Project AdSense

Ok, I'm going to jump around a little bit here and let you in on one thing I learned the hard way.

Use the Channels feature!

I can't stress that one enough. I had many many pages set up when I realized that I would never know what traffic was going to what page. It's easy to set up the channels as you're building the ads, use them!



As for ad placement and colouring, google has some excellent help on their site. I also got a hold of a free google adsense book which is quite good. Ignore 95% of the get rich quick schemes floating around on the net. They're only making the people writing the schemes rich!



When I find the link for that book, I'll post it.



BTW: For people who live in a cave, or are real newbies, google gives you code snippets to put on your web page. These snippets turn into the google ads that you see all over the internet. The ads are generally targeted to the content of the page they are on. For instance, if your page is a recipe for muffins, there will likely be ads for muffin recipes, weight watchers and maybe even muffin mix.

Project Adsense is starting to look like a lot of up front work, but the research is not done yet...next stop Joomla. Through some reading and research on the net I found out that Joomla was actually Mambo, but the next generation. I guess some of the original Mambo guys took the 4.5 version and started moving forward with it (calling it Joomla). Not sure where that leaves Mambo in the future, but Joomla seems to have caught on nicely.



My first Joomla site was at

http://gocurious.com/joomla



And actually, I am still adding content to that site...although in the future that site will change substantially. Or maybe I'll leave it as is and start yet another project. Joomla was easy to pick up after having used Mambo. they are virtually identical (as far as I can tell). Time to build another logo and start building the site.



This site is the first one to have any content and the first one to be registered with any search engines.



You might also notice that it is the first one to have ads on it. Integrating the ads with Joomla was a bit of a treat, but once I figured out how, it wasn't all that bad. Oh yeah, the ads:



I guess I should mention that at some point through this I decided to register with Google Adsense. The Google Adsense Project was finally beginning. Registration was simple. It took about 5 minutes and they approved my site within a day. Adsense lets you generate ads in a number of formats, but they have rules as to what kind of sites can have ads (no porn) and how many ads you can have per page.



The rules look sort of like the following:

3 ad units per page

1 link unit per page

1 search unit per page

4 buttons per page (can't remember what they're called...those get firefox buttons you see).



I'm going to end this item here, because the ad primer should be it's own article.

Well, I've looked at the blog engines and I could go that way, but what about a full fledged CMS system.



I remember looking at Mambo about a year ago and being impressed with what it could do, although I never spent the time to figure out how. So, I looked at the different value app options and installed Mambo.



It took a while (an hour or two) to figure out the basics of Mambo. I mean I was no expert, but I had added some content and figured out some of the basics. Then I got sidetracked...I needed a logo.



Before I talk about the logo, I want to mention that Mambo is open source, in other words it's a free CMS system. It seems to work remarkably well and is full featured...but you guessed it, in the end I did not go with Mambo. At least not permenantly.



Here's where things get interesting...the logo.

I needed to find some software to generate my first logo. After a few internet searches which didn't help, I decide to try using gimp version 2.2. Gimp is a free (probably open source) photo editing/drawing package. Gimp is used extensively in the unix world but there is a windows version.



After an hour or so on gimp, I came up with the logo which is still on

http://gocurious.com/mambo/



I actually still like this logo, don't ask me what I used for the effect. It looks like starburst with gold. Now if you take a short look at that site, you'll see sections for freeware, travel, food and some others. Along with most of the original sections from the inital mambo install.



Ok, I've played with nucleus, mambo, serendipity...now it's time for Joomla.



Did I mention that all of these php based packages are available free?

By now I've registered my domain, gocurious.com, and puchased some hosting from godaddy.com.



I still have no idea what I'm doing and I'm 1000 miles away from even my first goal.



Let's see what this hosting account can do. Ok, so I sign in to godaddy and check out my hosting. I read a few little documents then decided to take their interface for a run. It was pretty simple (at least I thought so) and in a few clicks I was looking at their "Value Apps" section. These are the apps that are included in the hosting. So I looked through them and decided that I should start with a blog.



