Archive for the ‘Questions and Answers’ Category

30
Oct
2009

How do you use WordPress to run a website?

1 Comment

WordPress is a blogging package right? Well if you think that you’re absolutely right but only partially. WordPress, which is most likely the worlds most popular blogging package is also a great piece of software to power small business websites. In fact, I’ve used WordPress to power websites such as:

In all of these cases as well as many, many others WordPress was used to create and manage complex websites which skyrocketed to the top of Google’s Search Engine Results Pages because they used WordPress as a powerful content management tool, making the website much easier to manage and therefore a better tool for busy marketing staff.

How do you use WordPress to run a website?

Actually, that’s the best part of WordPress. Once you’ve signed up for a great hosting package such as Bluehost’s $6.95 per month solution, you can install WordPress by simply clicking their one step installation process and voila! You’re website is setup with the world’s most powerful blogging package instantly.

So then, how do you use WordPress to run a website? Once you’ve installed WordPress you’ll need to make changes to a few key files, called template files. These template files are what control how your website looks to visitors. Here’s what you need to know:

  • The header.php file is what appears on all pages at the top of your page
  • The footer.php file is what appears on all pages at the bottom of your website
  • functions.php is where you store common PHP code to call if from all pages, most often you can ignore this
  • index.php is the heart and soul of your website, technically you can remove all the other .php files and format just this page to make every page on your website look the same.
  • pages.php is used to format content edited in the Pages tab of the WordPress control panel
  • single.php is used to format content edited in the Posts tab, by seperating these two you can format pages (such as About Us or Contact Us) to look different than content pages (such as a press release or CEO blog)
  • categories.php is used to format pages which list posts, archives.php is similar but for tags
  • search.php is used to format the results of a search

Once you’ve changed the look and feel of your website, you can use the built in WordPress editor to allow different members of your team to post content to the website, add marketing or press releases and even adjust prices!

You can get started with your company website today but signing up for a great hosting account, just $6.95 per month with BlueHost.

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03
Oct
2009

IntegraScan Scam Prevention Tool

1 Comment

This has got to fall under one of the coolest things I’ve seen in the Internet in at least a week, maybe two. The IntegraScan Scam Prevention Tool let’s you do a criminal record check on anybody … as long as you know their SSN.

I think this is a pretty cool idea, albeit a little creepy if you’re on the receiving end of an unwanted scan. What it could be used for is a quick check on new employees or sub contractors, especially in today’s market when a lot of people are down on their luck.

Here’s what the IntegraScan SSN Verify will give you:

  • Verification of an individual’s SSN
  • Any alias names they may have
  • Verification of the individual’s age
  • Verification of their current and previous addresses

What do you think?

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01
Sep
2009

Link Building Question & Answer

2 Comments

When I posted Bella’s question at Four Quick SEO Tips yesturday I mentioned that I love to hear from everybody and that your questions are always appreciated. I want to thank Lee from http://myblog2day.com/ for posting the following link building question and take a moment to answer.

Thanks for sharing these Chris! I have a question about getting links from high PR site. In fact, I’m doing a new link building by register in high PR site (PR4-PR7) and insert my link in the profile that points to my blog, so the profile page will be PR0 or no PR at all. In this case, is this type of link increases the blog ranking for the keyword since it’s just a PR0 page links to the blog (Even though people said that is a PR4-PR7 site link to the blog)?

Regards,
Lee

What Lee’s asking about is the value of linking from a low PageRank page on a high PageRank website and if that has any value at all but before I answer, I want to explain that concept to some people who may not be aware of the difference.

PageRank, as we’ve discussed before is a rank (0-10) which Google assigns every indexed webpage and website on the planet. Every time a page links to another page, it deducts a portion of it’s own PageRank and gives it to the receiving page. If it links to 10 pages from a single page, it transfers 1/10th of its PageRank value to each of the 10 links.

Now, a page may appear in the Google Tool bar as a PR0, even if it’s on a PR5 website but that’s an error or more specifically a flaw in the update routines but one that is well enough known that it doesn’t impact SEO value transfers within Google. The reason is simple, if my website hosts a page which is linked to from other pages on my website and my website has a PR value of 5, all pages which are links and interlinked must also by default have an assumed PR value of 5. In lay mens terms? If the domain your posting to has a PR value, all the pages interlinked on that website have the same PR value.

