The real secrets to do well with Adsense and rank good in the search engines

Hi there,
I thought to write about my little, personal experience about content sites and how to make money with target advertising i.e. Adsense.

When I started my first aim was to make money, receive tons of visits by having millions of pages displayed, and reasoning like "what if I had 1 click on every page, say on the 10% of millions of pages, whatever the content is.. I would be rich!". This scheme was not working, my sites that I did in this way never worked and it was a failure.

The second approach was based on the philosophy "you won't make money if you won't spend money". So I started looking for software, tutorials, ebooks, whatever it could be sold on the net. And you know what? It was another failure. 99% of this stuff is pure crap, written by people like you and me that is ripping you off money to tell you things that you can learn and discover in the same way, just doing your homework and fair research. I am sure that there are valuable tools around there to make great money with Adsense, but I am not aware about them.

The third and last approach was the only one that granted me the first check from Google Adsense and since then I am growing and growing. Here's how I did.

First of all, you will need a radical change of mind. Yes, stop thinking to make money from your sites and to rank well in the search engines. Your first and only aim must be to build a quality site, with quality and original content. You will need to add real value to your pages, and make your visitors happy to have found you. When evaluating your pages, you must say to yourself "would I be happy to see such a page? would I find valuable and good information? would I come back here to find more?". Thus, you must think to your visitors. Stick in your mind that you must rank well in your visitors head, and not in the search engine rankings This is my golden rule.

Second, you must sit down, relax and think at what you are really good at. Noone is able to do everything in the world. In the same way, you won't be able to build your site from zero just with notepad. You will need scripts, a layout, and content. So, you must be a designer, a programmer, a writer, and last but not least an innovator. You must put innovations in your site and bring that original thing that nobody has. Obviously, unless you are a pure geek you cannot do this all by yourself. Hence, if you don't have friends or if you don't want to share your revenue with others, you must rely in external resources. And wait, hold on! I haven't told you to get your credit card yet. Most probably you will find all you need on the web, and that is mostly true.

If you don't know HTML or CSS, then it's time to start learning the basics. Find some good tutorials on the net (http://www.w3.org/) and start practise. You won't need that skill to create pages. More probably, you will need this to do some minor edits and tweaks. Additional knowledge of basic PHP and mySQL is a plus. Make your own research on forums (DP is king for this ) ) and on google to learn. Remember this: with the proper research you will find everything for free, so think twice, 3 times, 4 times before paying for something you can find for free somewhere else.

Then, what about scripts. You can write them by yourself, or get free ones. www.hotscripts.com is a good place where to start finding scripts.

Regarding content, you can write it by yourself if you are a good writer, otherwise look for free article sites around the net. As a plus, you can find someway to make someone write for you for free, for instance if you build a site of poems and ask people to submit their poems. This is just an idea, you will find yours by yourself!

For designs, if you are not a designer check www.oswd.org . It is a free template repository where people will submit their own layout for free sharing. Take the one you like most and start using it: you will need those HTML and CSS basic skills to make your edits and customize the layout to your needs!

As a final note, learn some basic SEO to optimize your pages, but don't exceed overdoing it. Avoid things like keyword stuffing: remember to make your pages user friendly and that alt tags are for describing pictures, not putting keywords! Do your best to optimize your title tag, and your meta tags. Don't bother optimizing keywords for content: your content must be a quality one and you are not targetting any keyword. You are just writing fine and quality related content for your site. Period!

You will specialize on one of these fields, and for the rest you will look at the net. You can make some money in the field you are specialized by looking for freelancer jobs (for instance, www.getafreelancer.com or www.ifreelance.com the DP marketplace, or other forums) for you to get hired, or whatever else comes into your mind.

This is what I am doing and it works wonders for me if you have further tips to share, you are welcome!

Falco85

 

Good post!

 

VERY good post. Especially as it relates to AdSense revenue, but this can apply to affiliate programs as well. Customers can sense a 1 stop overnight shop over a fully dedicated, well written and programmed site.

I myself do occasionally give the comment that you must spend money to make money, but I try to elaborate WHERE you need to spend the money based upon your goals. My money spent is on advertising for Search Engine Marketing, and quality links or directory listings for Search Engine Optimization.

However, the most powerful and BEST suggestion is what you just wrote. Thanks for the post.

 

great stuff.
thanks mate!

 

Very nice post

Thankyou for your thoughts

 

this is a nice suggestion,, kind of similar to some post, but detail and your own word. good job!

 

I disagree, I have made big sites with just notepad.

