Google Adwords are a great service. They provide a webmaster with a simple and quick way to promote their website on the most popular search engine (no matter how you look at it, they are the most popular) and to have your ad’s appear on a truly great network of sites. But with most great things there is a downside and Adwords are no different.

The observation I have made is not always obvious, but I noticed after I started to use the service. I believe that most people will have the same problem until they themselves use the service.

This issue is not one that is Google’s fault, not at all. The issue that im talking about is people ability to be almost completely ignorant to advertising when its along side content of interest. For example when you use the Google search engine how many times do you pay attention to the Google Adwords on the side of the search, the “sponsored results”. I bet that unless you have actually used Adsense or Adwords that you barely ever notice the results that are shown. This is also an issue on websites but its more a problem with the sites layout and positioning of the ad’s.

The reason I see this as a issue is that I frequently use the Google search engine to search for a service or product and 90% of the time I will actually use the Adwords for finding what I’m looking for. It never disappoints. People can show an ad  for a product/service that I am looking for and Google applies their algorithms to it so that the top ad’s are relavant. But the problem is that before I actually started to implement Google Adwords and messed around with the keywords I hated the sponsored results and saw them as anoying advertisements that always seems to creep into every aspect of human life. I mean, everywhere you look there is a brand name or advertising and in my eyes that puts us into a kind of natural immunity to advertising, especially when its competing with content of interest. Kind of like when you ignore someone talking to you when your watching T.V.

Why am I going on about this? I the hope that once you have read this you will look at a Google search differently. Not because I want you to click my ad’s but because I want you to realise that If someone has the product your looking for at a really low price or they are in your area (Ad’s are often Location Specific), or they just want you to know they are there. The chances are they might not be number one in the search results but they will probably be number one in the sponsored results. So next time your Googling, take your time to take a glance at the results that people have targeted to your location and the keywords you searched for.

This is my point of view on the subject, if you think differently feel free to leave a comment.

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Heres the first installment of the ‘How to make money online’ series. I believe Google AdSense is the quickest and easiest way to make money online so lets start there.

Firstly with AdSense you will need an google account, this is a quick a simple form (Refer to bottom of page for a link). Once you have an account you will need a web site to put your ad’s on. Refer to How to make a website.

Once you have signed up with Google and have a website setup you will need to apply for AdSense. This is a simple process where you fill out some details for recieving payment and you need to submit the URL of your website. They take roughly a few days to a week to approve your site.

Tip: The great thing about AdSense is once you have a website approved with AdSense you can put ad’s on any website you want (aslong as its within the guidelines of Google, i.e. no adult sites, hate sites, racist site etc.) and reap the income.

There are a few downfalls with Google AdSense but they are just a few. One would be that its Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and that its often not much that you are going to recieve. The upside on that is that you are more likely to recieve a ‘Pay’ from a PPC than you will with a Pay-Per-Sale (PPS) or a Pay-Per-Lead (PPL). Refer to Advertising Terms

Once you have a website and your AdSense all you need to do is sign in to your account and you will see tabs at the top of the page, one of these will say “AdSense Setup”, click it and you will see three options appear on your screen. I will stop here because I want to cover these options seperately and how best to implement them. Stay tuned for Part 2.

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Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

The PPC is the most common type thanks to the popularity of Google AdSense/Adwords. This PPC is when a Advertiser pays the Publisher for a click (sometimes refered to as a ‘click-through’). This type is often more beneficial to the Publisher as a click is often very easy to obtain from the user.

Pay-Per-Sale (PPS)

This is a more common type among affiliate networks. This is can be either a % of the overall sale or a set amount for a sale. The user has to navigate to the Advertiser’s website by clicking on the advertisement on the Publisher’s website, once the user is on the website they need to make a purchase and the Publisher will either recieve % amount of the sale or a set amount. This is more beneficial for the Advertiser as they are not paying for someone to browse their website but are paying when someone buys from them. This can often also be very beneficial for Publisher as instead of a less than a dollar for a click you can make a large amount from one purchase depending on the % amount or set amount.

Pay-Per-Lead (PPL)

The PPL is a concept in which is normally used when there is not much money involved initially but there is an on-going amount, i.e. a credit card. For something like this there is not really any money involved so for a Publisher to recieve a % of the sale is pointless, but instead they recieve a ‘Pay’ for a sales lead. This is also more beneficial to the Advertiser than the Publisher. But can sometimes be very beneficial to the Publisher compared to the small amount of a ‘Pay’ in PPC.

Publisher

This is the website who shows the advertisement.

Advertiser

This is the website who creates the advertisement and pays the Publisher to show it.

User

This is the person that comes to the website and will click an advertisement.

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I will be writing a series of posts that will teach you how to make money online. Some of the topics I will be covering are:

• Affiliate Marketing
• Amazon Affiliate
• Google AdSense
• Many Others

I will be guiding you through using these services and while doing that I will give you examples and tip & tricks of the trade.

NOTE: The methods I will be using are tried and tested, and they do require you to do atleast a little bit of work to get the ball rolling. The more work, the more money. Some of these methods are quick and easy and some are not.

 I hope you enjoy.

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You need somewhere to host you website. There are numerious free services out there but the main thing you need to realise is that you need a service that allows you to run the CMS. For the purpose of simplicity, I recommend going with a Web Hosting company. There is a list below of Web hosting companies and some prices, from here we will refer to your Web Hosting Companies as ‘Web Host’. The main requirement of the CMS I will show you is that PHP is installed. Preferably anything greater than PHP4. To find out what version of PHP you Web Host has installed refer to (PHP - What version of PHP is installed?).

Now we need to get the CMS software we are going to use. Go to http://cmsmadesimple.org/downloads and download the latest version. Download .zip, uncompress it and read on.

Once you have your Web Host then comes the real work (its so simple that its not really work tho…). You now have to upload the CMS to your Web Host. Now go over the following steps:

1. Use an FTP Program (Dont have a FTP program? Refer to botton of page) to connect to you web host using the FTP host address, FTP Username and FTP Password they gave you upon signing up. The FTP host address is a URL often something like ftp.domain.com. The FTP Username and Password are often the same as the ones for your account with your Web Host.
2. Once connected to you need to make a directory for your new CMS
3. Then find the folder where you unzipped the CMS to, now if you click on the folder untill you can see a folder called something like ‘cmsmadesimple’. This is the main directory for the CMS.
4. Click on ‘cmsmadesimple’ so that you can see the contents and select them and upload the contents to the directory you made for your CMS.
5. Now go to Part 2, we now need to go through the install process.

NOTE: If you are having trouble with this step then you can purchase a web hosting account that has the already done, Dakine CMS Hosting provide this feature.

Web Hosting Companies:

• Go Daddy (www.godaddy.com)
• Dakine CMS Hosting (www.dakine.co.nz/cmshosting/)
• Net Logistics (www.netlogistics.com.au)

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Hello All,

 I thought I would write a series of articles on how to create a website. Please note that Im not going to do a HTML/Design based process. Insted I will be showing you how to rapidly deploy a valid xhtml, scalable, templatable, SEO’d Content Management System (CMS).

 Why a CMS?

The benefits of using a CMS are endless. You can manage your site easily with great control, customise the design, customise the content, customise the functionality and more. I will show you how to do all of this from start to finish.

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