So to answer Lee’s question, if the website you’re posting your link on has a high PR ranking don’t worry so much about the rank of an individual page. Instead worry if people who are visiting that page are likely to find value in your website being listed there!

Remember, if you have a question I’d love to answer it for you!

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31
Aug
2009

Four Quick SEO Tips

4 Comments

I received a great question this week via my Model Mayhem account (it’s like Facebook for models and photographers) from a website owner named Bella Valentine, here’s her email and what I had to say about it, I’m sharing this (with her permission) because I believe Bella’s questions are the same questions many people have about Search Engine Optimization and online marketing.

Hey,

Saw your post in the forums and I was hoping you could help me out with a few questions that I have…

  • How do you find related blogs?
  • Do you write your site’s link as the signature when posting a comment on such blogs? (I’ve been looking for blogs that have the slot for your website’s url but have come only across one that was set up that way)
  • Wouldn’t that be considered spamming?
  • Should I try to stay away from sites that have a worst ranking then mine on Alexa or do all links back help?

Thanks,
Bella

Hi Bella, thanks for asking!

You can find related blogs using Google’s blog search function, it’s found under the “More” tab on Google or at http://blogsearch.google.com/. If for example you’re hoping to improve your ranking with Denver models, search Google for that phrase and you’ll see 92,000+ blogs appear but you’ll want to play with the keywords until you find the right combination to return the best results for you.

Many of these blogs will have a comment form at the bottom of the page and on these forms you will see a space for your name, email, website and comment. Now you have to be careful, some web masters such as myself frown on “keyword spam” which is when you replace your name with keywords such as “Denver Model”, so instead I always suggest people using their name in addition to the keywords they’d like to leave. For example, I will always delete people using “Denver Model” but look the other way for “Bella, the Denver Model” or “Bella a model from Denver”. I appreciate self promotion is part of the game, but not at the cost of my site’s reputation.

On that point, I will also point out that 75% of people surveyed prefer the Ben & Jerry’s brand vs. Häagen-Dazs yet … 75% of people surveyed prefer Häagen-Dazs ice cream. Why? Because as people, we like people … so website owners and other surfers are far more likely to “connect” to you if you’re a person rather than a keyword.

There is a fine line between blog spam and self promotion. I tend to think of it as the same line men often cross in a bar, keep it genuine and nobody gets hurt but when your comments are fake, false or generic … web site owners will reject you. Instead of leaving generic comments which will get flags as SPAM, only leave comments which add to the texture of the article or benefit the website owner. You’ll be surprised how quickly your comments get you traffic when you’re helping others in a positive way.

Commenting on websites with a lower PageRank value will not hurt your website, in fact each successful link regardless of where it comes from is either positive or neutral, but never negative. This is because Google knows that you can not control who links to you, so they don’t punish you for poor incoming links.

That said … the higher the PageRank of a link coming to you the better.

For example, if you can get a link from Model Mayhem (5) to your website it’s better than a PR 1, but a link from Apple (9) is better still. There’s a complex math formula that is used … way to complex for me to explain or even understand but basically, in the simplest terms possible assume that every PR point is worth double the value before it so … a link from a PR1 is worth 1 point while a PR2 is 2, a PR3 is 4, PR4 is 8, PR5 is 16, PR6 is 32, PR7 is 64, PR8 is 128, PR9 is 256 … OK, so that scale is completely made up but it holds some analytical water and more to the point, it reinforced that incoming links from high ranking sites is better but lower ranking sites are not worse.

Chris

If you have a question about SEO, why not ask me? I’m always happy to answer your questions and look forward to hearing from people!

bella Four Quick SEO Tips image

Want to learn more about Bella’s website? Visit her at http://www.BellaValentine.com.

