Alright, we have setup an account, and we have created adsense adverts, now we need to take a look at what channels are.

When you login to your Google Adsense account, you will see a tab labeled “Adsense Setup”, which I mentioned in creating adsense adverts, click this tab. This will bring you so a screen which looks rather complicated, not to worry, it’s not too tricky.

If you look at the image along side, you will see two numbers: 1 and 2. Our first step is to click on “URL channels”, labeled with a 1. Then proceed to click “Add new URL channels”, which is labeled with a 2. When you click this, it will display a text area. The specific instructions are on the located on the right, but all that is really required is that you type in the domain name, leaving out the http://www so if I wanted to add a channel for http://www.webtrepreneur.co.za, I would type in webtrepreneur.co.za only. Once you have typed in the domain of choice, click the “Add Chanel” button, and you will see the domain appear in the list above.

For those of you who have many websites, you can add each one to the list. Why would you do this? Well, basically, what channels do is allow you to track your Adsense revenue across all your websites, so you can monitor and see which websites are bringing in the most revenue. If you only have one website, what you can do is setup channels for different areas, for example, if you have wordpress installed on your website, you can track Adsense on your main page, as well as different pages you have adsense on. E.g. webtrepreneur.co.za/index.php and webtrepreneur.co.za/comments.php - this will allow me to see whether I generate more revenue from adverts on my main page or on my comments page. Knowing this will allow you to place adverts to maximize your revenue.

If you now return back to your main page, by clicking the “Reports” tab at the top of the screen, you will see “AdSense for Content” about a 1/3 down your screen, and along side this, you will see a clickable link “top channels”. When you click this link it will list all your channels, and give you a breakdown of each one, I have placed an example on the side, of my channels.

You can get more information here.

Yesterday I covered setting up an Adsense account. If you are new to the game, sign up for an Adsense account with the link below, and read my artcile on setting up an Adsense account.

Right, so now we have setup an adsense account, and we want to start placing adverts on our websites. The process is fairly straight forward, let’s take a look.

Step1 - Once you are logged into your account, you will see three tabs, “Reports”, “Adsense Setup”, “My Account”. You should be currently on “Reports”. Click on the “Adsense Setup” tab, and move along to step2.

Step2 - On the “Adsense Setup” page, you will once again be presented with three options. Today I am going to cover the standard adverts, which you see on most websites. Click on the “Adsense for Content” link.

Step3 - We now have the choice of two options, either to to setup ad units, which are the common adsense adverts, or a link unit advert. Google shows us example on the right hand side, and both options follow the same setup, so in this example I will be using the ad units approach.

Step4 - Select the “Ad unit” link (baring in mind, that you can choose to show either Text Adverts or Image Adverts), I will be choosing the Text Adverts. The next page you are presented with is the important step, the setup. Read below:

• Format - It is important to select a format, which best suites your website. Cluttering your website with adverts will decrease the traffic of your site, nobody wants to look around a website filled with lots of adverts. So let’s assume we are wanting to place some adverts at the bottom of each post you have made on your blog, choose the 468 x 60 Banner option. 468 refers to width, and 60 refers to height, both of these values are in pixels.
• Colours - This part is crucial, you need to think long and hard about what colours who are going to use for your adverts. I don’t really need to explain what you need to do, as Google has made it really easy to follow. From my side, I have seen most success on my websites, when I use the same advert background and border color as my websites background, and secondly, making the URL colour and the Title colour, the same colour as the links on my website. So, with Webtrepreneur, I would set the background and border colour to white, and change the URL colour to red. If you are unsure about what #FFFFFF and #000000 are, these are just hexidecimal colour values. If you need help with this, or need examples, here are two links: Color Blender & Color Palette Generator.

Step5 - Once you have selected your colours, click the “Continue>>” button, this will bring you to a page about channels, for now we are going to skip this step, and you may click the “Continue>>” button once again. We are now at the final step, the code.

Step6 - You will now see a textarea with a bunch of strange code. This code is Javascript, which is a client side programming language, which basically means, you copy the code given to you, and add it into the current code of your website, whereever you would like to see the adverts. Once you have done that, we are finished, and your adverts will appear on your website!

Webtrepreneur suggests that you play around with colours and advert placement. The process of setting up your adsense is fairly easy, as we saw, but selected the best colours and placement for your website, is something which takes a lot of trial and error. I will return to the topic of colour usage and placement in posts to come, but for now, I will let you swim freely.

Enjoy the experience, you are now able to start earning a little revenue already!

