What type of hosting?

Virtual hosting

I get the occasional question about what type of server someone should choose for his project or website. The answer is simple for 99% of the people who ask me this. Virtual hosting, this is just the basic web hosting. You share a server, but you will have your own domain name. If you choose a good hosting partner you will not experience slow downs 99% of the time. You can get good virtual hosting for a small website or project up to 100MB to 250MB for less than $40 including the domain name. This saves a lot of money compared to the other types of hosting such as dedicated hosting.

Virtual private hosting (VPS)

 This is most comparable to a virtual host, but on a virtual host you can only run web applications. With a VPS package you can install software, but you still share the server. This is a good choice if you are on a low budget and want to run non web software on the server.

Dedicated hosting

With dedicated hosting you have a server for your own. So this is only useful when you want to host very big websites with a lot of traffic (millions a day). This option is also viable to run powerful applications or game servers. With dedicated servers you have options to choose from un-managed to managed servers. Un-managed is basically your own computer at your disposal, you have to set everything up and gives you great control over everything. Prices go up from $40 where more expensive just means a more powerful computer at your disposal. Managed, or anything in between means your hosting partner takes care of the software, updates, cleanup, backups, etc. It is just a service where you pay $50 to $200 a month for.

Co-location hosting

Finally we have a co-location server, which is basically just a dedicated server. You buy, own and maintain all the hardware. You set it up at the service provider and hook it up to the powerful network. Since you are reading this, you will not qualify for a co-location server since you really need to know what you are doing since you do everything yourself. However, this is a very powerful way of hosting and since you own the hardware and do all maintenance it cuts heavy on the price.

Some good host providers:
ServerPronto.com : Reliable dedicated hosting for less then $40.
Interserver : solid VPS hosting from $6.
IX Webhosting : 25% off all Hosting Packages of 1 year or More with PROMO CODE: CHiLL

Money through ads (Increase money)

Welcome to the last part of this series. At the end of this blog you know as much as me about earning money through ads. Time is all you need to get more experience, get more familiar with ads and keep creating content.

High value niche 

A niche market is focusing on a specific product that is wanted by the market. Your local grocery is focusing on the vegetable needs of the people in your town. For us I would value that as a low value niche. So what are we looking for here? In short, products or services that are hot topic so there is a larger audience for it. And where a lot of money is being made. In the first part i already talked a little bit about that.



So what are good targets? Gadgets for instance, there is a lot to earn with these ads especially when new products come on the market and the different companies are fighting for ad space on the web. This is very easy to target for the average Joe since everyone has a opinion about it.


Unlike for instance insurances or loans that are harder to target but because of that you can earn even more through those ads if you have interesting content about it and can draw traffic are willing to click those ads. What you could do is go to the library to learn more about these high value niches. When you know more about the subject perhaps you can make very interesting content for people.


But there might be plenty of value within your knowledge. You might travel a lot and write about that so you attract traveling agency ads. I do not know all the markets, so this is pretty much trial and error. But you can cheat a little bit. The ads on your sites are picked by certain keywords. So if you can incorporate some keywords into your content they might pop up every once in a while. But remember, you do not want to go to crazy here. The most important is getting your audience, especially the ones that click ads back to your site as often as possible.

More ad programs

There is much more out there then Adsense. While Adsense is the most user friendly there are plenty of other options to choose from. I like Clicksor, you see it on this site. But it is not so easy to setup. You will quickly end up with popups and disabled links that link you to full pages. But with the right setup it might earn you more then Adsense, but then again it might not. From here on it is experimenting and keep generating traffic.

Choose what is best for you

Do research on your ads, if you see you show an ad 100.000 times but it never get clicked you can turn it off. If no ads get clicked your audience is just not looking to buy anything. You can see the percentage of clicks at the CTR or "click through rate" tab. Obviously you want this as high as possible but you have to find a good balance between the amount of clicks and the amount of money a click pays. You can always choose to go with impression based later on if you can barely get clicks. That is CPM or "cost per impressions" that pays for just showing ads to your viewers. But in my experience that wont ever get you that extra pay day each month vs CPC or "cost per click" unless you really much traffic.


So to sum it up, find out what niche you want to aim. Get familiar with it and start putting out content. People will come if you follow my guide. But remember, you can not earn money doing nothing, so start blogging!

Money through ads (Traffic)

So we talked about all the basics you need to know about earning money from your very own online content. But you might not be earning much or nothing at all. Do not worry that happened to all of us in the beginning, or at least to me when i just started out. The most important in this stage is to pres on with what your doing. In this part of the ads blog we will have a deeper look in some of the things i pointed out in the previous blog.

Traffic

 

At this stage you probably urge to know how to generate traffic to your site. The truth is that there are dozens of ways to do that. Like i said above, more content equals more traffic but more content also helps to keeping your traffic on your site and even have them come back. Maybe to look something up, look for new content or even show it to some friends. More content means more keywords and pages search engines can find. So what are some other ways? 

 Social Media

 

A very obvious one is social media. If you do not have twitter or do not want to use your original account for it make one. Start looking for people that have the same interests and follow them. Most of them will follow back and they have a high chance of seeing your tweets. Yes tweets, small messages of 140 characters where you can put links in. These links count as back-links, which i again discuss later. Other then that, people who search for words in your tweets might stumble upon it and check out your site, and even follow you to see more of your tweets about it. There are similar sites as Twitter, you might want to look up some of them and start spreading the word there too.

