First and foremost you need to research the niche you have an interest in. Consider a few different topics that you enjoy and choose the one that you can write material on very easily without much time invested or research. Secondly, the niche you choose should be a profitable one. If you choose Beanie Babies for example, you’re not going to be able to successfully get a lot of money from monetizing that content. Also, Beanie Babies happens to be a very competitive niche.

Choose something that you can easily write about quickly and easily. Make sure the niche is rich and low in competition but also yields a high demand of searches.

http://www.garryconn.com/tag/niche-marketing-strategies

After you choose your niche, you should then start considering a domain name:

http://www.garryconn.com/tag/domain-name-selection

After you choose a domain name, you’re going to need hosting. I would choose a hosting company that allows for what I call, “Push Button WordPress Install.” Most standard WHM/cPanel linux hosting has fantastico.

Go here to see some decent hosting companies that work well with WordPress:

http://www.garryconn.com/free-wordpress-hosting.php

After you have hosting set up and you have WordPress installed, you need to choose a nice theme. I have quite a few available to use and I will be making more soon.

Join my mailing list to automatically have a free copy of SEOAdMax, a WordPress theme designed specially for people who want to make money with AdSense:

http://www.garryconn.com/welcome

Go here to download a theme that will balance out Affiliate Product Marketing with a nice subtle touch of AdSense as a cushion or a fall back on the typical lower AFF product conversions:

http://www.garryconn.com/leadermagic

After you have WordPress set up and have a nice theme in place, now you need to start focusing on article content.

Because your blog is new, you will need to give your blog a nice kick start. To do so, you will need to bust your ass a little bit and start commenting on other people’s blogs that are similar to your own. Make friends and be a very cool guy with everyone on the Net. Be helpful and make sure that your content is something that will interest the people that you place comments on their blogs.

The goal really from this point on is to focus on backlinks. You need backlinks so that your blog will start to rank for what I would call your primary keyword phrase. Secondary keyword phrases should naturally follow within your freestyle post writings.

As you interact with more people, you’ll find that people will actually start to write about you on their own blogs. This is very important towards backlinks.

You can also ask to be listed on folks blogrolls.

Do this and work hard for about three months and you’ll eventually score PageRank. When you score PageRank things start to really get better for the blog. You will notice that you’ll naturally start ranking for higher competitive words and phrases and you’ll start to see more search traffic coming to your blog.

Be prepared to help newly established friends just as you expect them to help you. Attach yourself to about 20 online friends whom have mutual goals as you. From there you.

As you start to score search engine traffic focus a balanced effort towards scoring not only AdSense clicks but also Opt In email submissions. Having a email mailing list is a very important part towards making money online. However, really this stems into other topics than strictly making money online with AdSense.

All in all, in order to make good money with AdSense, you need to have a lot of search traffic. Regular reader traffic doesn’t click on AdSense ads; however, they do indeed make purchases based off your recommendations. So, really if you play your cards right, you can get the best of both worlds.

Content can be of product reviews that trigger beautiful Adsense ads that cater to first time readers while also catering to regular readers who will actually be more interested in the actual product being recommended.

Volume is important if you are strictly looking at SEM (search engine marketing) the more posts, pages and sections that you have indexed on your site increases the amount of exposure you have in the search engines. If you are looking at focusing strictly on SEM then I would prepare to write a ton of content.

Chris Pirillo is one of the other publishers who I know that can actually produce more content in one day than I can. I am sure that he has many paid writers writing for him though. At this time I have only a few paid writers writing on my sites.

All in all, make no mistake, this requires hard hard work. Typically what you put in is what you will get back in return.

Ok Wayne,

Your blog is very healthy. Granted when you write content about making money online, you’re not going to be very likely to score clicks because of the type of people that read the content.

