Building an AdSense Business With Free Blogs
I feel like it's about time that I paid back to the community
for all of the knowledge and help that I received along the way.
Hopefully this post will help you get started in the AdSense
business even if you have little or no money to spare but
desperately want to try your hand at it.
Normally Google won't approve AdSense applications for free
websites, but there is one exception. So if you're short on cash
for hosting and are eager to get started, you might give this a
try.
Blogger.com Blogs
Not long after Google bought Blogger.com, they made AdSense
available to Blogger blog owners. Blogger is great because it
has an easy interface, Google and Yahoo crawl the blogs quickly,
and best of all if you're broke--they're free, and Google loves
to give out AdSense accounts to Blogger owners. :)
So if you're looking to get started with AdSense and not spend
much money, Blogger is a great way to get started.
Before I talk about how to setup a Blogger blog for AdSense,
though, let me tell you what an RSS feed is and how it works. If
you already know this you can skip ahead. I make reference to
this in the setup instructions, so it's important to understand.
An RSS feed (as it applies to a blog) is basically a list of all
of the recent posts made to your blog. People can use "RSS
Aggregators" (software that continually checks up on your RSS
feed to see if there's anything new) to keep up with new posts
on your blog. Websites will also want to publish your RSS feed
on their sites if your content is good. This gives them fresh
content for their visitors. And we all know that content is King
in the world of website building.
Blogger blogs come with an RSS feed built-in, and you can use
this to your advantage to generate traffic to your blog. I'll
discuss that in a bit, but first let's get into building the
blog.
Create Your Blogger.com Account
Determine Your Blog Topic First
Before you create the blog, you need to figure out what topic
the blog will focus on. Think about your skills or hobbies that
you're really good at. You might not be a mechanic, but if
you're really good at working on cars on the weekend, and you
love to do it, that would make a great blog topic. Brainstorm
your skills and interests to determine what you would enjoy
writing about. It's important that you like to write about it,
since you will have to do so to build up the blog!
I will say this: If you have some knowledge on a commercial or
industrial topic, this will usually get higher paying AdSense
ads. But a hobby blog can do very well also (I know this from
experience!).
Create the Blog
Once you have a topic chosen, it only takes about 5 minutes to
setup a blog. From the Blogger homepage click the "Create Your
Blog Now" link and follow the blog wizard instructions. I won't
get into detail about them because it's pretty straight-forward,
but there are a few points I want to make.
First of all, when you choose your blog URL, make sure that the
URL contains the keywords for your topic. For example, if you're
creating a blog about health insurance,
"healthinsurance.blogspot.com" is ideal, or "health-insurance"
or even "health-insurance-blog" or "health-insurance-12345".
Just make sure that your keywords are in the URL, that will help
you be found when people search for your keywords in the search
engines.
Also, be sure to pick one of the professional looking templates.
I suggest you just pick the plain-white one that is first in the
list of templates when you're creating the blog. Once the blog
is created, then click on the "Templates" tab and select one of
the nicer ones shown there. I'm not sure why Blogger doesn't
show you all of the available templates in the blog setup
wizard, but they don't.
The Settings Tab.
A discussion of the important points of each settings tab is
outlined below.
Basic
On the "Basic" settings tab, set your blog title to the keywords
you want to show up for in the search engines. That will help
you get ranked.
Give a good, detailed description about the benefits of reading
your blog daily. You want to get people to add your RSS feed to
their aggregators and websites so you can get traffic, and this
will help.
Answer "Yes" to the question "Add your Blog to our listings?".
This will have your blog appear on the main page of Blogger when
you make new posts (albeit for a brief period of time), and
allow people to search and find your blog using Blogger's search
tool.
One other, lesser known detail about setting that question to
"Yes" is that if you set it to "No" Blogger will shove
"nofollow/noindex" meta-tags into your blog template header,
which will prevent your site from getting crawled or indexed. I
believe this was done to fight what Blogger called "spam blogs".
Publishing
Set the "Notify Weblogs" setting to "Yes". This will send a
notification to Weblogs every time you make a new post. Weblogs
is a site that lets people (and search engine crawlers) know
when new content appears on a blog. You want the crawlers (and
visitors) to hit your pages when you add new content, so be sure
this is set to Yes.
Formatting
You can do what you want on this tab-I personally set the number
of posts on the main page to between three and five.