Alright, I have been bombarded with emails asking me to start talking about adsense! It is obvious that people are here for one reason - To make some money! I have covered the basics of SEO, and how to drive some traffic to your website, so let’s get right to it:

Signing up for Google Adsense

Step 1 -

Click the link above to start the process! This will load a website, which will allow you to either, take a tour about Google Adsense or Sign Up for Google Adsense. Feel free to skip the tour if you are keen to start making money, you can always take the tour another time, it’s not crucial!

Step 2 -

Once you have clicked the signup link above, you will be presented with a comprehensive form. Take your time, and fill out the form correctly, there are no shortcuts here, you need to fill in all your information correctly. Google pay via cheque, so make sure you enter your address in correctly. Once you have done so, submit the form, and wait for further instructions. You will be asked for your email account (make sure you use a valid one), and a password. After this, you are basically done.

Step 3 -
At this point, Google will send you an email, which should arrive fairly quickly in your inbox. This email will include a link, which you will be required to click in order to confirm your account. Click the link, and you will be presented with a login form.

Step 4 -
Login using your email address and password.

You’re done. Pretty straight forward? Webtrepreneur supports Googles excellent services! I will post an article or two tomorrow explain how to setup adsense adverts on your website, as well as tips to create the best adverts for your website. I will then cover channels and various other important adsense factors, so stay connected to Webtrepreneur.

I have told you all about keywords, and search engine optimization before, and I hope you have gained some knowledge, and hopefully put some of it to use. I would love to hear which sites you people work on, leave me a comment!

Keywords are often hard to come across, and if you have chosen an area in the market, which is already popular, then it’s even harder to optimize those keywords. Just imagine trying to optimize words/phrases like “make money”, “jobs online”, and so forth. I’m sure you can agree with me when I say that it is near impossible. Unfortunately, for those people who are new to the ‘game’ of advertising and making money online, there isn’t much room for making a success in an already established area, unless your ideas are unique or you have a clever way to get traffic to your website.

So what can be done about this? Well, I can’t tell you exactly how to get loads of traffic to your site, and I can’t tell you exactly how to get your website ranked up in the number one spot for the words of your choice, but what I can do is teach you a great little tip for choosing keywords.

As you know, everyone who has a website has a hosting company, which stores your website online. This company should provide you with some kind of control planel, the most popular being cPanel. cPanel is a tool, which allows you to login to your control panel, and within your control panel, there is a statistics section. If you are interested in making money with your blog/website, then you should know what I am talking about, if not, then I suggest you get hold of your hosting company, and find out how to go about checking your statistics and things immediately!

Within your statistics are of your control panel, there are two very useful sections: “Robots/Spiders visitors” and “Search Keyphrases”. These two sections will tell you which search engines people are using to arrive at your website, and further more, which keyword/phrases people are using to arrive at your website. Now, the aim here is to run your blog/site for a month or two, and carefully study these two sections. Let me explain why below..

Robots/Spiders visitors

This section will allow you to see which search engines are crawling your website. This basically means that your site has been listed with these search engines. For example, this website has been crawled many times by Googlebot, MSNbot and AskJeeves - so from this information I can tell that my site has been listed with these search engines. If your site does not have a Googlebot crawling it, then you should go ahead and take the steps to list yourself with Google!

Search Phrases

This is the most important part of this post. Search Phrases are the phrases and words, which people are using in search engines, that land them up at your website. I will return to my fishing example to explain what I am talking about - If you are looking through your search phrases and see, let’s say, three phrases: “fishing rods”, “surfing”, “tackle”. As the author of the fishing website, I will be happy to see “fishing rods” and “tackle” within those results, as those are popular words within my websites topics. The “surfing” phrase is not very relative, so I can ignore it. Now, the thing to do here is start using the phrases “fishing rods”, and “tackle” more often on my website. It is clear that these words are popular words for people to search and arrive at my website, so I will aim to optimize them. Use these phrases in your titles, and bold them in content of the website, and you will slowly start to “own” the words. The more times you use these phrases (within boundaries obviously), the more chances you have for your website to land in the top search results, when a person searches for them!

This is a process, not something you can just do once, and then stop, unless it just takes off the ground immediately, which is great, but rare. View your search phrases often, they change all the time, and choosing the correct words to optimize is crucial for a blog/site which relies on traffic from search engines.

Lastly, after a good couple months of carefully studying your search phrases, and you have selected a couple which work really well for you, include these words in back links. By this, I mean, when someone offers to link to your website, link it to your website using the key phrases you have studied. I have already talked about this: securing your keywords, if you are not following.

I hope that gives you some more information on getting that site of yours up the ranks!