Many of the steps I suggest in this chapter for publicizing your site are essentially mechanical, for example, submitting your site to a variety of search engines. Even so, you should have a plan for marketing your content sites. No brick-and-mortar business in its right mind would attempt a marketing or publicity campaign without a plan, and you shouldn't proceed online without one, either.
Having a plan will help you accomplish even mechanical steps more effectively. For example, when you submit your site to a search engine or a directory, you will often be asked for a description of your offering. Understanding your site in the context of a marketing plan will help you hone a site description.
The two most important aspects of a plan for online marketing and publicity are:
Understanding your target audience (or audiences )
Creating a story (or stories ) that will meet the needs of and intrigue your target audience
2.1.1. The Elevator Pitch
You should be able to summarize your story in a sentence or two. (This is sometimes called an elevator pitch .) For example,
Digital photography resources, techniques, software, equipment reviews, and photo galleries
is a story that will probably attract people interested in digital photography. On the other hand,
Ramblings of a grouchy, cranky person who, well, rambles about everything is not a targeted story likely to interest anyone for long.
Use your plan and story to create a summary of your site, a list of keywords related to your site content, and one or more press releases (as I explain in this chapter, in the "Publishing Press Releases" section). The site summary and keyword list can be also be used to create meta information for your site, as I explain in Chapter 3.
2.1.2. Creating a Checklist
In addition, your plan should provide a checklist with specific "to do" itemsessentially, all of the techniques used to create online publicity described in this chapter. The list should also include offline marketing and publicity placements appropriate to your target audience and your story.
Successfully getting online publicity and generating traffic is largely a matter of focus and keeping track of the details. Creating a checklist as part of your plan will help you make sure that none of these details fall through the cracks.
2.1.3. Naming Your Site
If you haven't already picked a name for your web site, try to select a name that helps to tell your story. Good names, at least with a .com suffix, are hard to find these days. It's worth working hard to find the right name.
The Cult of Personality
Life writ large with the cult of personality might well describe the times we live in. Paris Hilton, an heiress with an apparently vacuous personality, has a television show, and is famous, because (and not despite) of that vacuous personality. I think the reality is that Paris is a great deal smarter than she seemsalthough another moral you can certainly draw from the Paris Hilton success story is that sex sells.
My point is that people, particularly celebrities, get attention these days. If you have celebrity, have access to celebrities, or have ideas about how to create celebrity, I say: "Go for it! Milk it!" And don't forget to mention your web site.
It's reasonable that people should be interested in people. People are interesting. As the poet Alexander Pope said a long time ago, "The proper study of mankind is man." (If Pope had included both genders, we moderns could surely go along with this.)
It's really very simple. Getting web site traffic requires publicity. Publicity is best generated using stories about people, particularly interesting or notorious people. If your web site has an interesting story about people, let others know about it (perhaps using a press release). Your people story will draw traffic.
Ideally, a site name, as I mentioned, should tell, or evoke, the story of your site and be memorable. Consider these classics:
Amazon: the world's greatest river meets the world's largest inventory.
eBay: I don't know why this one works, but it does.
Google: a very big number fits with the very large quantity of information Google indexes.
Chapter 2. 2.1. Creating a Plan and a Story
Part I. Chapter 2. Driving Traffic to Your Site
They say (whoever "they" are) that the best things in life are free. That's certainly true when it comes to driving traffic to your web site.
You can spend a great deal of money to send traffic to your site using advertising. One of the most effective ways to do this is to use Google's AdWords program, explained in detail in Part III of this book. But there are also many no-cost ways to draw site visitors, many of which may be more effective, and get traffic that is more highly targeted, than using paid advertising. Even if you are using paid advertising to draw traffic, you should know about free techniquesand you should use these techniques in conjunction with your advertising.
I'll explain how to optimize your web site and pages to get more traffic from Google and other search engines in Chapter 3.
This chapter explains how to publicize your site and increase traffic using techniques that do not cost money and do not involve tinkering with the HTML code and content of your pages themselves. In other words, this chapter explains how to drive traffic to your site using external mechanisms, such as submitting your site to a search engine, leaving more complex issues of constructing your site so that search engines will like ita field sometimes called search engine optimization (SEO)for Chapter 3.
Chapter 1. Section 1.3. How Much Content Is Enough?
