New Web Sites

After reading Lisa’s website about making money with adsense, some things that I hadn’t considered before stood out to me. I know that one of my websites (tylercorlen.com) has a lot of competition and my golf website (http://www.marylandgolf.info/) has a somewhat limited audience (mostly Maryland residents or maybe at most, Mid-Atlantic residents). So, I thought about a new idea that could have potentially a global audience. As I thought about things that I find interesting, I came up with the idea to write about golf club repair. I have always done all of my grip replacements myself and when I did a google search for “golf grip replacement”, there were only about 84,100 results. That’s way better when compared to 853,000 for “funny pics” or 270,000 for “Maryland golf courses”.

Over the weekend, I worked on a website and a blog about golf club repair. I am happy to say that they are complete enough to publish. For the website, I just created a sub-directory off of the marylandgolf.info site. The address is www.marylandgolf.info/ezclubrepair. I also created a blog called golfclubrepair.blogspot.com. My plan is to keep an eye on traffic statistics for the blog and if it does well, I’ll buy a domain and push the website to the new domain.

Having said all this, the keys as I see them are:

• I’ve picked a topic that I like
• I’ve picked a topic that I know a little bit about
• I’ve picked a topic that doesn’t have a huge amount of competition (from a search perspective)
• I have a plan for a standalone domain (if the blog is successful)
  

By the way, in case you are wondering, I’m using Google Analytics to track web site traffic. I’ll discuss that in a different post in the future.

Making Money With Adsense

Recently, I stumbled upon a website about making money with adsense. What was so nice about this site is the writer actually went through in detail the successes (and failures) she’s had using Google Adsense. I think there are too many sites out there on the Internet that say “Get Rich Quick with Adsense.” In reality, there really are no get rich quick schemes. As I have found out and as the author (Lisa) mentions on her site, the key to making some money with website creation is to get users to your site. The more users that you can drive to your site, the better your chances that you’ll have people interested in your ads.

Although there are great free services like blogger.com for creating blogs and integrating Adsense, users are not going to flock to your site just because you have a site. I have found over my few months of blogging that one of the primary keys to getting users to your site is to have good, original content.

In the near future, I will post a section about some additional do’s and don’t’s of blogging. Thanks for reading and happy clicking.

Some Milestones

...so I reached a milestone this past week. I had my first person randomly purchase a book from one of my sites. That was a pleaseant surprise and hopefully a good sign for future earnings.

Additionally, I switched from using free hosting at godaddy.com to using economy hosting. I can finally get rid of that banner. BTW, it was the banner that was prevent my blog feed from working properly. As soon as the banner was removed, feedburner recognized the banner just fine.

Here is a link to GoDaddy. In my opionion, they are a great resource.

Using Other Ads besides Adsense

One other thing that I've been working on lately is using ads in addition to Google Adsense. Many vendors have what's called an affiliate program and when you sign up with a centrally managed site, you can access to various ads. The incentives vary but a t-shirt company, for example, may offer 15% of the sale. The main sites that could find [that provide the management of the affiliate program] are Commission Junction, Performics, and ShareASale. Some of the commissions are quite significant. I've tried to target my ads to the type of website or blog that I have but honeslty, I have had little luck thus far.

Golf Site Update

I'm still working on the golf site webpages. It's a tremendous amount of work but I reached a milestone. I finally finished all of the "county" pages. I've also been able to get a map of the course location to work on each course page. That's great but now I have to get back and retrofit all the pages that I had previously completed. If it helps generate traffic and keeps people coming back, it will be worth it. I'm hoping I noticed a change in trending. I actually made $0.48 on Saturday and I didn't even send out any links to my blog pages. Also, I've noticed that my golf site comes up fourth on a pretty generic google search for golf information.

Things I've Learned in 3 Months of Blogging

Here is a list of things that I've learned over my brief 3 months of trying to make money with adsense, blogging and web site development:

1. DO have fresh and releveant content on whatever you are posting.

2. Do NOT just copy another story completely. It's okay to reference other stories or blogs and talk about them but don't just take the entire story and paste it into your blog.

3. Keep you site updated and make sure it's accurate.

4. Don't overwhelm your site with ads.

5. Create a visually appealing layout. How often have you gone to a site and just got lost in the content or been turned off by the layout? Create a site where people like to come and they will keep coming back.

6. Don't make too many changes. I've been through at least 4 iterations of my blog and 2 iterations of my golf site. It's hard to keep loyal readers when you keep changing so much. I'm hoping that my content has found a home for good now. I think the next 3 months will be far different than the first 3 months.

7. Do read other blogs and leave comments and see what's going on "out there". I think this is related to staying relevant.

8. Do put the Snorg Tees girl on your site. If anything, it's just some visual relief from all the words! LOL!

Grand Tally as of August 22, 2007

So, I've been blogging now for over 3 months and the grand total of what I have made is just under $70. Here is the breakdown:

Adsense (all time from May 6, 2007 to August 22, 2007): $54.45
Amazon Affiliate: $14.81

As I move forward on this blog, I hope to create some sort of spreadsheet showing my progress. Most likely, I create some sort of monthly tabulation of my various incomes.

As far as current work, I've been putting a lot of focus on the golf website page as I think it will be the most useful things of all of the sites that I'm working on. Despite my hard work, I'm sorry to report that I still have a long way to go. I have to clean up all of the "by county" pages and finish at least 50 individual course pages. If I had a little more expertise in coding, I'm sure I'd come up with a better way of developing these pages. Currently, I use Dreamweaver to make static pages for all of my content. After I get this phase 2 of the site up and running, I'll look at some sort of database backend.