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20
May
2009

Questions about Keywords and Link Anchor Text

4 Comments
Hi Chris,
Just a couple of questions if you have a moment… By commenting on your website and staying in the top 10 commenters I see I’m getting hundreds of links to my website from yours and its steadily going up. Because they are all from the same site, just how much value do the links have as far as Google is concerned?
Also, its supposed to be better if the link anchor text has your key words in it. I’m just using Mel and for my last comment “10 simple things every housewife can do to make money online” I added “house sitting” after my name and that comment wasn’t counted. Is it possible for you to add those words to my name so when I comment in future that is what’s shown in the top 10 commenters?
Thanks very much for the opportunity to get these back links.
Regards,
Mel
Hi Mel,

Google will credit you for both links from one site as well as multiple links from the same site. I would suggest that to really optimize your back link value (both on my website as well as others) you take the time to do a couple of things.

First, there is value in keywording your post so for example “Mel @ House Swap Holidays” as the author (the site uses your last keyword in the comments) this will help a little, but to be honest my math on it shows that you’re better to remain personable. Google’s clever and they know what you’re doing.

Secondly, don’t link to the root of your site. Take the time to link each comment to a post or page on your website. For example, instead of linking to http://mindahome.com.au/ each time you post, linking to http://mindahome.com.au/questions/house-sitting will increase your PageRank value on that specific page. Spend a week linking to one specific page, then do another. I tend to link my comment text to low PR / high AdSense value pages, this helps me not only bring it visitors but AdSense cash!

Hope that helps and as always, thanks for visiting and taking the time to post to my site.

Chris

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15
May
2009

How do I make money with AdSense?

8 Comments

I think the Internet is awesome. There, I said it. The Internet is one of those amazing online places where anybody can make a great living and earn money while working from home. The web doesn’t make you go to work, it lets you stay home with your kids, work part time or even just earn cash after you’ve retired but the trick is that you need to know how to do it and I’m pretty easy going about telling people how to do it here on my site.

Get a website

The first step to making money on the Internet is to get a website. For those of you who think getting a website is hard work, you’re insane. Building a website is hard work but having one? It’s as easy as clicking a button and watching a few videos so step one to making money at home, sign up for a great hosting company like Bluehost and everything you need to get started.

Once you’ve signed up, installing an easy to manage website tool like WordPress is free and easy.

Get some advertising

What’s the biggest hurdle to making money on the Internet? The money dummy. Luckily Google makes it incredibly easy by offering a program called AdSense. How it works is pretty simple, you publish a website and they supply advertisers that what to put ads on websites about your subject matter. The more people visit your website, the more people see your ads and the more money you make. 

Write some content

So now you have a website and you have the ads setup so the next trick is to write content that people really want to read. Write often and write well, otherwise there is only one trick … write about something that people care to read about.

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14
May
2009

How do I get to the top of Google?

12 Comments

So what’s the secret to getting to the top of Google’s search engine? Nothing. There is no secret and there’s no reason to pay an SEO firm or consultant to get you there, honestly … you can do it yourself if you have the time to learn and implement the basic advice of people who know what they’re talking about.

First, let’s establish that one simple fact … there are no secrets. In fact, everything you need to know is online at the Webmaster Guidelines at Google and for those of you  need even more help, there is plenty of places here on my site to read about what Google wants.

Now, I should point out that I’m not a Google expert or even an SEO specialist (although I do offer similar services). I’m an organic marketing specialist if that title even exists … in order to do that I believe a website must meet three basic guidelines:

Technical

A web page is a computer document, much the same as a document produced by Microsoft Word and just like word processing documents it has to be opened and read by other computers. Now, we’ve all tried opening a WordPerfect document in Word or an OpenOffice resume in Pages and it always ends the same right? …. it doesn’t work. Why not?

The reason it doesn’t work is simple, the basic structure of how the documents are written are not compatible with the software trying to open them. The web works the exact same way. Web browsers from Lynx to Internet Explorer open your web page documents and read the content. If they can’t read the content, they can’t display the document … makes sense right? OK so here’s the kicker … Google uses a tool called a web spider to crawl your website in order to read the content and add it to their index. If your web page is poorly written, Google can’t open it and has to move onto another website.

So rule number one to getting to the top of Google? Make sure that Google can read your website.

