How to Start a Home Based Web Design Business » Profit

All about Google Adsense

prachimehta87 — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:00:59 +0000

The chances are pretty high that you might have heard of Google Adsense, but you might not have really tried your luck with it to make some handy bucks. So, let us take a closer look at what these money mines have got to offer.

In simple terms, Google AdSense is a contexual advertising program that the advertisers use to display relevant ads on the millions of websites of Google’s Network, while the publishers or the website owners get paid when the visitors click on relevant ads displayed on their site.

To get started with Google AdSense you can simply visit google.com/adsense and sign up. However, you must have a personal blog or website, which has been operational for the past 6months or more. Once your application is approved, you can simply insert the generated AdSense code on the header/body/sidebar/footer or any desired location of the website, where you wish to display the ads.

In case you’re what kind of website will be beneficial in making the most outta’ AdSense program, you should understand that Google has a massive network and their can render relevant ads pertaining to any niche right from travel, arts, drama, entertainment, sports, health and beauty, down to blogging or money making tips.

You’d be amazed to know that websites like ezinearticles.com have generated AdSense revenues as high as $9 million per annum, and changed their fate.

All it takes is a simple website loaded with some unique high quality content (Google Adsense program requires that you put ads only on web pages that contain more than 85% original content and displaying ads on plagiarised info may led to a lifetime ban from participating in Adsense program).

After this you need to do bit of link building and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and drive some traffic to your site/blog. Once your blog is 6months old, and there are enough visitors, you may start displaying Adsense ads and get paid for doing nothing – whenever the visitors click on those ads.

What’s more, visitors need not purchase or download anything from the website on whose advertisement they click (unlike Amazon referral, eBay, ClickBank and other similar programs), so making money is lot easy with Google AdSense.

You can experiment with ad placement and colours to improvise upon their performance!

SEO Certification: Don’t Be A Fool!

Allan Collins — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 01:33:25 +0000

Photo By Danard Vincente

I couldn’t help but chuckle at every self-proclaimed SEO certified professional. Needless to say many companies are making a bunch of money offering SEO certifications to oblivious buyers. To be straight, you shouldn’t be able to charge clients $200+ per hour just because you spent nearly a fourth of your annual income to be “certified”.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a highly needed skill in today’s web-focused world. If done right, the results are phenomenal. Organic search traffic is highly valuable for any website, since it’s free. Would you rather pay thousands of dollars a month for paid ads or pay nothing per month for the same amount of traffic? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to answer this one.

As with all things, there really isn’t a proven guaranteed way to perform SEO. Search engines algorithms are continuously changing and therefore no one can make SEO an exact science. It’s really a continuous trial and error game with no guarantees for a top ranking position.

So how do you become an SEO expert? Well, it first begins with the basics. By reading reliable SEO blogs such as SEOmoz, SEOBook, and even Search Engine Land to name a few, you’ll be on the right track in no time. Try out what you’ve learned from these sources and apply them to your personal websites. If you feel that you have gained search engine rankings by what you have done, then it may be alright to start offering it as a service to your clients.

There are three ways to bill for this service. The most common ways are to bill by the hour or to bill by the project. The third and less widely used way to bill is by performance. Basically, your clients will pay a set amount per month upon the condition that their website reaches a certain search engine ranking. The pay by performance model can be quite risky and has the potential to make you do a lot of free work.

So in the end, don’t waste your money on getting an SEO certification and focus more on the free and low cost resources available online. Try these processes out first on your own sites before you try them on your clients. If it all works out, you could be looking at gaining some much needed profit.

Gaining Profit: Hosting Services

Allan Collins — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 01:43:17 +0000

One problem many designers face is a lack of ongoing relationships with their clients. What if you could offer a service that the client needed that would allow you to still keep in contact with them?

Every web site online today needs a web host. Instead of sending your clients to a third-party, consider doing it yourself.

Your Own Servers

If you are the do it yourself type, you might consider setting up servers at your location for your clients.

Do this if:

You know what you are doing.
Know all about network security.
Do daily backups.
Have a really fast internet connection.
Have the spare time to fix problems (server errors, etc.).

It can be a huge liability if you host web sites on your servers at your location, please be aware.

Virtual Private Servers

If you know a bit about web servers, you may be interested in getting a Virtual Private Server (VPS) to host web sites with. These are basically servers setup in a datacenter for you to use for whatever you wish. These can be costly, but highly effective on custom items.

Reseller Accounts

If you are like me and don’t want to spend all of your time fixing server hardware and software issues, you should invest in a reseller account. A reseller account can be a great way to take away a lot of the liability you would have by hosting on your personal servers. Basically, big web hosts will allow you to sell their services under your brand. All support and server management will go through them, but you will be the front person the client sees.

Example:

Purchase a reseller account from Hostgator, nicely priced at $25 per month. Charge your clients $25 per month for hosting. At the end of the year, if you have five clients, you should have received an income of $1,500. Subtract your yearly hosting expenses of $300, and you will make a profit of $1,200 for your first year.

*Once you reach six clients, you should purchase another reseller hosting server or upgrade your package.

Conclusion

Having constant contact with your clients is key to a long-term business relationship. A majority of clients who leave firms feel that the company didn’t care about them anymore. Your long-term and happy clients are the key to a business’ revenue stream.

Gaining Profit: Web Maintenance

Allan Collins — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 03:27:03 +0000

This post is going to contradict my previous post regarding the pitfalls of website maintenance. One may ask, how can you gain profit by providing website maintenance? The answer relates to my other previous pitfall post regarding hourly billing. When you charge by the hour, you are basically earning based on the time you spend to do something. Instead of dropping maintenance clients, consider doing it yourself.

SET LIMITS…

Allocate a certain amount of time each month to devote to maintenance. Estimate the time needed each month on maintenance for a client. Next multiply this by your current maintenance rate (if hourly). Subtract a portion of the cost as a discount. Charge the client each month this number.

Example:

Client ABC will use about 3 hours a month for maintenance.
My hourly rate is $70. Times three that’s $210.
Let’s take off $10 and make it an even $200 (Around $66 per hour).
I sign a one year maintenance contract at $200 per month with ABC.

The client is aware that they are limited to three hours of maintenance time a month at this rate and anything after three hours will be billed at $70 per hour. The client also understands that this time cannot be rolled over to the next month and cannot be refunded if not used.

DID YOU SAY PROFIT?

In the above example, let’s say that we promptly complete the client’s change requests and keep them happy.Â Let’s also say that the client used 24 out of the allocated 36 hours for the year.Â Â That’s 12 hours of time resulting in a profit of around $800!

BUT I DON’T WANT TO DO WEB MAINTENANCE…

That’s okay!Â But there are starving contractors out there that would love to have some work.Â Let’s say you hire a contractor to handle the changes for ABC.Â The contractor works for $35 per hour.Â You pay them $840 for the year and earn a profit of around $1,500!

CONCLUSION

I hated website maintenance.Â Each time I had to do it, I felt that it was draining me dry.Â By using the above example, I made website maintenance worth my time.Â I no longer dread the thought of doing it anymore.