The registrar you use to register your domains isn’t usually something that you spend a lot of time thinking about.  Most people will just search for the cheapest registrar and off they go.  And truth be told, the registrar you use to register your domain probably won’t matter all that much.  But occasionally you will find that the cheapest registrar isn’t always the best to use.

Some registrars will inundate you with offer upon offer to add to your bill.  Then once you’ve signed up with them as a customer they continue to send offers to your email.  Some of them make their user interface difficult to use so that you have to click through a lot of pages to find what you want.  Every page will have some kind of advertising on it so it’s a way for them to increase their ads visibility.

Worse yet some will buy up domains from under your nose as you’re searching for it.  They’ll monitor how popular a domain is in the searches and then while you’re in the process of trying to buy it they’ll snatch it up with an automated system.  Knowing that the domain is sought after they’ll try to offer it to you for the low low price of hundreds of dollars.  Of course they do all this sneaky stuff through subsidiaries so they have plausible deniability, but if you can connect a few dots you’ll see it leads right up to the worst offenders.

By the way, I’ve written up a page on transferring your domains out of Godaddy.  It’s not an easy process, though Godaddy has made it a little easier than it has been in the past.

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One of the most important aspects of your website will be the layout and colors that you choose.  The layout should flow well, but some webmasters would tell you that more important than the layout is the color scheme that you choose.  Colors are the first thing that stand out to your websites users, so picking the right colors is very important.

Depending on the layout you will want to have one or two primary colors and one or two secondary colors.  The first primary color is found more prominently on the website while the first secondary color compliments that primary color.  You need to pick primary colors that don’t clash or stand out from one another.  A clashing color scheme is hard on the eyes and users will want to exit your site quickly.

It’s easier to pick your primary colors first since your secondary colors will compliment the primary ones.  For example, if you chose deep red as your first primary color your first secondary color should be a lighter shade of red.

The last thing to know about your color scheme is that you want to make the primary colors more bold, more deep than the secondary colors.  It would look weird for the primary color to be a pastel pink while the secondary is rose red.

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The easiest way to pay for your websites hosting costs is to sign up for an ad program.  There are a lot of them out there though.  So to get the most bang for your click what program should you go with?  Well the three big players are Google, Yahoo, and MSN with their contextual ad networks.  MSN has a pretty big sized ad network that pays pretty well, but both it and Yahoo are in their infancy when compared to the big G.  Google consistently outperforms Yahoo and MSN in terms of the ads being relevant to your site (meaning they have a large number of ads to display) and the payment per click.  In fact, Yahoo recently inked a deal with Google to share their ad networks with each other so that Yahoo can get in on some of Google’s action.  If you can’t beat them, and Yahoo certainly can’t beat Google (neither can MSN), join them.

Now that you have the major player picked the question revolves around your desire to dabble with some of the other players in the market.  In order to do so you’d have to make sure it’s not agains the Terms of Service for either provider to use another ad network on your website.  You will also need to realize that using another smaller ad provider will cost you a few clicks from your primary provider.  The main advantage to the secondary provider is that it allows you more ads per page (Google only allows 3 ads per page).  It also gives you a back up should you do something that your main provider deem agains their TOS and ban your account.

There are a number of smaller ad providers out there but the biggest one out there is called adbrite.  Using adbrite you can place ads on your page just like you can with Google.  An advantage with adbrite is that you can set the prices you want to be paid for the ads instead of just accepting whatever Google/Yahoo/MSN pay your for each of your clicks.

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So you’ve managed to make a website and gather a decent amount of traffic on the web.  Now you want to put some ads on the site, but the question is do you go with image ads or text ads?  The easy answer is text only ads.  Text only ads typically do better than image ads on a given website.  Though this performance is scewed because most people that use text only ads blend the ads into the content as well as possible to make the ads look like part of the content.  This is effectively tricking the reader into clicking the ads since they look like content.  So I like to think that the value on text ads is a bit skewed.

If the ad won’t be masquarading around as content on your site the answer is a bit more difficult.  I prefer to use a mix of text and image ads on my site in places that don’t interfere with the content.  The text ads give the reader more options to click on and these typically have higher pay per click.
The reason for using image ads is that they give an allure to your site.  Chances are you don’t have a site that’s ranked in alexa’s top 100,000 sites in terms of traffic.  Most sites that are highly trafficed will have an agreement set up with some third party ad placement agency that puts image ads on your site.  If you don’t have the traffic to attract such an agreement the image ads can give your users the illusion that you have more traffic than you do.  Perception is everything on the web.

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There are a lot of things to consider when using adsense. First and foremost, you need to experiment a lot. Because each website is different some things work well on one site and horribly on others. You’ll find a lot of good info on adsense from google (it’s in google’s best interest to see you succeed). You just need to search for it.

Some things to consider:

• Placement of ads
• Ad colors
• Blending ads into content/make them stick out
• size of ads
• number of ads on page
• what types of ads to use (link unit/video/text)

All these things will affect your earnings and there aren’t any straight forward answers. I find that people click my ads when the stick out more. You might not find the same. Play around with all of those things and be patient. Set up ads in different channels and over the course of 8-10 thousand impressions make an informed decision about what works best.

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One thing that a lot of webmasters encounter is frustration.  It’s easy to lose focus on your website when you get no traffic.  The Internet is an extremely competitive place and unless you have a lot of money for advertising or a very clever idea for a website chances are you’ll be last in line for traffic on the web.  One way to stave off this frustration is to set up realistic goals for your website.

It’s important to set small easy to obtain goals so that you don’t lose focus.  If you choose a goal of getting one thousand visitors a day it could be many months or years before that happens, during that time you won’t feel like you’re making any kind of progress.  The goals should be small and easily obtained at first.

