Chronicles of Building an Adsense Site

Three months ago I began the process of developing a website for the primary purpose of generating income from advertising. I had no idea of what it would take or how I would get there. It's been an interesting journey.

I knew how Google's Adwords worked. I had used the program in the past for other ventures. I had seen Adsense text links and a few image ads from Google too, but I always assumed that Google or the advertiser were paying the web sites to display their ads. I admit that I couldn't figure out for the life of me why some companies would advertise on some of the cheesiest websites, but I really didn't think about it that much. Through a series of articles similar to this one I learned about pay per click (PPC) advertising and I could do it too.

I added Adsense banner ads to a couple of sites I own just for fun. One of which is a personal/family web site that does not get but a few hits a week. I did it mainly to learn about how Adsense worked and how to add the code to a web page. I am not a web developer. I barely understand HTML, PHP and know nothing about Java Scripting. It was a good learning processes, but now I needed to figure out how to use it to generate income.

I spent several weeks learning the best way to generate income with Adsense is through web content. I don't know if what is on my mind is interesting to anyone else or not, but I know I don't have the time to develop thousands of articles. I know some people that I could pay to write for me and it wouldn't be very expensive, but it will take time to produce that content and deliver it. I want to get started quickly. I read that duplicated content is not a good way to go, but I also discovered that many sites are just that. So I went searching for one of these Adsense sites in a box. I ended up purchasing two different programs. One from adsenseready.com and one from adsensepages.com; although they did provide thousands of pages I later became fairly disappointed in those products. Even though I'm using them today, I do not recommend them. The content in these sites is heavily duplicated, and I've found more then one vendor selling this same content so I'm sure this stuff is way oversold. I was going to scrap my little project all together at this point, but I decided to turn it into a learning lesson.

I followed the instructions that came with these two products and got my site started with some Adsense content. It took several weeks before any ads would show up and then a few more weeks before ads related to the content on the page appeared. I learned this is more a function of Google indexing the pages then the pages themselves. Then I learned that the articles are riddled with broken or improperly coded links that I needed to fix. I thankfully know a little about sed and other mass editors to I could script many of the fixes. This process still took over a month and I'm still working on it.

Despite what the marketing around these Adsense ready products, you can't easily add or change affiliates. Pulling from an old programming trick, I developed my own method of controlling the advertisers on these sites. If you look and watch closely long enough I think you'll figure out what I did. If you figure it out e-mail me. I'd like your input. I had to make many other changes and improvements too. I added some RSS feeds for recent news to one set of the products. I added an area for partner or reciprocal links. Which is about as important as it gets when it comes to generating traffic. I'm still researching the best reciprocal link partner sites.

In summary, building an Adsense empire isn't as easy as most sites would have you believe.