Adsense site journal - a real experience on earning with Adsense

[mrankin]

Initial word of warning - please read the whole thread before putting anything into practice. Either the free hosting or one of the plugins used infected my Wordpress and prevented indexing of the site! Use paid hosting and only use the XML Sitemap Generator plugin, no others.

Whilst I have a few sites earning revenue through Adsense Ads, I thought it would be beneficial to put together this journal on creating a brand new site, getting it ranked in Google, and hopefully have it start earning some revenue from Adsense.

I will take you through everything that I do with this site, including where I buy all of my outsourced work from. I have no idea what it will end up earning, but certainly hope for a profit in the first 6 months.

I'll be updating this thread at least once per week with where things are up to. I expect it will take a few weeks before the site gets ranked and thus has the ability to get any traffic.

This journal won't require any special tools or skills so anyone should be able to replicate this on their own if they like (you may not want to unless it proves profitable!). It is however expected that you have an Adsense account already.

The process I am following is as follows:

1. Determine the keyword phrase that I will be aiming to rank for.
2. Register an exact match, top level domain for my keyword
3. Setup hosting for the domain.
4. Install Wordpress.
5. Install Wordpress plugins
6. Order articles (content) for the site, and publish them
7. Adding the Adsense code to all pages
8. Start getting the site ranked, building backlinks (will be using Fiverr for this).

Once the Adsense code is added I'll update the earnings every week, along with the traffic.

It is anticipated that the whole project will be completed for under $100 (USD).

Please feel free to ask any questions you have in the thread.

[mrankin]

I'll start with step 1 - determining which keyword to start with.

Ideally I am looking for a keyword with at least 1,000 exact Google searches per month, and with relatively low competition. It also has to have the ability got get a top level domain name (.com, .net or .org) registered with the exact keyword.

There are plenty of tools available for a hefty price which would assist me with this, but as with just about everything in life, you can outsource this work for you.

In this instance, I have purchased a service from Blackhatworld.com from a member called 'hurn' in this thread for the total cost of $7.00 (Keywords with EMD).

Here is what I received back:



So I now have my keyword I want to rank for, the domain I need to register, and some other keywords I also want to include in my site and rank for if possible. $7.00 very well spent.

[mrankin]

So I'm now on to Steps 2 and 3.

Step 2 - Register the TLD which in this case is cheaptwinbeds.net. I could have saved a bundle and shopped around for the latest deal, however I just registered it in my existing NameCheap account for $10.16.

Step 3 - Organise hosting for my new domain. Whilst I am a hosting reseller and can host this for nothing under my reseller account, I realise this won't/may not be the case for many of you. As such I have registered with 000webhost.com on their free plan. it is pretty restrictive, but will serve by fine for this site.

Last thing to do at this stage is to ensure that I've updated my name servers with my registrar (NameCheap) for 000webhost.

Edit - 000webhost did not work for me, my home page always redirected to their sales page. I am now using serversfree.com instead.

Total spent so far - $17.16

[mrankin]

Time for step 4 - install Wordpress. It's pretty straightforward, just go to http://wordpress.org/download/, download the latest version, unzip it and upload it via FTP to your new hosting account.

If you're not sure how to install Wordpress, you can follow their guide - http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress. The 5 minute install guide is all you really need to follow.

You can also use Fanstico (if available in your control panel), or in the case of serversfree.com use their Auto Installer.

[miansc]

(01-02-2012 08:52 PM)mrankin Wrote:  Time for step 4 - install Wordpress. It's pretty straightforward, just go to http://wordpress.org/download/, download the latest version, unzip it and upload it via FTP to your new hosting account.

If you're not sure how to install Wordpress, you can follow their guide - http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress. The 5 minute install guide is all you really need to follow.

Upon completing this step it looks like 000webhost can't/won't load any index file - will look for another host to move forward with.

I've used 000webhost with wp before and had no issues. What's it saying for you?

[mrankin]

(02-02-2012 09:49 AM)miansc Wrote:  I've used 000webhost with wp before and had no issues. What's it saying for you?

The index page always re-directoed to their sales page. Removed all content and tired just with an index.htm and got the same result. Now using serversfree.com for this site.

Edit - Seems Serversfree.com is also not without it's own bugs. By default it tries to load http://cheaptwinbeds.net/cgi-sys/defaultwebpage.cgi which doesn't exist. You need to delete the default.php file from the public_html directory.

[mrankin]

Okay, my Wordpress site is up, time for some plugins (Step 5). I am also going to cover some basic changes to the default Wordpress installation here.

Plugins to be installed:
1. Google XML Sitemaps. No need to do anything other than activate this plugin for now.
2. Date Exclusion SEO. Activate the Plugin, then go to Settings => Date Exclusion SEO and check the top 4 options to remove dates from all pages/posts.

There are hundreds more plugins you could install, but these are the main ones you'll need.

