Internet Earnings Adventures!

OK, now comes the biggie, how to get people to find your sites.

The first thing most people head to is Google, where you can use two tools that they provide, Adsense, and Adwords. these tools are considered the biggies by most people and with the power of Google behind them, that’s true, but…….

Adsense is their tool to put Google ads on your website. After you sign up with them you can use a tool that will generate a piece of code that you insert on your site and when someone goes there, Google analyzes the content of your site and places ads that are relevant to the site’s content. If you have a general sports site it will place general sports ads, a pro football site, pro football related ads, a New York Giants site will get fairly specific Giants ads. All well and good and certainly interesting to your readers but do you really want them going to another site and buying there instead of your site? No, you don’t! Besides the pitifully small amount of money you may get from them is not worth it. The only sites that make a reasonable amount of money are the big sites such as CNN, or Sports Illustrated, sites that have a HUGE amount of traffic. So my advice is don’t bother until your traffic is really large. You will notice that this site has adwords on it, I have a fair amount of traffic and I like to be able to track how much people click on the ads for my research.

The second Google tool is Adwords. This is where you write a short ad for your site that will be placed by Google on their Adsense customers website. Sounds good but they don’t place those ads for free and if your product is a fairly popular category such as sports memorabilia, satellite TV, or some other product that many others are doing the cost per click gets big fast! You can suddenly have a huge ad bill with very little to show for it. If you are interested in pay per click you can check out other, cheaper services to start out and see if it is worth it. Goclick.com is one that I have used that isn’t too bad.

The biggest way to drive traffic to your site is blogging. At first I really recommend that you design your BANS and affiliate-o-matic sites in a niche that you have some knowledge in and enjoy, that way writing a blog isn’t as hard a job. Be aware that this is not a path to overnight success. It will take months to develop a following and it will take an hour or two every day of writing and researching to find subjects to write about and ads to place, etc.. But after 3 or 4 months things suddenly start taking off on their own and you don’t have to spend as much time every day. There are several different blogging tools that you can choose from depending on how much customizing you wish to do. The easiest tool is Google’s Blogger. you can make a nice blog with easy to use templates and can have something up and running quickly. You can have ads and everything that you commonly see on blogs by using Blogger. The easiest setup uses their servers and you would have to find an available name for your blog on their domain, an example would be income.blogspot.com for this blog if I was using blogger. This is not always easy as there are millions of blogs hosted by Google and chances are the good name may be taken. You can use your own domain to run your blog but it seems to be a bit confusing to me.

The other option is using self hosted WordPress software. This is a better choice if you are fairly computer savvy, since it takes a little more hands on effort to set up your blog, but I think it is a better choice for a somewhat more professional look as well as more available customization. If you are hosting your web site on Host Gator you can install WordPress very easily from your control panel. Check out my entry Web Hosting Services or click on the Host Gator banner on the right to find out more. TheWordPress people have a huge amount of free themes and plugins for bloggers that can give you wide choice of blog styles to choose from.

So how do you get traffic to your blog? I have found an excellant tool from socialmarker.com where you put a small button to put on your toolbar and everytime you make an entry to your blog, you simply go to that entry, click the button and it takes you to their website and sets up a template that you can then submit that blog entry to about 40 or more social bookmarking sites quickly and easily. Sites like digg, propeller, redit, and others that specialize in spreading the word about blogs. Once you get listed on these sites all sorts of feeds, spiders and other indexes start finding you from all over. As long as you make regular blog entries and list them using these services you will notice more traffic every day to your blog and from there, your BANS and other store sites. Every post should have a blurb at the end that sends them to your other sites and your blog should be using ads from the companies you affiliate with. Believe me, if you follow this plan you will be moving plenty of people to your sites. The keys are, regular posting to your blogs, and the blogs should be part of your niche that you built using BANS and affiliate-o-matic.

Looking for the perfect credit card for your situation? Check out http://www.easycreditcardsite.com/ Student cards, business cards, select by best rates, no fees, points cards, frequent flyer. Choose the one that’s right for you!