Design

There’s a catch-22 when it comes to Google, Google doesn’t care about design but Google cares how your web content is designed. Technically, it couldn’t care less about your websites looks but it does care about how your website is structured, how the content is organized and how the overall site appears to both spiders and people visiting your web page.

In order to make sure that your website ranks well with Google, you’ll have to ensure that your documents are properly structures, the content is readable and that it appears the same to search engines as it does to people. Often times, I have clients ask if they can upload Flash version of their website but hide Google friendly text in a hidden layer somewhere on the page … sure you can but that’s not being very honest is it? 

Rule number two to getting your website at the top of Google? Design content for people, not robots.

Content

Rule number three, have great content.

Honestly, I can’t make it more clear than what I’ve written here. Take a moment to stop thinking about Google as a company or a website to beat and start thinking about it as a group of people who are working towards a common goal, as I’ve written before … they’re very smart people and they spend a lot of time trying to make the Internet a better place, so when they catch people trying to scam them by breaking these simple rules … don’t be surprised to find your website banned.

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11
May
2009

How do I remove specific ads from my AdSense ads?

4 Comments

competitive 300x210 How do I remove specific ads from my AdSense ads? imageIf you’re anything like me, running ads on your website isn’t just an option it’s a great way to make money but sometimes there are ads that I simply don’t want on my website so I need to tell Google to block them but how? Actually it’s really very simple, it’s called the Competitive Ad Filter from Google and it’s part of the AdSense tool.

To block an advertisement, you simply need to place the destination URL (where the ad is linked to) into the Competitive Ad Filter dialog box and within a few hours, Google AdSense will stop serving ads to that domain. Pretty easy right? Well there is one problem … how do you know where the ad is linking to?

Finding the desination URL of an AdSense Ad

First off, do not click your own ads. 

Wait … let me repeat that again … do not click the ads. If you click ads on your own website, you’ll earn money from the program and violate your Terms of Service. Google will figure it out (they’re pretty clever) so just don’t do it.

Instead, you’re going to have to do a little bit of detective work but it’s super easy.

  1. View the source code of your webpage. To do this, right click or look under the View or Edit menus for an option
  2. Search for the phrase googlesyndication.com/pagead/adclick which is how every Google ad looks.
  3. After you’ve found the correct ad, look in the code and you’ll see a value titled &adurl= along with a domain name address. For example &adurl=http://www.thisismyurl.com so the domain name that you’d like to stop serving ads for is www.thisismyurl.com.

Now that you know the domain you’d like to cancel ads for, simply visit the Competitive Ad Filter  and add the link.

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04
May
2009

How can I make $100 a day from my blog?

19 Comments

One of the most intersting things about my job is that I get to look behind the scenes at dozens of websites ranging from small ‘mom and pop’ style blogs to large web magazines run by multinationals and do you know what I’ve discovered? We’re all in the same boat.

Statistically that is, we’re all pretty much the same. There’s a theory in retail advertising which states that assuming all other aspects to be equal, the only determining factor between revenues is square footage. Simply put … if there are two stores in town selling hockey sticks and each has a good location, spends the same on advertising and treats customers well then the only reason one store sells more sticks than the second is because it is bigger. I think there’s a similar concept at work on the web.

Size Matters

Assuming that your website is the same as another and that you have roughly the same visitor volume, you’ve both been online for the same amount of time and you both practice roughly the same traffic building strategies, in theory your two websites should earn roughly the same amount of revenue but if your website posts twice the volume of content, your website will generate additional traffic and therefore money.

Content Matters

The other determining factor to your income level is content. Say for example that the two websites described above each produce exactly the same volume of content, logic dictates that they will generate roughly the same volume of advertisement clicks right? Wrong. Once of the more interesting things that I’ve noticed watching dozens of websites is that some sites such as cooking and home repair websites generate a significantly higher volume of clicks over technical websites such as mine. This isn’t to say that they get more clicks overall but that they receive a higher click rate pre thousand visitors.

The other reason that content matters is the value of the ads located on your website. Renovations for example has an average cost of $4 per click through for ads as opposed to $2 for web design. If you take both the value (50% higher) and the increased click through rate per thousand of non-technical website, you’ll notice very quickly that websites which focus on non computer content are more likely to earn money.

