Now that you have your Google Adsense account all set up we can proceed! The next step will be for you to sign up for Google Adwords. Now the difference between Adsense and Adwords is simple. Adsense are the ads we are hosting (the ad examples shown here on this blog ) and make money per clicks, Adwords are the ads themselves created by people who have something to sell and want you to put on your site. We are far from needing to create Adwords to promote anything. Only when you have started generating daily income would I suggest you reinvest profits to grow your business by advertising with Adwords. But for the purpose of this course, Adwords does provide a tool we need which is their keyword tool. Only members with an Adwords account can access this. The Google Keyword Tool will tell us which keywords and terms are being searched for on the internet. This is important for us to know so we put the right terms in our content and draw people to our site. If you haven't already, click on the "sign up for Adwords", top right again, and get your account. Then come back.
Welcome back! Now that you have the 2 most important accounts set up to make money it's time for you to set up your blog. You can reach people and sell things on blogs just as you would a website, but blogs are completely free and you never have to pay hosting fees or anything. There are many free blog sites available and I suggest that as you improve and build your Adsense skills you should explore them. For now we will use Blogger.com which this blog is on. Click on Blogger.com and sign up using your Google account then come back.
Now you that have your Adsense account and your blog account, you need to decide on a subject to write about. It doesn't necessarily have to be something you are an expert on, but it does need to be a popular subject that people search for. Be creative and think about this. The trick is to first find out what people want and then give it to them. Some searches are seasonal, for example, during the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving there are many searches for "how to cook a turkey". The Christmas holiday brings an endless amount of search opportunities. And then you have your really popular regular searches such as with music downloads, movies downloads, game downloads, how to put movies on an ipod, how to download games to PSP, and so on. Now it's no secret that Sexual content is the most searched on the internet. The only problem is that 100,000,000,000 pages of sex related content is already on the internet. We could write the best article in the world about something sex, but if our article was on page 10,000 with a search, who would ever find it? The answer is nobody. Same goes with celebrities. Britney Spears has been a number one search term for months. I created a blog about Britney Spears and put Adsense on it, but didn't have a single visitor for 3 months. To be successful you need to find niches and write about them. Maybe only 10,000 people search about "xyz" lets say, but there are only 5,000 results of content to compete with, and anything with only 5,000 results or less is easy pickings for us. By writing an article about something with only 5,000 results or less, you are almost guaranteed to be somewhere on the first 2 pages of a Google search with your article. Now try this: open another window and go to Google. Lets search "scrapbooking" and you will see up in the right corner the number of results. At the time of this writing, the term "scrapbooking" results are 46,600,000, ouch! Now break it up into two words, "scrap booking", because people will search this way too, results are 347,000, much better. Now find a niche with "scap booking". I found a popular term with "scrap book ecuts" and only 3,240 results. Now an easier way to find this data is with a program called Ad Word Analyzer. When you are ready to invest in a keyword analyzer, this is the ticket. I've been using this keyword analyzer for over 8 months now and it has saved me 100's of hours and I highly recommend the investment. Now remember what I said about Google Adwords and their keyword tool? Go to your Google account page and click on Adwords, after it opens click on tools, and then click keyword tool. Type: scrap book, and then click get keyword ideas. Look at all the ideas you now have for keywords and can check to see what the results are for each.
After you have decided on your subject, you are now ready to set up your blog. Go to Blogger.com and sign in, then click create a new blog. Choose a catchy name that relates to the subject you will be writing about. Like with "scap book ecuts" I would try: scrapbookecuts, scrapbook-ecuts, scapbookingecuts, scrapbooking-ecuts, etc. until I found one available. You can then choose from many different layouts, try and keep it simple and not too crazy. Remember, you want people to read your content not get confused by all your banners and ads. The blog layout I use here is stretch denim, one of my favorites. After you've chosen your layout and created your blog, one of the first things you should do is modify your blog so you can put ads around your content. Click on the Template tab and then click Edit HTML. What you are seeing is the computer language (html) that tells the host server what to display, etc. Scroll down the text box and look for the following entry near the bottom:
div id='header-wrapper'
b:section class='header' id='header' maxwidgets='1' showaddelement='no'
b:widget id='Header1' locked='true' title='Your Title Is Here (Header)
After "maxwidgets" change the '1' to '2', after every "showaddelement" change the 'no' to 'yes', then click save template. Now click the Template tab and notice all the new "Add Page Elements" you now have. You can now put Adsense ads in more areas.
Now one great thing about Adsense is that once you paste your codes into your site, Adsense does all the work for you by reading the content of your page and picking ads related to your subject, pretty cool huh. Now Google does have rules you need to know about. They only allow a certain number of ads to be put on every page. Google allows a total of 3 Ad Units, 2 Link Units and 2 referrals. With Blogger you have a choice if you want ads to be placed between your posts or not. To adjust this click on the Template tab and in the "blog posts" area at the bottom click edit. If you don't want ads between posts, uncheck "show ads between posts" and save changes.
Take some time and play around with the ad elements and get a feel for arranging your blog. When you are ready to start posting ads, log into your Adsense account and click on Adsense Setup. Click on Adsense for Content, check Ad Unit then click continue. Choose your first format like a wide skyscraper, then change colors if you like, near the bottom I suggest leaving it public service ads but this is up to you, now click continue. Now add a new channel and name it the same as your blog. This will let you see how the ads on your blog are doing in your reports, click continue. Now click Submit and get code and the next page provides you the html code of your ad unit. With your mouse hightlight the entire code and right click and save. Go back to your blog, go to the Template tab and click it, then click on the "Add A Page Element" in the right column. A new window pops up with options. Click "Add To Blog" under the HTML/Javascript heading and paste your code into the content area. Click save changes. Now click view blog to view your first Adsense ad. It can sometimes take up to 10 minutes to show up so keep refreshing.
Congratulations! You now know how to set up your free site having good subject content and ads for people to click on and make you money. Experiment with the different ads and place them around your content and blog. You want the ads to be noticeable, but don't make your page look like a billboard. Try adding a video link between posts and a search link near the bottom of the page. Above the search link, put a "text" caption like, "Google search for your convenience" or something. When visitors use your Google search box and click on links from there, you earn.
After setting up your page the way you like, return here and go to next page 3. Next we will discuss how to get people to your site.
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