Suppose you create one web page every hundred days that generates $100 in ad revenue. Alternatively, you create a page a day for 100 days. Each page generates $1.00 in ad revenue. Either way, you end up with $100.00 at the end of 100 days.
The point is that there are different ways to go about deciding how much content to createit significantly depends upon the quality of the content. A single content page might make sense if it contained a valuable application like TinyURL (See "Useful Free Services and Software," earlier in this chapter). If your pages are low-value content, you will need a great many of them to make significant revenue from advertising.
Web Site Metrics
The metrics of web site traffic is a huge topic just by itself, with a number of books just about web metrics and quite a bit of software designed simply to help webmasters gather and understand the metrics of their sites. It's a very important topic, because to optimize your site you need to have baseline information as well as feedback so you can understand whether changes improve site traffic, or not and also which elements in your site draw traffic.
The topic is also important because the fees you can expect to get from advertisers largely depend upon the metric of your site.
By and large, web metrics are simply beyond the scope of this book, although you'll learn about the metric related to Google's AdSense in Chapter 9 and the metrics related to AdWords in Chapter 12.
Of course, your web server's logs contain a great deal of traffic information that can help provide you with useful metrics.
But, no doubt, the best metric of all is money in your pocket from fees paid by advertisersthrough the AdSense program or some other mechanismfor publication on your site.
For further information about metrics, I suggest you start with Jim Sterne's Web Metrics: Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success (Wiley) and then have a look at the "Tracking and Logging" thread on WebMasterWorld, http://www.webmasterworld.com.
Between the two extremesa single page of valuable content and many pages of low-value contentlies a happy medium that will work for most content-based sites by creating enough critical mass to draw both traffic and advertisers. If you are just starting out, this happy medium is a goal to which you can reasonably aspire.
Here's what you need at a minimum to have a site drawing respectable numbers at the end of one year:
100 pages of quality content "in the can" to start with
On average, one new page of quality content a day every day for a year (each page about 300 words)
"26 Steps to 15K a Day" in O'Reilly's Google Hacks by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest provides a step-by-step formula for creating a successful content site and drawing traffic (for more on drawing traffic, see Chapters 2 and 3 of this book).
1.2. Popular Sites: Using Alexa
I've already mentioned Google as an example of a site with broad traffic. There are, of course, many others. If you are curious, you can go to Alexa, http://www.alexa.com, which monitors both how much traffic a site gets and the relative increase (or decrease) in site popularity.
Where Does Content Come From?
No, content doesn't grow on trees. Content is a valuable commodityand perhaps more than a commodity. Great content is wonderful and unique, and not fungible.
Communities can supply a great deal of content if you have an idea for a good framework that will entice contributions about specific subjects.
If you are a writer, you can create content yourself. (Maybe this is the time for your inner writer to finally come out!)
Site owners can hire writers, either as employees or freelancers, or with a profit-sharing arrangement.
You can often pick up the rights to publish material on the Web that was originally created for a book, magazine, or newspaper very inexpensively. Content creators may be placed to let you use their content simply in exchange for publicityin the form of an author credit as an expert and/or a link.
You also might check out book and literary agencies. Some of them run a sideline business supplying aggregated recycled content and represent whole groups of writers.
So even if you aren't confident that you can personally create valuable content, don't despair: there are many inexpensive ways to publish valuable content without writing it yourself.
Don't underestimate the value of resource pages as content. A simple page of links to sites related to a specific subject (for example, sites of interest to collectors of antique typewriters and calculators) may draw traffic if the links are accurately described, kept up-to-date, and expanded when new relevant sites are opened.
Alexa is owned by Amazon.com.
On the Alexa site, click on the Top 500 Sites tab to see an ordered list of the most highly trafficked sites, updated daily. The most trafficked sites according to Alexa are shown in Figure 1-1.
Alexa's Movers and Shakers, shown in Figure 1-2, is also interesting. This snapshot of the "right here and now" Web is useful for seeing if there are any Web-wide trends in action, and also for learning about the kinds of exogenous events that move large-scale web sites up and down the chutes and ladders of popularity.
Although it is probably unrealistic to expect that you or I will be piloting sites that are the top of Alexa's list, it is worth spending time learning about popularity on the Web if you want to build successful sites. Alexa provides the tools you can use to see for yourself what is trafficked and what is gaining or losing among top-ranked sites.