Comments
Allow comments unless your blog topic is really controversial
and you're likely to get a lot of flaming (people lashing out at
you for what you have to say). Allowing comments is good because
it gives more food to the search engines and keeps your blog
updating and fresh even when you're not posting to it.
I usually let anyone comment, and don't limit it.
Don't show the comments in a pop-up window, because that will
prevent the crawlers from being able to get to the content since
it's javascript-based.
If you're concerned that people might flame you, but you want to
allow comments, enable comment moderation so that you have to
approve each comment that is added before it goes live.
If you want to be notified when a comment is made, set the
Comment Notification Address to your email address.
Archiving
Set your archiving to daily if you post every day, or weekly if
you only post every few days. If you post every day daily is the
best way to go, because it gives the search engines more unique
pages to crawl and index. More unique content means more traffic
to your blog and more clicks on your AdSense ads (I'll get to
adding your AdSense to the template in a bit).
If you don't do a daily archive (and maybe even if you do),
enable post pages so that each post will still have its own
unique page even if multiple posts appear on the same archive
page. Having multiple posts on one archive page is not a bad
thing if you have post pages enabled, since the posts tied all
together make for yet another unique page on the blog.
Site Feed
Definitely enable the site feed. If your posts tend to be very
short, you might enable full descriptions. But if you have long
posts (which I recommend), do not enable the full feed, use the
short feed. Here's why:
If you put the full post in your RSS feed, then the person
reading the feed doesn't have a reason to go back to your blog
since they have already read the full post. No visitors to the
blog means no clicks on your ads. AdSense has an "AdSense For
Feeds" in beta testing, but it's not open to all publishers yet,
so at least for now you need to induce people to visit the blog.
If they can only read part of the blog post, then if they want
the whole story they will need to go to your blog. You can plan
for this by making sure that your title and the first 255
characters (about the first 50 words) really pull in the
reader's attention. You need to use those first 50 words to make
them just have to read the rest.
Also, if your RSS feed appears on websites, you don't want to
give away the farm by showing the whole post. You're letting
websites use your feed so you can get clicks on the posts in
that feed and get visitors to your site to build AdSense revenue.
So set the "Descriptions" to Short, write long posts and make
the title and the first 50 words count.
The Templates Tab
If you haven't already picked a nice template from the list,
click on the "Pick New" link under the templates tab and select
one of the templates that you like and that fits your topic.
If you don't already have an AdSense account, you can click on
the "AdSense" link and apply for one straight from the blog
instead of having to go to Google.com to apply. That's how badly
Google wants Blogger blog owners to use AdSense on their blogs!
:)
Once you've done that, it's time to paste your AdSense code into
your template. Click on the "Edit Current" link if you're not
already there.
There are two methods of setting up your template. You will
generate the most clicks by doing the following:
1) Find the section of the template that looks like this:
2) Paste your AdSense code for a 336x280 large rectangle
directly after the second
tag. Be sure to format the colors of the AdSense to blend in
with the background of your blog for maximum results
If they agree to exchange links, make sure that you have them
link to your site using the keywords that you want to rank for.
For example, if you want your blog to rank well for "Home Made
Widgets", be sure to have them use the link text "Home Made
Widgets".
You can manually insert the webmaster's link and description
text into your blog by modifying your template. I try to put it
in the left or right hand column just below the archive links.
To do this, modify your template and look for this code:
And finally, below the links, add this:
Every time you make a new link exchange with a webmaster, just
go in and repeat the
code with the new link and description just above the tag.
The more competitive your blog topic is, the more links you will
need to get to rank well. But if your posts are informative,
witty and humorous where appropriate, word will soon spread
about your blog and your traffic will grow as people link to you
without you even asking for a link. Growth in traffic means
growth in AdSense revenue.
Concluding Comments
I hope this tutorial will help some of you who are on a
restricted budget and just getting started with AdSense to start
making some money by creating quality blogs at Blogger.
It takes some time and effort to make good informative posts,
but once you have learned to create one successful blog you can
repeat the process and create another, and another, until you
achieve enough success to start putting up your blogs at your
own domain name instead of "yourblog.blogger.com". Blogger lets
you do that, too, but that's a subject for another post. :)
Here's to your success!
Generate additional revenue from your site. Display ads related
to the content on your site. You'll earn revenue from qualified
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