Facebook is also a very popular platform to promote. Under your existing account you can create a project page and ask all your friends to like it. So there friends see they liked it and they might like it too. See where i am going? This might create a chain reaction of people really like your content and can create a ton of those back-links sooner or later.

If you feel comfortable talking on camera you might want to consider putting your video's up on Youtube. On Youtube it is fairly easy to create traffic and you can make back-links to your page in the comments. Whenever you do this, go for quality video's, i usually click everything away under 480p and even that is bad quality most of the time.

These platforms are all up for grabs to make some free promotion. You also have hundreds of relative boards you can post in. Be aware that posting you site for promotion is often not allowed but making links in your signature often is, which creates back-links. Try to communicate and get known on the site and people will visit your site and might even help promoting it without even knowing it.

Back-links

 

So what are back-links exactly? These are links to your site anywhere around the internet. If Google or other search engines finds these it rates your page higher since it seems more popular. The big trick is to let others post those back-links for you but in order to do that you need more traffic. So you can push yourself slowly in the right direction.

This takes a little more effort but what you could do is make more of the same or slightly different content and link those together into a loop. So you have your site linking to some blogs and these blogs link to each other  and your site. Have signatures on boards linking to those and if one gets popular the others benefit.

Ads?

 

Ads really do work, that is why you get paid for having them on your site. So why not promote your own site through ads? Investments are often the key of being successful. For example on Facebook you can create a add that targets specific people. You can create a add that costs you 5 cents when someone clicks on it (and goes to your website). You can set any fixed maximum, let's say $100 and let it target males from age 18 to 30 that are interested in cars. You can make your add really specific so only people see it when they have a interest for it. So once they click it they often stay and view your content. Guess what, if you set your site and Adsense up right they show mostly relevant ads. So relevant for you new visitor as well and you might earn that 5c back double right away.

Now you know everything i know about generating traffic. Yes it takes effort, but nothing comes free. The best once things get rolling your ads can earn you a lot of money without putting in much effort. If you have original content it is almost unavoidable since there are always people interest. But keep in mind, if they can find the same content on other popular sites they wont bother.

In the next and last part i will go into generating more revenue from your ads per click.

Money through ads (basics)

So you heard about people making money from there website or a blog by using ads and looking to do the same. If you have anything to tell to the world it is very likely you can pull this off. Everywhere there are people that love to hear your stories, lectures, opinions and even complaints. But in order to earn a good amount of money, you should be aware that the most important parts of making money through ad campaigns is generating traffic. You have to put some effort in, but by the time you have a audience all your work will pay off. If you are after the big money you should consider create content for a high value niche but more on that later. In this blog i will guide you through all the steps to become a internet entrepreneur. It's all up to you if you are to become successful at it.

 So what is this Adsense?

Google Adsense opens up the opportunity to monetize your content. Although there are many other ad programs Adsense is the most widely known and widely used. You can not have missed the ads google itself displays on it's page. This is the main income for Google and these same ads are going to earn you money as well. With Google Adsense you have the opportunity to display those on your own website or blog. Every time a person clicks or views an ad on your site linked to your Adsense account you will be paid around 60% of the value of that particular ad that has been shown or clicked.

So how much can you earn?

Obviously a click is worth more then a view but a payment per view guarantees you money when someone visits your website and such an ad is being generated. But ads that pay per view have a very low pay rate. You might need thousands of views for a couple of dollars. These ads are also known as CPM or Cost per Impressions and mostly go by thousands impressions.

The other one is CPC or Cost per Click. These can earn you the most, anywhere between a couple of cents to $50 per click. So my advice is to always go with CPC ads, unless you have a audience that does not click your ads but more in the next blog. The amount of commission you will earn for a CPC ad depends on the market you are targeting. Because Google searches your website or blog for keywords relevant ads show up more often. So if you write about dogs you will most likely get ads about dog food that might only pay around 1 dollar per click. There are plenty of niche that pay out more, i bet you can think of some. Yes sex always sells but markets like finance, insurance, employment, mortgage do very well too, if not even better. More of those in my next blog.

So how do you start?

Well first of all you need a somewhere to put up your content. There are several options to choose from, in fact you are looking at one now, blogging sites. There are a couple of very good once such as Tumblr, Wordpress or this one blogger. These sites are free and the content gets relatively picked up fast by the search engines. But you have less control over your content. Where Wordpress definitely gives you the most control it might not be enough for you.

You could always start your own website. This option requires you to buy a domain name and web hosting. But together they should not cost you more then $30 a year. Making your own website from scratch can be a very challenging task but surely gives you the most flexibility. You control all the content, you can optimize it for search engines and market it yourself. But there is a big chance you find building your own website a daunting task. So two more options arise, let someone build it and keep the freedom or look into website builder software like Jimdo or Squido. They are easy to understand but again take some away from the flexibility of your content.

Where does Adsense come in?

Once you created some content and generating some traffic you can go to adsense.google.com and sign up for an account. You will have to fill out some simple forms and apply. Once your application gets reviewed and accepted, which should not be a problem in 99% of the cases you can start adding ads to your website or blog.

If you have build the site yourself you should add the HTML code provided by Adsense to you pages. Within Adsense you can setup how you want to display your ads, within your content, on the side, both, etc. On blogging sites like this or Wordpress you can add widgets for Adsense. Even better, since Blogger is part of the google network it you can just enable adsense in the settings of your blog.

So now you know all the basics, let's dive into some tips, trick end more advanced methods on how to create a successful campaign in the next blog.