 

Thanks everyone

latehorn, what I was trying to say is that making sites with notepad from scratch it would be really time consuming now. Do you imagine building a forum board with notepad, or just any other script that you can find free and well tested somewhere else? My personal and humble opinion is that I am not that good in design, nor in programming. So I concentrate myself in writing, and try alternative ways for the rest.

 

Nice advices, great post

 

Some really good advices, great post .

 

Some people actually do write their forum board using only notepad It's time consuming, but rewarding at the same time since you can enhance your programming skills.

By the way, nice article on the subject of Content is King! I wish people would dedicate themselves to write quality content instead of "selling content", which is content with actually no life nor goal which makes it useless to the visitor who just passing by.

 

good post indeed.

I have come, in a sense, from exactly the other end of your journey to a reasonably similiar place.

I started as a specialist freelancer/contractor in corporate software (SAP), slowly moved into the Web side of SAP, then started to suppliment my income with various web-based businesses with revenues from advertising.

I dont find it surprising that so many people seem to have undergone the same journey of realisation as you have (having read many accounts on here), as its tempting to start with your simplest and most obvious idea first (ie publishing huge reems of 'usually duplicate' content onto the web and SEO for traffic).

The thing about everyone's simplest and most obvious idea in a reasonably mature market (the adsense market), is that the barriers to entry are nearly always non-existant, this leads to an unstable business model that will most probably be fleeting. Or worse, you enter a market that is unfeasibly competitive (like basic no-frills Adsense publishing) and just end up trying to scrap around for pence (or cent if you are American).

Anyways, very good post. Its great to hear that you are someone that has been on a journey and learnt from it

 

Ade355, I like your contribution to this thread and I agree with you when you say that this is a very unstable model of market. As someone said on this forum time ago (if I don't recall bad it was Nintendo on one of his posts): don't put all your eggs in one basket only. You cannot say if your sites are going to have the same CTR of today, or even if you traffic will stay steady.

This is a real challenging market in which you just need a small change in google serps to get dropped and lose your traffic. You need a constant update on what is going on in the scene (i.e. read, read, read), and you must be humble enough to be ready to destroy and restart a project from scratch if you feel you have taken the wrong direction.

You should also have a look to other ventures as well, such as domain investing (in a very low low part, being this a speculative deal), affiliate marketing, and more.

And most of all you shouldn't ever drop your freelancing jobs, since you build yourself a reputation when working as freelancer, and a major job could come at any point

So, if you like all of this as your hobby or if you are trying to do is for a living, you need to be ready to change everyday and work really hard. I won't do this as my living revenue, this is just my hobby but I am very proud that I am able now to receive checks at home, though they for very small amounts, and repay my hosting, my internet connection, and my computer. It is way too much funny doing this rather than playing a computer game to me

 

Thank you for the great insight! I have been developing sites for companies for years now, but am only recently attempting to create sites for myself that I can monetize. I do appreciate the real world experience and hope that others like yourself post their own.

 

I'd like to add something which I suppose is a kind of a sideways AS tip as we should all be doing it anyhow.. Optimise the hell out of your pages. Make sure they are loading as fast as grease through a goose and you won't lose potential AS clickers to sheer boredom.

I had referral AS on the bottom of my pages for ages but it wasn't until I checked on this BASIC step that people started clicking on those buttons. You know what that tells me - there were so many people skipping off my pages before they were fully loaded that many NEVER saw the footer AS.

 

It's a nicely written article, but contradicting. It says to come up with original unique content, then says to go get them from HotScripts.com and free article repositories. I'm confused.

 

You write the content, you get the script to show your website from hotscripts. Might have been a bit confusing but that's the general idea. Most writer nowday just write and don't want to mess with programming languages so they'll get scripts from hotscripts, install them and use them for their website(s).

 

Yeah, I see what you are saying now in regards to HotScripts.

 

What is confusing? Falco says if you can write, write original conten. If you can't write, source articles from around the net. If you can write scripts do so, if not, source them and if you can hang together a good design, do that for yourself, if not go and get a template.

I take falco's point to be - don't look for free lunch type of answers. What you need is already on the net and you might have to research, negotiate, work for it yourself or buy what you need but get-rich.quick ebooks and as secret BS are time and money wasters. We all have our strenghts and out ¡r weaknesses. Use what you have and research or outsource the rest.

Incidentally as far as content goes, here is another little nugget for the pot. If you are in a particular niche that supports advertisers you can sell sponsored pages. Imagine - advertisers paying YOU for the right to put their content on your site, but if you are going to go that route you have to maintain editorial control over the PR hype they want to submit and insist they make it valuable and informative.

 

Very nice article indeed. That's the one thing newbies mess up on -- they skip the first part of your step completely and go right for the money making schemes.