So, time to decide between nucleus, serendipity and whatever else they had. I installed both Nucleus and Serendipity and played with them a bit. I also got a bit ahead of myself here, trying to see where I would insert the code snippets for the ads. For now, I was just putting in "add would go here" placeholders.



I found serendipity a little easier to use and place code in, but serendipity could not host multiple independent blogs. I believed that this would be necessary because I had multiple people with multiple specialties involved.



My first nucleus test is still online (yuck)...I reserve the right to delete this any time

http://gocurious.com/nucleus/



My first serendipity does not work any more. At oone point I was really messing around with settings trying to get things done and must have messed it up.



While I beleived I could probably do everything I wanted with Nucleus (by the way, this blog is in nucleus, but not the Value App version), I decided to check out some other things first.

Ok, so I made my decision. I was going to put my 28 years of computer experience to use and share some of my knowledge with others. The first step was to register a domain, now I knew that I would want to do more than one category within my domain (one of my core business ideas was that I would not waste a ton of money on it.) . I was going to register one domain at first and if I saw success, then others might follow.



I decided to register my domain with GoDaddy. Why? Because I saw their ad on last years Super Bowl



Now, when I looked at what they had to offer I needed to make some decisions.



1) Do I want fries with that?

- There are a ton of options when registering, my main one was who do I want hosting my domain, and what type of hosting package do I want.



More questions then...what do I need to be able to do with my site(s). Certainly I need to put some pages up, but what if there was more I could do? After looking a bit I decided to go with their linux hosting which offered something like 100GB storage and 1000GB bandwidth per month. With the account I ordered I got 25 mysql databases (no way I would use that many) and some nice pre-paid apps.



Next step, what are these apps and what do they do?



There were apps for blogs (Nucleus, Serendipity and more), CMS apps (Joomla, Nuke, Mambo), photo hosting apps, forum apps and more. The possiblities started going through my mind. I also wanted to make sure the account could host Java (my specialty) and php (seems like a common thing amoung server side scripting these days). I am not a current web master, so things like frontpage extensions are meaningless to me and unnecessary.



So, it's settled. Total price for my domain (gocurious.com) and hosting for 2 years. approx $150 US.



Not bad, that's done...now, what to do next?

I guess before I start I should summarize what Project Adsense is. It's really quite simple, it's a written documentary of my efforts to get some websites ranked by google and make some money using the Adsense program.



Truth be told, this all started about a month ago. I was sitting in my basement on a Saturday and it finally hit me...I snapped. I don't want to work for someone else any more. That really limits your options to starting your own business. Even running your own business involves working for somebody though. You always have customers, but if those customers aren't direct, if they aren't calling you making demands, that could really free up a ton of your time. Time for hobbies and family...not necessarily working less hours, but choosing which hours and days you work. Also every minute you are working is toward your future, not somebody else's. Every bad decision made is yours, every good decision is fully rewarded.



I had heard of some people pulling in a little money through this Adsense thing, not enough to replace an entire salary, but enough to perhaps help pay some bills. I was intrigued, then I did a little research, the research said "Adsense is dead". But more research tells me that it's only dead for the cheaters, the people who are relying on tricking people into clicking ads, or relying solely on page impressions. True enough that Google changed the rules, it may not be the money grab it once was for web masters, but dead...I think not.



My goal then is multi-fold.

1) Prove that Adsense is not dead, not if you have good content and are willing to work at it.

2) Short term, make enough to buy a case of beer...then celebrate.

3) Medium term, make enough money monthly to help pay the bills.

4) Who knows, perhaps become fabulously wealthy.



Ok, so #4 is pretty far fetched, but I am determined and I know I can learn this stuff as well as anyone.



Like I said earlier, Project Adsense actually started a month ago or so (Late September 2006). As of today (November 7, 2006) I've made a total of about $3.00 yes, that's right, three bucks. But the amount of work accomplished and what I've learned is outstanding. I am very impressed.



The players:

AV - My Travel Guru

SM - My Food and Recipe specialist

CT - All around smart guy and gadget king.

Johnny - (Me...the computer guy...well, Craig is a computer guy too, but for this excercise I will

take on that role).



Welcome...by the time you find this, the project will have either moved forward significantly or died. I look forward to documenting along the way...all the way until I reach Goal #4.