Your First Site

In this article, i will tell you the basics of setting up an average site to generate money from advertisements. Keep in mind that the following tipcs are, in no way, the guidelines to setting up a great website that will get you millions of visitors per day! They are only tips on what you can use on your website, so that you don't have to work hard, and yet can generate money from ads.

important: keep watching the future articles. i will soon be writing on how to generate maximum revenue from a website.

STEP 1:  setting up a website

If you are new to the web-world, you might be aprehensive about setting up a site. Especially if you don't know much about HTML or CSS, even though the knowledge of these languages is no longer mandatory to set up a good website. 

You might want to start off with a free site for a few weeks, just to get things started. These include, mainly, blogs like this one.

Otherwise, if you are ready to invest some time, you could start off with a free .co.cc domain. 

You can use tools like Kompozer to help you with the web pages themselves. such tools invariably make your job easier. And you still won't need any kowledge of HTML!

STEP 2: getting content

ok, so that was the easy part. Now you have a website, but nothing in it. That isn't going to get you any visitors! And no, Google won't allow any ads on such a site, in case you were wondering...

The next question is....how do you get some meaningful content in it? 

I am assuming you alrezady have some basic idea of what kind of content you want. You would have required this idea even while setting up the domain name. So now you know what you want, but you don't know how.....

The easiest way would be to get free content from the net. You could go to Google and search for "free articles". This will get you a lot of articles that you can put on your website, without paying a penny to anyone! Just make sure you credit the original author for every article, and provide back-links if required. Don't try to pass off other's work as your own.

Another good way would be to post non-coppyrighted material like old books/poems on your site. Just make sure they aren't copyrighted.

But wait, what if YOU didn't have to write anything at all?!? You could allow your members to do all the work for you! One way would be to start something similar to a discusion forum. This way, all the writing work is done by your users! However, keep in mind that users of discussion forums don't generally click on ads, so that might decrease your revenue.

STEP 3: getting visitors

great! so now you have a site, and the site has some good content on it! and if you are wise enough, you already have ads posted all over it! But they are no good if no one clicks on them right? And who will click on the ads if no one visits your site? Tough question huh?

The tougher question is....How can you get visitors on your site?

The easiest answer would be link exchange. You go to sites hosting similar content, and ask them to post a link to your site. In return you would have to do the same of course. This way, you get "free advertisement", because at the moment, your site doesn't have any visitors, but the sites with which you have exchanged links do! So their members see a link to your site, and they might just give it a go! 

The best part about link exchange is that the more sites host your link, the higher your rankings get in google as well! so instead of the last page, your site comes within the fitst ten pages when a user searches for keywords related to your site. Pretty cool huh?

Another way would be advertising. Yes, it is not cheap. But the publicity will be well worth it, if you know where to advertise. (that is another article in itself)

You could also tell your friends. By friends, i don't mean your neighbourhood chums. They are no good when it comes to getting publicity. What you need to do is get onto those forums you had been active in earlier, or get onto some social networking site, and spread the word! This is easier said than done though. If your "friends" aren't friendly enough, you might face some objections for "blatant advertising"> Take care not to offend anybody, and never to post repeatedly about your site.....

So there you have it! a site, some content, and visitors!

I haven't really told you anything about the ads themselves, but i am sure you can figure out adsense by yourself at the moment. And i have already put up an important note before the article.....