Why is this? I actually have a pretty simple explanation for it in that ads on web design sites tend to be repetitive and people surfing for technical details are more immune to advertising due to increased exposure to web content.

So, how can I make $100 from my blog?

Step one, if my analysis is correct … don’t run a technology blog :) Actually that’s great advice but since I am running a technology blog (actually I run closer to 20 blogs on a variety of subjects) what I really need to do is understand the statistics of running a blog which luckily, Google makes available for free with Analytics and Keyword Tools.

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01
May
2009

After I’ve launched a website, is it a lot of work?

14 Comments

Depending on the purpose of your website (What’s Your Revenue Model?) you should anticipate an investment of roughly 10% of the cost to develop the website each month in maintain it. Since small business owners often misvalue their time, let’s assume for this argument that your time is worth at least $20 per hour.

That means that in order for your website to succeed, if you spent $1000 to create your website (or 50 hours) you should be spending a minimum of five hours per month dedicated to your websites success.

Obviously this varies depending on the type of site that you’re running but I would say small business owners should plan to spend at least five hours a month on their website performing some fairly basic functions:

  • Reviewing website analytic reports to know who’s visiting them (and what people are doing on the site)
  • Adding fresh content as well as updating or removing old content
  • Promoting the website on other industry and related websites

In the case of websites which operate exclusively online (ie there is no retail or business to support), maintaining the website should be a full time job.

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28
Apr
2009

How do I get more people to find and visit my web site?

10 Comments

First and foremost, write better content more often.

Then, stop asking how to get people to find your website and start asking yourself why would people want to find your website. The trick to the Internet is that it focusses the marketing drive on the consumer, not the company so get out of the ’90s and start trying to make it about the end user instead of your business.

How to make it about the end user

When I was with the US Beer Drinking Team I came up with a marketing concept called Me Marketing, at its core was the simple belief that everybody was (in their own mind at least) special, so if you wanted to market to them all you needed to do was ensure that your business or product solved a problem that they believed they had.

I wrote an article a while back called 25 Things to Do to Increase Your Website Traffic Right Now, which offers some advice for people just starting out as well as a recent post entitled 25 simple ways to make WordPress SEO friendly which  talks about some of the things you can do to make your website more Search Engine Friendly but remember the best way to build readers isn’t to create SEO friendly content, it’s to create content people actually want to read and share with their friends.

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27
Apr
2009

How much does a new web site cost?

5 Comments

Websites are one of the funniest things to quote, literally a website range from absolutely nothing (Build a Website) or just $100 (Can you put up a website for less than $100?) to thousands, tens of thousands or even millions or dollars to build so how do I effectively answer a question like How much does a new web site cost?

Let’s look at a couple of different methods for estimating what you should spend on the web.

Do it yourself.

Technically, everything you need to build an effective website is already on your computer or can be downloaded from the Internet for free. As long as you have access to a few basic things, you’re set and the cost of building a website is nothing. Here’s what you’ll need:

  1. A text editor such as Notepad or Textedit
  2. An FTP client to connect to your hosting provider
  3. A hosting account on a web hosting provider
  4. A domain name
  5. Basic HTML skills and/or a copy of WordPress
  6. Knowledge of PHP or similar programming language

Hiring a Professional

If you don’t know how to do it yourself or prefer to hire a professional, the cost to build a website is pretty difficult to estimate because it involves two factors;

  1. How complicated is your website
  2. How expensive is your web professional

When you’re estimating how much time your website will take, I think it’s important to get three quotes from three qualified web professionals. As tempting as it is to work with just one, when it comes to the future of your business it’s a great idea to get a few different opinions but as for the quote itself? Expect it to range dramatically.

Sample Pricing

While I can’t speak for other designers / developers I can tell you that I know many web professionals who price themselves in one of three price ranges:

  • Entry Level – $20 – $35 / hr
  • Mid Career – $40 – $60 / hr
  • Senior Level – $75 – $100 / hr
  • Webmasters – $150 (+) /hr

One of the problems answering the question however is that the amount of time that it takes for somebody to do a job varies, even within the same career levels. For example, my time to SEO a website is fairly low because it’s what I specialize in but my great friend Chris Bavota does it just as fast even though he considers himself less experienced. On the other hand, my custom programming is faster in both prototyping and execution … his rich media on the other hand? Faster and cleaner than I could ever dream. This is why the same project, quoted from three designers / developers can be dramatically different.