You can also use Alexa to see traffic statistics for sites that are not in the top 500. For almost any site that has been around a while, Alexa will give you an idea of traffic statistics and whether it is gaining or losing traffic.
Alexa lets you enter descriptive information about your web site, which others can see if they check your site traffic using Alexa. You can also make sure that Alexa provides a snapshot of your home page along with it statistics. Since this service is free, it is certainly worth entering a site description.
Alexa works by collating results from users throughout the Web who have installed the special Alexa Toolbar. (If you'd like, you too can install the Alexa Toolbar and help with popularity statistics.) There's some question about the statistical validity of Alexa for less trafficked sites because of this method of gathering dataAlexa's results are probably skewed towards users who are already web savvy and heavy users.
Most likely, Alexa's results are not very meaningful for sites that are ranked below 100,000 in popularity (very roughly, with fewer than 10,000 visitors per week).
The Alexa ranking of 100,000 or lower is also a great divide: if your site is in the top 100,000 you have content that many advertisers will consider worthwhile. Being in the top Alexa is a pretty good goal for your web site or sites: you can make real money from a top 100,000 site; it is an ambitious goal, but attainable.
Chapter 1. Section 1.1. The Taxonomy of Success
There's a great deal of variation in goodsuccessfulcontent web sites. The gist of these sites varies from humor to practical to editorial opinions and beyond. It's hard to generalize. But successful content sites typically do tend to fall into at least one (maybe more than one) of the following categories:
The site is humorous and makes visitors laugh.
The site provides a useful free service.
The site is an online magazine or newspaper.
The site provides opinions in the form of a blog or blogs.
The site provides practical information.
The site sells a popular product or service.
The site services a community and provides communication tools for that community.
The only thing these kinds of sites have in commonand there are undoubtedly other ways successful sites can be categorizedis that they draw traffic (either focused or broad). Therefore, they are good sites and are excellent venues for web advertising. In short, they use web content to make moneyand making money with your web site content is the topic of the first part of this book (and likely a subject you care about!).
In this section, I'll drill down further on the categorization, or taxonomy, of successful sites without spending too much time on the issue. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harlan Stewart once commented about obscenity, it's hard to define good content, but one knows it when one sees it.
The section "How Much Content Is Enough?" later in this chapter provides information about the mechanics of content creationin other words, how many pages of content you need, how frequently it should be updated, and so on.
1.1.1. Funny Web Destinations
Humor itself, as is well known, is in the eye of the beholder (and by itself as a category has infinite variety), but an example of a humorous site that is popular and makes money from contextual advertising is Googlefight , http://www.googlefight.com, a site that compares the Google rankings of two terms such as "God" and "Satan."
Humorous sites tend to have short half-lives. Like stars going nova, they can draw tons of traffic for a short while and then fade from view. For example, when Christo's Gates, an elaborate and well-publicized art installation, were up in Central Park, New York, a number of parody sitesCrackers Gates, Nicky's Gates, the Somerville Gatessprang up. These sites were quite popular for a week or two, but when the Christo art installation was taken down and the media publicity surrounding the installation faded, so did interest in the parody sites.
Today, everyone is bombarded with content in a variety of mediums. Things come and go quickly. For the most part, humor sites that are static , meaning that the content doesn't change, publish content that can be expected to fade from public interestwhich means that to make money from this content you must be prepared to strike while the iron is hot, because it will only be popular for a short while.
The reason that a site like Googlefight has some longevity, or legs, is that it draws upon a community effort to constantly update itself (with new examples of humorous juxtapositions). Community participation is a crucial element in many web content success storiesand has the virtue that you don't have to create the content yourself! See "Great Communities," later in this chapter, for more information.
1.1.2. Useful Free Services and Software
TinyURL , http://tinyurl.com, provides a practical and very useful (but simple) service: it allows you to convert long, unwieldy URLsfor example, like those you often see from Amazon.com when you select an inventory itemto short, convenient URLs that are easy to use in HTML code (and easy to enter in a browser). Astoundingly, this service is free. Last time I looked, TinyURL had more than 185 million hits a month. Talk about traffic!