It’s also important to set different kinds of goals.  Maybe your first goal is to average 50 unique visitors per day.  Then the next goal could be impressions per day (impressions are different than visitors, one visitor can generate many page impressions).  If you’re running ads on your site that pay per click you could set a goal of one click per day after that.  Then go back to unique visitors.  Then maybe instead of clicks per day it’s amount of money per day earned from the ads.

Keep going with the goals and make sure you vary them.  By varying your goals you’ll learn different things about your visitors.  You’ll also learn valuable lessons about traffic and how to convert it to money, returning visitors, and how you site will grow in the future.

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A lot of people with websites make the website for the explicit reason of making money online through ads.  This is done by a number of people successfully right now and you could be one too.  Don’t expect to make enough to quit your day job, but you could get lucky.

One of the mistakes people make when using pay per click advertisers is that they pepper their page with ads in an attempt to get as many clicks as possible.  These webmasters don’t realize that the amount they get paid per click will drastically decrease because of this.  Ad programs are happy to have you place multiple ad blocks on your page for users to click.  But they also like to place the highest paying ads at the top of the site.

That means if you have a banner ad at the top that doesn’t get clicked very often and you have another ad placed somewhere in the content the banner ad will always pay more money per click.  You should set up your ads in different channels to see which channels are clicked the most often.  That will give you an idea of what ad placement works best.  Then you should eliminate the ad placements that don’t get clicked very often, especially if they’re higher than the ads that do get clicked often.

Overall you might see a reduction in the number of clicks you get, but you should see an increase in the cost per click (cpc).  Hopefully the increase in cpc will make up for the lost clicks.  Of course the added bonus is to the readers, they get to see a website that isn’t peppered with ads and are more likely to return or encourage others to go to your site.

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Many people just starting out in the web world have some experience with a programming language whether it be C# or C++ or Java or a scripting language like PHP or Python or Perl.  There are a lot of options out there when choosing a language to write your website in.  But to choose you should ask yourself a couple questions.

1.  How much time do you want to spend setting up the site?

If you want to spend very little time setting up the configuration for the site you should avoid languages like Java or C#.  Big object oriented languages will require at least a few days of configuring servers and files depending on what type of web framework you choose.

2.  Does the code for the site need to be easily extensible?

If you plan to use the site as a platform to make a large company from you’ll need to make the site much larger over time as you add new clients and new features.  Making a hulking site is easier to do with an object oriented language, maintaining it is easier as well.  The time you spend configuring the site up front will be saved on the back end.

3.  Do you have a dedicated server?

If you don’t have a dedicated server (those are costly) you won’t have the ability to just add whatever functionality you want to the server.  Most shared servers come with PHP and Perl installed for you to use and some will have some form of Java or C# available, but chances are that you’ll want some feature that they don’t have installed and won’t install for you to use.  If you don’t have a dedicated server you probably would be better off choosing a scripting language that is already installed.

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The number one mistake everyone makes when starting a website is that they do it to make lots of money.  Very few websites ever make more than a few thousand dollars a month let alone the millions that google or facebook make.  The best kind of site to make is one that you like writing about.  That said, there are different ways of making a website to get your ideas out on the web.  Different methods produce different results.

Forums: if you liked a particular topic, say batteries, you could easily make a forum on the topic and write all kinds of posts on different kinds of batteries that you liked.  If your forum picks up members you get the added bonus of the members writing most of the content for you.  The downside is that you have horrible click rates from members so most of your page views won’t result in any clicks.  Another downside is that if you don’t pick up members you’ll be talking to yourself and you won’t get any of the free content and then
your website looks like a graveyard to any potential members.  And no one wants to be a part of a dead or dieing community.

Another format that’s popular is blogging.  With a blog it’s much easier to convert your traffic into clicks, you can put the ads right in the middle of your blog posts and anywhere else you want to put it where it’ll get a higher conversion percentage.  You also have the bonus of not needing members to contribute content or posts to make your blog look like it’s lively.  The main detractor is that you need to keep adding content to the blog every few days.

Social networking/news sites seem to be a big hit these days.  Though those formats are so overly used and created these days that you’ll have a hard time breaking into those niche’s, and you require a huge userbase to make it successful.  Though if it works the upside is much bigger than anything else these days.

If you’re good with flash you could make a few clever games online, though like social networking the web is flooded with these sites.  You’ll need to be really clever with your game.

Overall, the best kind of site to get into for beginners is blogs.  They’re easy to use and pretty flexible.  Once you have a good amount of traffic you’ll be bringing in money through advertising.  Once you get a feel for how websites work a forum would be a good addition to your blog.

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Everyone asks quite often what is a good niche to get into when starting a website.  The truth of it is the best niche is the one you like the most and the one that you have a lot of knowledge about.  If you don’t like what your website is about you’ll have a hard time updating it.

But if you’re a glutton for punishment I can’t stop you from creating a website about something that you despise.  You can do a couple different things to determine what are high paying niches.  Google provides a tool for you to use to determine what keywords are the highest paying.  With it you can type in different keywords and see what the search volume for the keyword is.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

So you could, for example, look up a keyword for a site based on finance.  You would find that 16 million 6 hundred thousand searches for the month of september.  That’s a lot of volume so it’s bound to be a niche that advertisers are paying a lot of money for.  But that’s only half of equation.  You also need to find out how much competition there is for that keyword.  To find this you simply need to do a google search for that word.

In our case the word finance has 557 million results, that’s a lot of competition.  So sure you get a lot of searches but your website is very unlikely to show up in the first 100 pages of search results.  You’ll just have to keep looking for a good keyword to make a site around until you find one that has a good volue of searches with a small amount of competition.

The defacto answer is that health and finance are the best niches to be in, but unless you have a lot of advertising money you won’t get any traffic.

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