Other changes made on this step:
1. Under Settings => General, update the info for the site:
a) Change the name to your keyword (e.g. Cheap Twin Beds).
b) Change your tagline to include one of your long keywords (or both if you can). I will be using 'Information on kids twin beds and twin storage beds'.
2. Under Posts => All Posts, delete the Hello Word post.
3. Under Pages => All Pages, delete the sample page
4. Update the list of sites to ping as per this thread.
5. Under Settings => Permalinks, change the Common Settings to /%postname%/
6. Under Settings => Discussion, untick the top 3 options for Default Article Settings.

Feel free to make any other changes you like at this point, but I'm only doing the minimum here.

So now I have a wordpress site that is 99% configured and ready for content. At this point I've still spent only $17.16.

[mrankin]

Step 6 - lets get some content!

To keep costs down I'm going to be using a Fiverr gig for my content. I'm not too worried about how well it reads, as long as Google likes it and it's original.

The Gig I have chosen is from overamu - I will write 800 words high quality articles and content in English for your blog and website for $5. So I get 2 articles for $5, that's pretty good value. I have ordered 2 of these gigs to get me 4 articles total which should be enough to get started.

As I had ordered these articles ahead of time, I have already received my articles and am now uploading them to my site. I will be adding each article as a new post. You could also add them as new pages if you preferred.

Total spent so far - $27.16

[mrankin]

Step 7 - Let's add some Adsense code.

This step assumes you already have an Adsense account that is ready to go. I'll be using a new custom channel for tracking purposes, and generating a new text-only ad type of 300x250.

For now I'm going to leave the setting default for the ad unit, and grab my code which is as follows:

Code:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "ca-pub-4887169465073917";
/* Cheap Twin Beds */
google_ad_slot = "1707938863";
google_ad_width = 300;
google_ad_height = 250;
//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>

Now that I have my ad code, I need to include it on my pages. There are a number of plugins for this, but I prefer to do it manually, so I include 2 of these blocks side by side in a table at the top of each post. The code therefore looks as follows:

<table border="0">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
***Insert Adsense Code Here***
</td>
<td>
***Insert Adsense Code Here***
</td>
</tr>
</table>

So now I have my completed code, I just need to edit each post, click on the 'HTML' tab, and insert my code at the top of each post. Just to be clear, my completed code I'm inserting looks like this:

Code:

<table border="0">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "ca-pub-4887169465073917";
/* Cheap Twin Beds */
google_ad_slot = "1707938863";
google_ad_width = 300;
google_ad_height = 250;
//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
</td>
<td>
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "ca-pub-4887169465073917";
/* Cheap Twin Beds */
google_ad_slot = "1707938863";
google_ad_width = 300;
google_ad_height = 250;
//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

Now each post will have adsense code at the top, however by default the site is showing all 4 posts on the same page, and thus 8 sets of adsense code which violates their TOS (3 max). SO I want to ensure only 1 post shows per page. Easy fixed - just go to Settings => Reading, and change the 'Blog pages show at most' setting from 10 to 1 and save the changes.

Lastly, the default template includes a large random graphic at the top of every page, right where I want my Adsense ads to appear, so I'm going to remove it. I may decide later on to replace it with a smaller graphic, but for now I'll just do without it. The fastest way to do this is to go to Appearance => Header, scroll to the bottom and click on 'Remove Header
Image', then click save changes.

I now have a site with some related unique content and Adsense ads. Time to start building traffic through SEO.

At this point I'll start recording total spent, total earnt and SEO rank.

Total spent - $27.16
Total earnt - $0.00
Rank for 'cheap twin beds' - Not in top 500.

[mrankin]

Step 8 - Starting on SEO and building backlinks and traffic.

I'll be working on this step from now on, it may take a month or so until I get to where the site needs to be (i.e. #1 for 'cheap twin beds').

First place to start is to get the site indexed by Google. Luckily I have put together a free site which should do this for me pretty quickly - http://oblnow.com. This site will build 47 do follow dynamic backlinks to my site, and add them all to linklicious.me for crawling. Now that i"ve submitted the site here, Google should stop by within the next couple of days to start crawling the site.

From here I'll be using Fiverr gigs to keep costs down. Given I've got a max budget of $100 and I always like to come in under budget, I'll run a set of 5 Fiverr gigs to begin with, and then another 5 once these have been delivered.

Gig 1 - http://fiverr.com/getmybacklincks/setup-...in-1-month
Gig 2 - http://fiverr.com/the_giri/create-36-dof...-backlinks
Gig 3 - http://fiverr.com/greatoffers4u/create-2...s-and-wiki
Gig 4 - http://fiverr.com/steve41/increase-your-...nt-reviews
Gig 5 - http://fiverr.com/linkwheel_seo/build-a-...rch-engine

I have used each of these gigs before and have been happy with the results. All have now been ordered using my keywords in order of preference:

cheap twin beds
kids twin beds
twin storage bed


Total spent - $52.16
Total earnt - $0.00
Rank for 'cheap twin beds' - Not in top 500.