admin | 
05 25th, 2009| 
I recently completed a project where I created 50 websites about unemployment. Each website covered one of the 50 states in the United States. A couple I recently completed covered Wisconsin Unemployment and West Virginia Unemployment but there are many more similar. I had not yet arrived at any new ideas for more websites so I changed my focus. Unemployment is a hot in demand topic right now but the USA is only so large. I recently returned from a business trip to Ontario Canada and it got me thinking, how do they handle unemployment benefits in Canada? This was interesting as I had to do some research to see how Canada provides employment insurance benefits to their citizens. It turns out that much like the USA Canada provides unemployment benefits but they call it Employment Insurance or EI. Canada provides employment insurance as a country not provisionally so I was able to make one site about all of Canada and how they handle EI. What would normal be a formula type site fairly repetitive took a bit more work ast I had to learn the in’s and out’s of obtaining employment insurance compensation in Canada. I also included some formula type pages for the 10 provinces in Canada. Looking to expand a bit further, I learned that Mexico and Jamaica do not offer any form of unemployment benefit to their citizens. The expansion into Canada has thus been profitable so i’ll look to take some of my earlier successes in the USA and apply them to Canada.
So you’ve finished work on a new website, now what? Well you need to point the search engines to it and you do that with links. The easiest way to do this is to maintain some sort of blog that you update regularly. I use a free Blogger Blog called Beer234 where I just keep a diary of the projects i’m working on. Usually when doing research for a project I learn things that doni’t end up in my website. I just write a little bit about them on my blog as a post and put a link to my new website. This creates a great launching point for your website. Search engines love blogs because they are frequently updated so they visit often to check for new content. This ensures your new site is visited by search engine spiders sooner than later. If you develop some inbound links to your blog you can improve the power of the link that you add on your blog making it an even more powerful tool. Again this doesn’t have to be anything fancy, a free blogger blog regularly updated will go along way. I recently used this to blog about Idaho unemployment which i’ve worked on lately on a website.
People ask me alot how do the ads get on the website? I thought i’d create a quick video to show you how you generate the ad code to place on your website. The process is to logon to your Google Adsense account. Choose Get Ads, choose the size for your ad unit in pixels and then adjust the color if necessary. Then create a channel so you can track the success or failure of your ad and generate the code. Then you just cut and paste the code into your website code and within a few minutes you should see ads appearing on your website or blog.
Google has a great site called Google Trends which will show you the up to the minute most popular search keywords. Aside from giving you an idea of what is going on in the world, it can show you what people are trying to find and what they may or may not be finding. If you can find keywords that are not well served you have an opportunity to create a site or even just a simple blog post that might rank well in Google and thus draw traffic, and thus bring money to your pocket. Here’s an example. Yesterday I noticed that many times the keywords rihanna and chris brown pictures and rihanna pictures were showing multiple times. I’d see this as an opportunity for a website. I’d head over to http://www.givingstuffaway.com and try and find a domain like rihannapictures.com or something like that. I can see that the closest I can get now is rihanna-pictures.net but that would certainly work. I’d then scour places like http://community.webshots.com for pictures of Rihanna or any other site where I could find a picture of Rihanna that wouldn’t get me sued. I’d also use snagit to clip only the part I want. I’d then just build a site with 6-10 pictures of Rihanna and wait for the money. Now a site like this won’t make you rich but it would take like 20 minutes to complete and probably make $15-$30 per month.
The best part about running a web publishing business with Google Adsense and other companies is that there are no limits to how much income you can make. The limit is just your time, drive and imagination. Here’s a good example of how you can expect your income to start and change with Google Adsense. When I started this in 2002 I had three websites. My Sandals Jamaica website was a hobby site that I put Adsense on. I put Adsense on it and made $3-$4 per day. The great thing about this business is that I made that $3-$4 per day regardless of how much work I did or what I was doing. If I was working my day job I still made $90-$120 per month. If I was working harder on the site I sometimes made more. The web business is not predictable however so while that site earned $3-$4 per day then it makes maybe .40 per day now. But I’ve not touched it since 2002 so i’m still getting $12 per month for work done five years ago. Now do the math. Imagine you had 10 sites 20 sites or simply 1 better performing site. Initially you should set some small goals. Mine was to make enough to hire a company to mow my lawn. Within a few months I was earning $150 per month, enough to pay the lawn mowing company. Then I wanted my truck payment paid, with a little drive and more sites that goal was also met. Then I wanted my mortgage payment paid and yep, more sites and time and that was also possible. So my recommendation is to set some small goals based on your real life expenses. Then increase your goals to realistic levels and you will hopefully stay motivated enough to generate a real income for yourself. Even if you get started and then stop you’ll still have some spending money coming your way. One other example is my rental property business. I knew i’d need a website to advertise my property on but it’s really only needed for that purpose once per year or hopefully once per several years. So I tossed Google Adsense ads on it and added some useful articles and it now earns me $200-$300 per month. I’ve used this to fund improvements to the property and cover some unfortunate tenant damage. There is a legendary guy named “Shoemoney” who long ago posted a picture of an Adsense check he received. You can see this below.