A basic website – If your looking for a small website, using WordPress as a content manager, minor customizations to a theme, advice to select some great plugins and installation on a new domain name you should expect to pay for anywhere from three to ten hours of time plus consulting of course.

A large business website – Larger websites are significant investments for a company, while they’re equally difficult to judge one measure that I’ve found fairly accurate in the past is to look at the companies annual print advertising budget and assume the development of a website to compete will cost 75% of the existing budget for the first year and 50% for each additional year. 

For example, if your yellow page ad budget is $150 per month ($1,800/yr), you should anticipate your website costing ~$1,350 once completed. This of course represents between 10 and 60 hours of time for a web professional, depending on their experience and level.

A website just like X -  Just to put it out there (because I’m asked the about twice a month), building a website like another popular site is possible, so here are some quick estimates:

  • Facebook – 4,000 hours development & 300 hours per month marketing / maintenance
  • MySpace – ditto.
  • Elance – 2,500 hours development & 200 hours per month maintenance
  • eBay – 2,000 hours development & 200 hours per month maintenance
  • Plenty of Fish – 2,000 hours development & 200 hours per month maintenance

What should you ask your web design firm?

There are a couple of things that I would always recommend you ask your web design firm before getting started with them.

  • Talk to some previous clients to see how responsive and supportive the firm was
  • Ask a few previous clients what the cost / timeline overruns turned out to be
  • Did they find working with the team pleasant?

Web designers are notoriously grumpy sometimes, so you should be able to forgive a little bit of that (it’s a stressful job, like working in a kitchen) but what matters (also like working in a kitchen) is how well the final piece turned out and if it got out on time.

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27
Apr
2009

How do you move a website to a new domain?

10 Comments

“… changing your IP address, webhost, domain name, blog template, and blog version all at the same time is the exact opposite of what you should normally do. It’s better to change only one thing at a time so that if something goes horribly wrong, you can trace what caused it.”

 - Matt Cutts (http://www.dullest.com/blog/switching-things-around/)

Why move a website?

First and foremost, why would you move a website? Well there’s a few reasons that I can think of right off the top of my head:

  • Your old domain name was inappropriate
  • You lost your old domain
  • You decided to change focus
  • You started on a sub domain and related to a full

What ever the reason, sometimes we have to move domains so the real question is … how do you do it right?

How to move a domain properly

Moving WordPress

First, lets assume that you’re using WordPress.

  1. Log into your phpMyAdmin or control panel and export the WordPress database to an SQL file.
  2. Save the SQL to your hard drive and open it in a text editor
  3. Search for the path of your old domain (i.e. thisismyurl.com) and replace it with your new domain (i.e. getawaygraphics.com) If you’re changing the path, (/blog/) to the root or something as well please make sure to search for the whole string!
  4. Search again! 
  5. Change your server paths. This is a UNIX friendly path that the server uses to identify where you are on that hard drive. For example it may look like /var/www/t/thisismy/public_html/. If you don’t know your server path use my phpinfo() plugin for WordPress to find it.

Installing WordPress on a new domain

Now that you’ve altered your SQL for your old WordPress website,

  1. Install a copy of WordPress on your new domain
  2. Open your phpMyAdmin or control panel and paste the edited SQL into your SQL query box
  3. Wait …
  4. Open your new website in a separate web browser. Assuming everything worked, you should be up and running.

One final note, I always like to re-save my permalink options at this point to ensure the server writes a proper .htaccess file as sometimes it seems to act up.

Search Engine Optimization for the new domain

Next, you’ll want to make sure that the search engines know that you’re new domain is the correct domain and that your old domain is no longer active. You can do this using what is called a 302 redirect. Pretty fancy right? Not really, we’re geeks but … it’s important and that’s where Matt’s post Switching things around comes in handy.

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26
Apr
2009

Is it possible to schedule videos on YouTube?

