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AdSense Training Course - Marketing Tools

Looking for a different way of making money?

The tools you're going to need

Over the next few days we'll be looking at the tool kit you would ideally use to construct your own AdSense empire. Some of these tools are cheap, some are free and some are expensive. My advice is to start off with the low cost stuff to get yourself going and then to invest in some more sophisticated tools once you have got some money coming in.

Whilst you are going to need a hosting account and a domain name, I think the place to start is with your website and there are two ways to go.

Using a blog

First, you can start out with a blog. There's free software available to let you create and run a blog from sites like WordPress and Blogger. These come with a range of templates that you can edit and tweak but the process can be quite difficult. Blogger for example has a complex structure which makes editing hard work and error prone unless you are familiar with HTML.

WordPress again is quite complicated but can actually be used to generate beautiful and highly functional websites. In fact one of the people I introduced AdSense to (Eibhlin) has written a short guide to creating an excellent WordPress blog and I recommend you take a peek. Called "Sites That Soar", this ebook is actually written by an artist and not by an internet marketer. But Eibhlin has worked out exactly how to make WordPress blogs look stunning. If you look at the Sites That Soar page you'll see an example.

So one way forward for you would be to download the WordPress software from WordPress.org and then edit it using the blueprint the Eibhlin has created.

You will still need a domain name and a hosting service but you've got to start somewhere!

A complete Website design and publishing tool

An alternative approach is to use a full-blown website design tool and this has a number of advantages. First, it gives you total control over how your site looks. Second, it will let you make changes to your website easily and quickly. Thirdly, you can use it to build a range of sites and many of the most successful AdSense publishers have lots of sites!

I use a combination of the two for my sites. This website for example is built using a tool called XSitePro as is AdWords Management. They are very different in style but I created them using a couple of the templates that comes with the software (you actually get hundreds and hundreds and they are easy to edit and play with).

I'll be discussing XSitePro in more detail later on because it has some features in it that make it exceptionally easy to use with AdSense too. Specifically it makes the process of adding your AdSense code into your web pages very easy: you just point to where you want your AdSense ads to go on the page and right-click on the screen. Not hard!

Tomorrow we'll get on to the process of selecting a domain name. Getting the right domain name can make a huge difference to the amount of web traffic you get so it's an important topic.

William Charlwood

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