Your blog is doing very well in the SERPS and when you write posts such as this:

http://www.waynejohn.com/post/2008/06/The-Tattoo-on-my-Toes.aspx

You pull up #1 for exact phrase search in Google as seen here:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Tattoo+on+my+Toes

If someone who is interested in getting a tattoo on their toes, you better believe that they will find your post page. When they do, you better believe that this page will generate very nice ads. With that said this leads me to talk to you about design.

Your design is nice, but terrible for AdSense.

(FYI to ppl reading this… I am typing very fast, I don’t have time to be nice or politically correct. I will call things as I see it, don’t get offended.)

You are using a 468×60 at the very bottom of the post and then a 160×600 on the right sidebar. I don’t have access to your AdSense account, but I would guess that your conversion % is around 1 to 2% TOPS!

I would remove the 160×600 from the sidebar.

I would remove the 468×60 from the bottom of the posts.

I would add a 300×250 image ONLY adsense unit directly below the

Post title

View the source code example of your page below:

<div class=”post xfolkentry”>
<br />
<h2><a class=”postheader taggedlink” href=”/post/2008/06/29/The-Tattoo-on-my-Toes.aspx”>The Tattoo on my Toes</a></h2>
<div style=”float:left;padding-right:15px;”>
INSERT 300×250 GOOGLE ADSENSE CODE HERE
</div>
<div class=”entry”><p>This is your blog post about tattoo on my toes</p>

At the bottom of the post pages, I would set up a second 300×250 AdSense Unit and make this one display both images/text.

To be honest… I would completely go with a new blog template. You are using a fluid width design, which personally I enjoy more than fixed width. But with fixed width you have more control over where your ads can go and how they are positioned on the screen.

I would use a theme that has a total width of 985px and also I would continue to use the 160×600 but put that on the LEFT SIDE in a sidebar on the left so that people feel more attracted to the mixture of content in relation to the relevant ads.

You have 389 pages indexed in Google, your blog is HOT it can make you a lot of money… focus on writing content that PAYS and less on content that doesn’t. Immediately change your theme so that you can properly monetize your content effectively.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:http://www.waynejohn.com

lose the 468×60 on the top of the posts and use a 250×250 or a 300×250 and float it to the left and have the content wrap around on the right. You will see a huge difference.

If you want to keep the top 468×60 for show and tell, do it, but then remove the bottom 468×60.

Also I would have another rectangular 300×250 or similar at the bottom of your posts.

Remove the

<?php comments_template(); ?>

from your single.php file as no one comments and I am sure that you don’t really care about comments. Site that use WordPress for the purpose of simple content publication shouldn’t have the appearance of being a blog.

A blog with out comments is a dead blog. If you have a blog that caters to social style or regular readers, you would need to reduce your content flow down to a level to where you get around 5 to 10 comments prior to publishing your next post.

On GCDC, really the rate at which I publish new content is defendant on the frequency of comments I receive. With the recent survey I ran in addition to my readers pattens in reading times, GDCC does well with 1 post per day… on occasion I do 2 such as today.

Your blog indeed can make more money.. but once again, I am starting to already see a trend here in AdSense positioning. Good luck Owen, I enjoy both The Linux Blog and witnessing your development on the bike rack blog.

Wow!!! I love this site… this is very very cool man. Congrats to you on this site. If AdSense is important to you, again, position of the ads is very important. You have a 300×250 in some of the pages / posts and you currently use a blue border around the ads. I would suggest to raise that unit up directly below the post / page title and have the content directly BELOW the AdSense unit. The goal for you would be to make sure that your content is found below the bottom fold and only the post title and AdSense unit is found above the top fold.

Your site is very healthy…

When you write content such as this:

http://www.publicrecordsguy.com/fbi-foia/

it ranks very well in Google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Does+The+FBI+Have+A+File+On+You

Which to be honest, I can totally see people using Google to seek answers on this topic. That is some really interesting stuff.

I see too that you are active in StumbleUpon… thumbs up on that for sure! Good move as your content is very interesting… people love stuff like that and people will end up blogging about it and linking to your pages.