In part, a service like TinyURL works to generate ad revenue because it is so targeted. If you go to the site, you'll find Google AdSense content ads for things like DNS (Domain Name Server) services and software that fixes technology problems with browsers. In other words, technology that addresses the problems of reasonably savvy web users is likely to be contextually relevant to the concerns of visitors to TinyURL. Enough users click these ads to more than justify the startup cost and ongoing costs of maintaining the URL conversion service.
It's splitting hairs to try to decide whether sites that provide access to free downloadable software are providing a service or information. Whatever the case, a site that provides information, links, resources, and downloadable software covering a particular technology can draw a great deal of traffic.
For example, if you want to learn about RSS and Atom syndication softwaretools for reading and writing feedsand to download this software (and find easy one-stop links for the location of the download sites), a good site to visit is the RSS Compendium , http://allrss.com. Because of their usefulness, one-stop technology sites such as RSS Compendium (whether or not they provide access to downloads) can draw considerable traffic and content-based ad revenue.
If you are going to publish a site whose main draw is access to software, and then make money off the site with content advertising, it is worth bearing in mind that software that runs on the Web typically generates multiple page views for a single user running the software. (In other words, the user spends time on the web site.) This makes it better for the purpose of generating content revenue than a site that merely publishes information about software with download links.
The difference I'm describing is between software that runs on the Web, and software that you download from the Web in order to run locally.
With a download link, once the user downloads the software, there is probably going to be no more interest in the web content.
In my opinion, downloaded software that hosts advertising using an Internet connection is a heinous way for vendors of software running on local operating systems to monetize their softwareat least it's a step above installing spyware for a living.
1.1.3. Magazines and Newspapers
The business of Salon , http://www.salon.com, is to provide informed editorial content. This business is profitable because of the advertising that appears on the Salon site. The business model of Salon, and other online magazines , is pretty much like that of a brick-and-mortar newspaper or magazine: subsidize the distribution of your articles and editorials, and make your revenue with sponsored ads. This works pretty well on the Web, even though it is essentially old-fashioned.
Although it is harder to get subscription revenue for content on the Web than off-Web, profit margins for online advertising are higher, and ads can be more reliably targeted to the context of the content. (This last point is important, because it is the unique selling proposition for web advertising as opposed to advertising in other mediums.)
Opinions differ at even the most successful online venues whether charging a subscription fee for access to content makes sense, or not. (This is a debate that is almost as old as the Web, and yet to be fully resolved.)
For example, the Wall Street Journal does, but the New York Times does not charge for most access. The New York Times online site has a far greater revenue base from online advertising and certain pay-for-access premium services than the Wall Street Journal with its entirely subscription-based model. Probably either model can work. But at this point, the advertising model seems to be winning the race.
1.1.4. The Blogosphere
You probably read one or more blogs , at least from time to time. A blog, also called a weblog or web log, is a diary of entries, usually presented on the Web in reverse chronological order. You may even write your own blog. The subject matter of blogs varies wildly, from general rants and raves, to blogs about relationships, to blogs more-or-less devoted to specific technologies, such as my Googleplex Blog (when I don't get too carried away with tangents, my blog is about Google's technology, searching, and research on the Web).
If you think that blogs about a specific subject are an ideal (although narrow) venue for targeted advertising content, you are quite right. Unlike opinion sites that are basically online magazines, blogs are a specifically web phenomenon (sometimes collectively referred to as the blogosphere ). A variety of software mechanismssuch as the ability to automatically collect trackback links in a blog entry, meaning links to sites or blogs that discuss the original entrymake blogging an extremely effective and versatile mechanism for publishing content on the Web. Syndication built into most blog content management software such as MovableType or WordPress allows easy distribution of the content.
All is not perfect in paradise, though, and there are some problems with blogging as a vehicle for making money from your content. First, there are so many blogs. It's easy to create a blog using hosted services such as Google's Blogger or Six Apart Software 's community sites TypePad and LiveJournal. (Six Apart is the publisher of MovableType blogging software.)
But it's hard to stand out from the mass of blogs and generate notice and traffic. See Chapter 2 for some ideas about how to drive traffic to a blog and Chapter 10 for information about how to purchase traffic for a blog using Google's AdWords contextual advertising program.
Next, the fact that blogs are essentially unvetted and unedited makes some advertisers leery about placing ads on these sites. If you do expect to make money from advertising on your blog, it's a good idea to be careful with spelling, punctuation, and the overall presentation issues involved with writing.
