense. I have nothing against that and don't think that necessarily is synonymous with spam. Half the sites built, good and bad, are built on that principal. In fact, I only wish you success. You describe yourself as a total beginner and was just suggesting that you poke around at "made for adsense" search results so you could see what some of the guidelines are and how far you can or can't push things so that you would have a better idea of what is acceptable and unacceptable content. I really was trying to be helpful.
You asked about lists of high-paying keywords. I've seen numerous articles where people obtained such lists and tried to make money with them and found it very difficult because of the competition. Again, not trying to say that you're incapable of making money there, but just to say that it is extremely difficult for anyone, especially a beginner.
That's all
[edited by: WNxERIC at 4:40 am (utc) on Dec. 13, 2007]
You have already decided on the gaming niche (about which I know absolutely nothing, so I have to sort of guess) and are basically starting out with a blog, as I understand from your last post. So I'm assuming for the rest of this that you're not planning to buy traffic and that you are hoping for traffic from organic search by writing blog posts. If that last assumption is not true, substitute whatever it is you're doing for "articles" in what follows.
I suspect that gaming very competitive, but has a lot of searching and a lot of money, so if you offer something good, you'll get traffic and eventually that traffic will pay. Since you already know what your niche is, most high-paying keyword lists are not going to be much help. In your case, it doesn't really matter that mesothelioma, debt reduction, refinance, etc still have a high cost per click. They're not gaming terms, so you'll never go there.
Rather, try to think of some topics in the gaming space where you think you know a lot. Your first goal is to get a trickle of traffic that you can watch and study and test. For each topic, do some searches and look at results 5-10. Can you write a better article than at least one of those? Give it a shot. Don't worry whether these get almost no traffic (you do need *some* traffic, but it's astounding how easy it is to get a trickle of traffic). In some ways that's just as well, so when you write an article that does get traffic, your site has some content beyond the landing page.
Install some analytics software immediately. This may be provided by your webhost and be log-based (i.e. analyzing your Apache logs) or you could install something like Google Analytics (if you are 100% whitehat) or statcounter or the like if you are pushing the edge or just don't want Google to have your data. At this point you only want to see how many visitors you're getting, what they're looking at, where they come from, and what search terms they used, if any. If visitors are coming from a forum or a blog, visit that source. Make a comment. Let them know you're a real person who cares about the site.
If you have search engine traffic, you'll be surprised at the variety of terms they use to arrive at your pages. This list of terms becomes your guide to new content. That list will be more valuable than anything anyone would throw out here for suggestions and anything that you might find in lists of high-paying keywords.
I am no expert at making money on line, but as one example, I saw a few people arriving at my site (about 10 per month) using a certain two-word phrase. I spent about an hour writing a page that was more on-topic, put in a link from the page they were landing on, and made about $50 over the next month. And by the way, neither of the two word terms are high-value terms, let alone the two-word phrase. Granted, $50 is chump change, but I didn't actually expect any income from that page and was just after the traffic. I think of the $50 as a bonus for my one hour of work.
I don't know anything about gaming, so I'm maybe saying something that makes no sense, but I hope the principle is clear. If you have a page on say cheat sequences for Excalibur: Buck Rogers edition and you find that you're getting visitors (even just a couple) who are looking for Buck Rogers add-ons, you immediately write a page on Buck Rogers add-ons and link to it from the original page.
Keep watching the logs and building traffic. Don't bother with Adsense yet until you have some good traffic, or at least make it very secondary (below the fold). You don't want to turn people off with ads all over. In my limited experience with Adsense, you aren't going to make anything off 100 visitors a month unless you have super high-paying keywords. In the meantime, though, it hurts nothing to have an amazon affiliate link on, say, a review of a game. That can earn some usually terribly small amount of money, but more important at this stage, it gives actual, useful information to the visitor. It's not just an ad. It is an enhancement to your article in some way and many visitors will appreciate that you provide a link (at least when I see an Amazon affiliate link, I am happy to pay the commission in order to save me two minutes of searching).
Now, let's say you're starting to see some traffic, you've got a few pages indexed. You can actually come up for some pretty specific longtail searches. Now start looking for keywords that might pay well and have good traffic. You can get started with the Google Adwords traffic estimator, various paid and free keyword tools and so on. You'll get a really rough idea of what these terms will pay if you just use the Google adwords traffic estimator to see how much you would have to bid to get clicks. It will also give you an idea of how much search traffic you get. This is a rudimentary tool, but it's a starting point.
Now start building those pages and probably at that point it's worth it to start putting on some Adsense and see how it goes. Use channels in Adsense so that you can see which pages are earning and which aren't.
I'm far from an expert on this stuff, but I think that gives you a bit more detailed plan and will get you started. If you want real money, you'll have to get more sophisticated that this and I can't really hep much with that, but other people here can.
Good luck
[edited by: ergophobe at 5:52 pm (utc) on Dec. 13, 2007]
If you're doing a blog and are using Wordpress, get the Headspace2 plugin. It has push-button install of the code for a few analytics packages. All you need to do is sign up for an account, give headspace2 your userid for whatever analytics services you're using, and WHAM! you have analytics installed and running.
PS. I revised the original post a bit. Not sure if it's worth reading again, but I didn't expect you to read it so soon!
Frankly, I don't know anything about what you can and can't do with google pages. My gut reaction, though, is that it's worth it to pony up for an account on a shared server with your own domain. I recently saw someone say he got a year's worth of hosting and a domain name for $30. There are lots of places (probably hundreds) where you can get an account and a domain for under $100/year. You only need to make about $0.28/day to break even on that.