All in all… don’t change a thing to your actual design.. it looks awesome. Just start testing ad unit positions and do a bunch of trial and errors. If you get a lot of regular reader traffic, forget it… you’re not going to get a lot of clicks. However, if you get a lot of first time reader traffic from search engines, you totally can get that blog to convert nicely at 10% or higher. .. consider how well your 728×90 is performing and consider swapping it out for a IMAGE ONLY 728×90 unit as the clicks will pay better.

Nice work…

Hi Ginnee,

Your blog is wonderful and you have tons of respect from me for what you are doing for the community.

Ginnee, some blogs are better served with AdSense while others are not. From what I understand, you are donating and accepting 100% of the money to give back to the community.

I would NOT ad Google AdSense to your blog but instead I would add a paragraph of text to the bottom of the posts that say something loosely on the lines of:

Thank you for your love and care for our community. If you would like to make a difference in the lives of the people of our community please consider placing a safe and secure donation using PayPal.com. - CLICK HERE.

On pages such as this:

http://costaricamountain.blogspot.com/2008/07/this-beautiful-indigenous-boy-was-at.html

having that paragraph of text that invites people to make the donation will help out a lot.

From there you can easily create a web page that tells about the charity or how the money is used and set up really cool http://www.paypal.com donation button. PayPal.com has gone a long way over the years and its really easy to accept donations from your readers.

The great thing about your blog is that you attract people who have an interest to change the world and make the lives better of people in need. All you need to do is create the proper call to action in order to get your readers to give you money. They are sad, sympathetic to the situation and have their wallets open, but unfortunately they don’t know how to give you money quickly and easily.

Make it easier for people to donate money to you and they will.

No problem… I was able to answer both.

You got a really nice blog. It looks like your blog is very slow to index. The last post to get indexed in Google was the very last one found on your home page. You have way too much stuff on your home page. The home page should be an open window for the Googlebot to freely and easily roam to find your newly published content.

Coding has a lot to do with that. Also the amount of content that you put on the home page has a lot to do with this. I would recommend that you get drastically reduce the amount of information on your home page as I think it is difficult for Google to get digest all the information.

Home page should feed Googlebot the most recent posts quickly and efficiently. The home page should also direct Googlebot to the category pages as well as the tag pages… These sections soon get considered as being their own home pages. Really if you look at a category page and compare that to your home page, what is the difference? None really… only main difference is your category page contains even MORE links to more focused keyword targeted content. Etc….

As far as traffic goes.. there is nothing wrong with 300 visits per day. At a minimum, I can make around $3 per day off 300 visits using AdSense. My rule of thumb for AdSense is that I try to make $10 / 1000 ad impressions.

I think also you should do a better job with your post titles as those are going to be the primary keywords that people will search for to find your posts.

http://www.cutiegadget.com/boobs-pudding-from-japan/

is a great post…

if you type the same thing in Google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Boobs+Pudding+from+Japan

you pull up #1.

I would make a lot of changes to your theme or consider getting a new one. I would continue to post as often as you do… unless indexing does speed up. If indexing does speed up after the updated theme, then I would slow down your rate of content or simply create a second blog. There is nothing wrong with having two blogs. If you have the ability to write three posts per day, you are better off running three blogs doing one post per day on each of them.

As far as monetization goes… you have a big HOLE in your site that escapses traffic without getting money from then when they leave.

You need to review your amazon.com stats and see how much traffic you have sent them without a return. I don’t like amazon.com and I am done sending them free traffic. My amazon.com conversions have always been super low.

Last month I sent them like 25,000 visits and didn’t make a dime… If I had had 25,000 Google adsense clicks, OMG that would have been so much better.

Review how your traffic leaves your site and PLUG all the holes in the exits that allow people to leave your site without you earning money.

All in all… you have the best thing working for you that many people DON’T and that is the fact that you have the time to product unique content. That is the hard part… the easy part is monetizing it effectively.