Finally, most bloggers use hosted blogging services such as Blogger, so they don't have to worry about configuring or maintaining their own blogging software. Installing software like MovableType is tricky enough that Six Apart, the company that wrote the software, will get it going for you on your own web serverfor a fee.
But the problem with having a hosted blog is that generally it's not up to you to place advertising on it. If there is contextual advertising, the revenue may go to the blog host. So if you plan to make money from blogging content, you need to either set up your own blogging server software or work with a specialized web hosting organization that handles the technical end of things but still lets you profit from advertising.
The problem of losing control of the revenue potential of hosted sites can be presented in contexts other than blogging. For example, many smaller e-commerce web sites outsource order processing and shopping cart functionality. This often makes practical sense, but may mean that these pages are no longer available for advertisingor that the advertising and profits are controlled by the host rather than you.
1.1.5. Practical Information: Content Sites and Niches
The O'Reilly site (http://www.oreilly.com) provides a great deal of practical information, such as code from the O'Reilly books. O'Reilly is also a source of (usually) well-informed opinions, mostly about topics related to technology: for example, the O'Reilly author blogs, articles, and other quality content.
Many people turn to the Web as their first line of approach for finding information: about technology, relationships, travel destinations, and much more. These content niches are probably the most dependable road to advertising riches on the Web.
Niches don't necessarily have to be big niches. For example, my site Mechanista , http://www.mechanista.com, features antique machinery such as typewriters and adding machines. Mechanista makes slow but steady AdSense revenue (from companies selling things like typewriter ribbons).
Don't forget the old saw that it's better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond. Sites that feature a niche that is of interest only to a small group of people (but very interesting to those people) are likely to achieve high search engine rankings for the relevant terms, draw traffic through the search engines, and become well known among aficionados of the niche.
See Chapters 2 and 3 for more information about drawing traffic and search engine rankings.
If you are the publisher of this kind of niche site, you may not get rich off contextual advertising (you simply cannot draw the eyeballs necessary for getting rich), but you are likely to make a nice revenue return in relation to the effort involved.
1.1.6. E-Commerce Sites
Many of the most successful web businesses make their money as e-commerce sites : by selling goods or services. Advertising on these sites is a by-product (you might say, a product by-product). To name just a few examples:
Amazon.com is the department store of the Web, selling, either on its own account or for affiliates, everything you can imagine.
eBay is the world's greatest flea market and auction community, with a great business model since it doesn't need to take an inventory position in the items sold on its site.
ETrade , Schwab , and other online trading and investing sites are among the greatest revenue generators on the Web.
Gambling sites successfully part "players" from their funds.
The only thing these sites really have in common is that they make money by selling something and that they draw traffic (in some cases, such as eBay and Amazon, lots and lots of traffic).
Making money from advertising is not really the business of this kind of site. These sites are big businesses and are likely to be advertisers on other sites themselves. In fact, if you work on behalf of a large e-commerce site, you may be interested in using the AdWords APIs to create custom advertising applications as explained in Part IV of this book.
Still, it's natural to look for additional revenue sources, and many e-commerce sites do sell advertising, although they all try toor should try totake care not to let the advertising interfere with their primary goalselling products or services onlineor with their brand. For example, you can buy placement for a book or other product on Amazon. These ads show up as similar items when you are checking out (or considering a purchase). It works pretty similarly on eBay. You can purchase contextual advertising on eBay, but only for your products or "store" on eBay itself.
E-commerce sites besides Amazon and eBay may sell ads based on impressions (also called CPM, or Cost Per Thousand, advertising) such as banners used for branding purposes. They are very unlikely to sell ads on a pay-for-click basis (also called CPC, which stands for Cost Per Click) because they want to keep traffic on their sites. Even CPM ads intended for branding purposes will be scrutinized carefully to make sure that the branding message is in keeping with the goal of the e-commerce site.
1.1.7. Great Communities
From its very earliest beginnings, the Web has largely been about community. From a practical standpoint, involving a worthwhile community is a great way to create content. You don't need to create the content yourself: your users do, for example by contributing to discussion threads or by making syndication feeds available.
Site owners can use community to leverage their content and to create sites that are valuable to users because of the involvement of the community.