When you logon to your Google Adsense account you will see an easy to use portal to see stats and create ads. You do not need or get to choose the ads that are shown. You simploy choose the size of the box you want the ads to appear in. You can then adjust the colors of the borders and text. You can then create and assign a channel to the ad so you can track you ads to know what works and what does not. When you are done you click a button and your ad code is presented. You then just cut and paste that code in the spot on your page where you want the ads and with seconds ads will be running on your website. You can see an example of the code used for the ads on this blog below.
The amount of money you are paid per click will vary greatly from niche to niche. Some such as celebrity, tattoo or music sites are known not to be high payers. Maybe 1-5 cents per click. Others such as financial, legal, real estate, related sites can have ads that pay $1.00 – $5.00 per click. There have even been tales of $15 – $25 clicks from attorneys recruiting member of class action lawsuits. My advice is to create content you enjoy and the money will follow. Web marketing is very much a numbers game so i’d rather put up 100 pages paying less but that make this money easily with low competition vs focusing on getting $1.00 clicks in a highly competitive area. One of my favorite niches is the automotive area. Ads pay .30 – $1.00 many times and the subject matter is medium in the competitive area and fairly interesting to work with. Travel is another well paying area that is easy to work with. Take pictures from your vacation and make a site with tips and descriptions of where you’ve been. You’ll then see ads for hotels, resorts or vacations paying .10 – $1.00
It can vary but generally Google will pay you on the 26th of each month. Sometimes Google pays early like on the 24th and it has happened that Google has paid on the 30th. You can generally find out when Google will pay by logging onto your Google Adsense account. Google will only pay when the balance on your account reaches $100.00 So if on April 1 you have a balance of $25.00 you will not be paid on April 26th but if during April you generate another $75 then you could expect $100 on May 26th. Google will send you a check or if you prefer Google will direct deposit the funds in your bank account. Google does offer the ability to delay payments or to have Google withhold money to cover income taxes. This option is left to the publisher.
Google Adsense is an advertising program run by Google. For the most part Adsense is contextual advertising in that the ads shown are supposed to be in the same context of the content of your website. Once the code is placed on your website a spider visits your site and Google places ads on your website that are related to the subject matter of your website. This should result in a better experience for visitors, result in a higher click thru conversion and more money in your pocket. Google Adsense is generally a PPC or Pay Per Click model meaning that an advertiser places a bid on certain keywords. The advertiser bids per click and you get paid percentage of that bid. So for example. If you have a website about Ford trucks and an auto dealer bids 1.00 on the term Ford Trucks their ad might show up on your website. If a visitor clicks their ad They are charged 1.00, Google takes a chunk and you get the balance. You never know exactly how much you get and how much Google gets. Some speculate that you get 40% but who really knows. In a nutshell as a Google Adsense publisher, you build web content. Place Google Adsense code on the site in the location where you want the ads and then wait for visitors to click on the ads.
For anyone who wants to jump into something with the least amount of technical effort it doesn’t get much easier than a Blogger Blog. Google owns Blogger which makes it another way to use Adsense to make money. Blogger.com lets you create an account and start one or many blogs. If you don’t mind your blog ending in b logspot.com you can create unlimited blogs like mine http://beer234.blogspot.com Blogger offers a great non-technical control panel to help you write posts and publish and even add Google Adsense ads to your blog. This requires 0 technical skills. If you can write an email you can publish using a Blogger blog. The other nice thing about portals like Blogger is that you can do it anywhere even at work. This makes creating updates anytime you get an idea for a new post.