Earning Revenue From Your Website - Week 1
A little over a week has gone by and I thought I'd recap what little I know so far. My google ads were working as of Monday and no total revenue to date is $3.55. Not enough to retire on, let alone buy a Starbucks coffee. I think I made it from my wife and friends just going and clicking wherever the first few days.
Here is a screenshot recapping the last 7 days. My adsense has only been active for 5. I'm interested to see how these numbers change over time and based on different events. I will recap for the first few weeks on a weekly basis and then after that I will probably resort to once a month unless something interesting happens.
I have learned a few things already since my website went out, so I will recap what has happened.
Purchased My Domain and Hosting
I purchased the domain thoughtsfrommylife.com for $2.99 this year and the first month of my hosting for $6.99. The account was configured and ready for me to use within a few hours. This was of course through GoDaddy. They were the cheapest and had the basics that I wanted. 100GB of space, 1TB of bandwidth, PHP, and MySQl database.
Created My Website
I coded all of my website in a blog style. Basically I can post articles, login, allow comments from other users with user accounts, and organize my articles in categories. There is password retrieval ability and some other security features. I also have an "email this article" feature and your typical About Me, Contact Us, and Links pages.
Submitted My Site to Google, Yahoo, and DMOZ
Google involved just feeding them my url at http://www.google.com/addurl/. They took about 3 days before they indexed my site for the first time and haven't come back since. Yahoo has my site now too (took a week). DMOZ hasn't indexed it yet at all (been over a week).
Signed Up For Google Adsense
Got the account, dreamed of the money, and copied and pasted their well known code into my web pages.
Learned That Dynamic Links Are Bad
When I searched for pages on my site using Google, it would only return the home page as a result. I found out that Google doesn't respond to dynamic links. This is how I built my article viewing to work. The same page would display all the articles and just look up the content in the database. So after doing some quick research, I applied the mod_rewrite functionality to my website. All the links now look like a full path name and I use the mod_rewrite to turn them into the dynamic link I want to use. You can read up on how I did this in my article Using Mod_Rewrite - Search Engines and Dynamic Links.
I haven't had them reindex my site since, so I'm hoping they do soon so I can the difference in indexed pages in a search.
Used Google Tools to Submit a Sitemap
I also looked through the Google Webmaster Tools. One of the things that appears to be important is an XML sitemap. I generated this and I update it every time I have a new article and resubmit it to Google. They seem to get around to it a few hours after I resubmit it. I wrote about this in my article Adding a Google Sitemap. Apparently Yahoo likes a text sitemap and I have also read where it is good to have an html one for users (and search engines) as well as a RSS version. I will add these soon and post an article on the best free tools I found to do the job.
Changed the Layout a Bit
The banner at the top didn't go across the whole top before so I changed that. I tinkered with ads a bit based off articles I have read on John Chow's website. Basically there is a 300X250 ad on the 1st, 4th, and 8th article summary on the main page, archives, and category pages. There is 300X250 ad on all article pages. They are done inline with the article. There is also a horizontal text ad banner at the top of every page and a vertical text ad banner in the side menu after the archives.
The ads have been set up in Channels in the Google Adsense program so I will be able to track the performance of them.
Wrote and then Wrote Some More
I try to spew stuff out on a daily basis. From anything I have read you need decent content and I would like to get a lot my stuff down in writing anyways.
I have articles sitting in draft. I build them up and proof them before I release for everyone to see. It is kind of good system right now. I have 5 basically done articles at any given time that I just need to publish and I have around a dozen skeleton articles sitting there I can work on. Anytime I have an idea, I will create the title and put into the drafts section of my site (only viewable by me). When I have a moment, I will venture in there and bang away my thoughts during some strange hour of the day.
Got My Links Out (just a little bit)
I have had a couple friends put my link on their websites and put my link on my personal webpage site as well. Have to start somewhere, but I'm still unsure how else I'm going to get my link out. You always have grand visions of writing an article worthy of Slashdot, FARK, or Digg, but that isn't always a reality. I don't think my site could handle the hits if it did anyways.
If I can really hone some of these articles down, perhaps I can post on a more popular website. I guess I'd have to learn how to write first.
If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe for email updates. Only one email a day and only if there was a new post.
Related Posts
Earn Revenue Online - July 2008 Recap
Earn Revenue Online - November Recap
Kontera ContentLink - An Update
Active and Passive Blog Income
Earn Revenue Online - May 2008 Recap
Category: Blogging
0 Comments
No approved comments yet.