If your site is extended by community members (for example, through a discussion thread), you may have little control over the quality of the content. As an advertising venue, this content may not be worth that much. But even if it is only worth pennies a day in advertising revenue, the content generation is on autopilotit is expanding, changing, and staying relevant on its own. So you may still be making a good return on your effort.
Community has made eBay great: essentially all the content comes from users of the eBay auction system. Amazon makes extensive use of community to fill out its content with reviews of books and other products.
Even if your site is essentially not a community site, you can use contributions from visitors to extend and round out your own content. Successful examples include comments on blogs and reader reviews on a site. Another idea for obtaining content that some webmasters have used successfully is to run contests ("Best story in pictures and words about a diving trip" for a scuba diving site is one example).
Mechanisms you can use to build community on a site include providing:
Message boards
Chatrooms
Calendars with information about events in a specific field
Instant messaging applications
Reader reviews
Blog comments and trackbacks
You probably wouldn't want to program an application that enabled much of this community functionality from the ground up, but the fact is that your web host may provide this software for free, versions may be available from the open source community that are also free, or you may be able to inexpensively outsource the application.
If you are hosting your own blog with standard software like MovableType or WordPress, the software will give you the ability to enable comments and trackbacks out of the box.
Chapter 1. Build It and They Will Come: Creating Popular Web Sites
"Build it and they will come" is a wonderful line in the movies. Too bad it's usually not quite so easy in real life! True, good web content is occasionallynot alwaysdiscovered surprisingly quickly. More often, it requires a great deal of disciplined work to draw traffic to a web site, no matter how good the content of the site is.
And what is a good site and good web content, anyhow? "Good" does not mean a site with a halo! The way I use the word good in this chapter is probably circular: a site, and its content, are good if the site and its content draw traffic (or can draw traffic when suitably promoted).
If your site has a great deal of traffic, then the site's traffic is broad . Google itself is a prime example of a broad-traffic site: people use Google to search for myriad different things. But narrow, or focused , traffic can be more useful to advertisers than broad, unfocused traffic. For example, a site discussing complex ophthalmologic conditions might be very successful with targeted advertising even if it draws only a few hundred users a day. Google's traffic becomes more focused, and less broad, when a keyword search is initiated. And all the targeting in the world won't help unless you get some eyeballs.
To make money with your web site content it's a necessary (but not sufficient) condition that you have good contenteither broad or targeted at a specific niche. Content can mean information, but it also can mean other thingsfor example, software applications or jokes.
From a technical viewpoint, there are some issues about setting up a content web site so you can be flexible about the advertising you publish. Flexibility is good: to make money with advertising you need to do a great deal of tweaking. I'll explain how to set sites up so you can easily modify advertising as you go along without having to rewrite your entire site.
Acknowledgments
I'd like to specially thank Brett McLaughlin for his excellent job editing this book. It's rare to find an editor who knows both how to trust his authors and when to challenge them to do better.
Matt Wagner did an excellent job of representing me as the agent for this book. He also deserves acknowledgment for having the courage to follow his own destinyby setting up shop as a solo agent.
Phyllis is my hero, as well as my wife and friend. Thanks, Phyllis, for reading the chapters of this book before I submitted them, and for taking up the slack around the house and with the kids. Julian, Nicky, and Mathew bore my obsession with writing this book with extraordinary grace, although Nicky did frequently tell me that he wanted his Daddy back, and that he wanted "Daddy's book to be done" so that he could play with Daddy.
With three little boys in the house, music and a good headset are obligatory. Artists I listened to on this book include Ry Cooder, the Dixie Chicks, John Dowland, Emmylou Harris, Bob Marley, Kitaro, Mozart, Paul Simon, Seal, Bruce Springsteen, and Ali Farka Toure. These musicians are, of course, responsible for all errors and omissions in the text, while I alone deserve credit for everything I happened to get right!
Using Code Examples
This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, you may use the code in this book in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for permission unless you're reproducing a significant portion of the code. For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does not require permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O'Reilly books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of example code from this book into your product's documentation does require permission.
We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN.
Conventions Used in This Book
The following typographical conventions are used in this book:
Plain text
Indicates menu titles, menu options, menu buttons, and keyboard accelerators (such as Alt and Ctrl).
Italic
Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, directories, and Unix utilities.
Constant width
Indicates commands, options, switches, variables, attributes, keys, functions, types, classes, namespaces, methods, modules, properties, parameters, values, objects, events, event handlers, XML tags, HTML tags, macros, the contents of files, or the output from commands.