6 Comments

Well, the simple answer is no but … as well most things on the web, there’s a great work around (thanks to Donace over at the Nexus for pointing it out to me via Twitter).

YouTubeStep One, upload your video but mark it private to ensure that it’s not live. This is always a good idea as it allows you to edit it online, change the title or keywords etc. before it’s live.

Step Two, mark it public on the proper day.

This isn’t nearly elegant as the built in timer in WordPress (How to schedule a post on WordPress) but it does have the advantage of allowing you to upload massive volumes of videos at the same time (I set mine to upload videos overnight) and I can release them on a schedule.

Scheduling a Reminder

Believe it or not, running a website or releasing videos is really hard work. Why? Mostly because it’s off in cyberspace and I forget to update the content! To get around this, one of the first tricks I used was to ask my wife to remind me but that got old very quickly so instead I started using iCal from Apple to remind me. If you’re on a PC you can use Outlook or if you’re looking for a free alternative, use the calendar built into Google’s Gmail!

The benefit of using something like Gmail is that the event may be shared with a group so if you’re not available somebody else on the team can do it for you.

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22
Apr
2009

How to make money with Google ads.

5 Comments

So I received my first genuine question today from my new “ask a question” form and it was a doozy, Lisa from Southern Ontario wants to know how to make money with Google ads. This is a great question because it addresses a few others along the way.

How do I make money with Google ads?

An example of ads which appear here on my website.

An example of ads which appear here on my website.

Google runs two programs in tandem, the first is called Google Adwords and it allows business owners such as yourself to buy advertising on the Google network. Adwords allows people to bid on the amount they’d like to pay for an advertisement and then, if their bid is high enough to win out over the competition the ads appear on either the Google search results associated with the keywords or websites associated with the keywords.

This is where the second program, called AdSense comes in. AdSense allows website owners such as me to place Google’s Adword campaigns on my website. You’ll notice for example in my search results there is a banner ad (728×90 pixels) that appears as well as an ad in the comments below. These banners are created automatically from Google and appear in my site content, based on the keywords for the pages that I’ve included.

 

How do I install Google Adsense on my website?

Once you’ve setup your ads by choosing the size, colors and type of ads that you would like to appear Google will present you with code such as the folllow:

[source lang="javascript"]<script type="text/javascript">
<!– google_ad_client = "pub-9144171931162286";
/* 728×90, created 9/21/08 */
google_ad_slot = "2146157422";
google_ad_width = 728;
google_ad_height = 90;
//–>
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"></script>[/source]

To place this code into your website there are a couple of options. If you’re using WordPress for example you can place it into your sidebar using the text widget, or you can edit your theme files to place the code in the appropriate places. Sometimes this is a little difficult for non programmers, so if you need a hand you should post a request at http://jobs.wordpress.net/

 

How do I sell ad space using Google ads?

That’s actually the best part! You don’t. Google automatically matches you with the most content focusses advertisers from around the planet. Essentially, Google takes all the matching requests from its Adwords program and searches for websites in the AdSense program to serve ads to, which means that you never have to sell anything.

How much can I make from Google ads?

That’s a tough question, Google ads work on two principles. First, how many times is a page visited and secondly, how many times does somebody click the ads on your website? Google ads are paid per click, so if a million people visit your website in a given day then you’re likely to attract a reasonable volume of click through traffic, which will result in increased revenue. 

Each time an ad is clicked, you earn money so the amount you make is dependent entirely on how many people see and click the ads. To determine exactly what an ad on your website is worth, try visiting the Keyword Tools and generate a free report on your (and your competitors) website. Remember, you’re likely to receive a little less than half of whatever Google reports on this page.

How do I get paid from Google ads? 

Each month that your Google AdSense total is more than $100, Google will mail a cheque (or transfer funds) to you. If your account hasn’t reached $100 yet, no problem … the total simply carries over to the next month and will payout when it hits the $100 level.

Can I encourage people to click my ads or click them myself?

No. Serious, don’t do it. If Google catches you (remember they’re REALLY smart there) they’ll not only close your account but refund any revenue you’ve earned to your advertisers … it’s simply not worth the risk.

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If you found this post useful, please share it with a friend or if you have a question of your own, why not ask?

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