Constant width bold
Shows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user.
Constant width italic
Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values.
This icon signifies a tip, suggestion, or general note.
This icon indicates a warning or caution.
About the Examples
Various fragments of HTML and code are presented in this book, such as the JavaScript code used to display Google AdSense ad units on your web pages.
In addition, Chapters 14 through 16 provide extensive examples that show how to use the Google AdWords APIs.
Chapters 14 and 16 use PHP in a series of complete web pages. In contrast, Chapter 15 shows a C#.Net Windows application that is compiled using Visual Studio.Net (2003 or later).
If you want to play with the applications presented in these chapters, I do not expect you to type them in by hand. The source code for each of these three chapters is available as a zipped archive from both http://www.braintique.com/ad/ and http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/buildinggoogle, and you'll also find the PHP applications from Chapter 14 and 16 ready for you to use at http://www.braintique.com/ad/ (once you have your Google AdWords APIs developer key, as explained in Chapter 13).
Assumptions
This book does not explain HTML and will not tell you how to create or modify web sites. To put the concepts and software explained into practice, you need to have basic knowledge of web fundamentals and skills or to work with a webmaster who does.
Part I, Making Money with Your Web Site, and Part II, Getting the Most from AdSense, are intended for readers who have, or are interested in building, web sites that can be used to make money with advertising. To take advantage of this material, you will need to be able to publish web pages and to modify the HTML code of these pages, for example, to add affiliate links and to add the JavaScript code needed to display Google AdSense ad units on your pages.
You don't need any technical skills to become an effective advertiser on the Web using Google's AdWords program. So, in a sense, Part III, Working with AdWords, is the least geeky part of this book, although, as you'll learn when you read Part III, advertising on the Web does have its own complex discipline and metrics. If you want to take advantage of AdWord's nifty conversion- and cross-conversion-tracking features, you'll need to be able to add JavaScript code to your HTML pages.
To profit from Part III you need, of course, a service or product to advertise that makes you money, but webmasters who are simply interested in monetizing the content of their own sites, and not in advertising per se, will gain from an understanding of "how the other half lives." An interesting idea to explore is to see if you can profitably drive traffic to your site using AdWords and make more revenue from AdSense and other programs than it costs you to get the traffic.
Part IV, Using the AdWords APIs, is written for programmers and assumes an audience that has a basic understanding of the web services mechanism, already knows how to program, and can sight-read code (in PHP or C#, depending on the chapter).
Organization
This book is organized into four parts, with each part containing several chapters. Taken as a whole, these parts cover the gamut of the Google advertising tools. However, each part can be read as a self-contained unit, and each part is aimed at readers with different needs.
Part I, Making Money with Your Web Site, explains how to make money from a content-based web site, how to build a site that will get traffic, how to get your site noticed, and the many ways to make money with advertising on your site.
Part II, Getting the Most from AdSense, explains how to work with Google's AdSense, the premier contextual advertising program for content sites. Participating in the AdSense program is probably one of the best ways to monetize your site.
Part III, Working with AdWords, explains the nuts and bolts, and metrics, of the Google AdWords program, a highly successful mechanism that anybody with a valid credit card can use to place advertisements that reach over 80% of users of the Internet.
Part IV, Using the AdWords APIs, is written for programmers who are interested in writing applications that take advantage of the Google AdWords API web services. This part explains what these web services are and how to write code that interacts with them.
If you read all four parts, you will get a comprehensive picture of how advertising works on the Web and how you can use the Google advertising programs to your advantage.
OVERVIEW !
When it comes to advertising on the web, you just can't argue with the numbers. A $7 billion market today is expected to grow to $18.9 billion by 2010. Jupiter Research also estimates that search advertising will be a larger share of the market than display advertising by 2010. These phenomenal numbers are due largely to Google, which has changed the way the world publishes content - and advertises.
This book has specific and detailed sections on:
Turning your web site into a profit center with AdSense
Making sense of AdSense metrics
Driving traffic to your site
Optimizing sites for search engine placement
Working with AdWords campaigns, auctions, and reports
Managing campaigns dynamically using the AdWords APIs
Once you've read all four parts, you'll have a comprehensive picture of how advertising works on the web and how you can use the Google advertising programs to your advantage.