Figure 1.1Getting started with Blogger is really easy and takes only a minute.
WordPress.com, on the other hand (as opposed to WordPress.org), works exactly like Blogger. Your domain name will be [yourchosenname] .WordPress.com. It’s free, and you won’t need to fiddle around with a hosting service. But you also won’t be able to place AdSense, Chitika, Yahoo!, or text link ads on the site. As you’ll see in this book, that still leaves plenty of other options, but WordPress.com wasn’t really built for moneymaking, and the people behind it take a pretty dim view of revenue generation on these sites.
The best option is to use Blogger just to get your feet wet. I like to call it “blogging with training wheels:” Then, once you have a handle on blogging, move up to WordPress.org or MovableType (www.movabletype.com).
There’s a good chance, though, that you’re already online, either with your own web site or a blog. You may have created them yourself from scratch, or you may have paid a developer to create your site(s) for you. Both options are fine.
I’m not going to talk you through the first steps of launching a blog or creating a web site. That information is available everywhere (including in my previous books), and it really is so simple now that the best way to learn how to do it is just to do it. Go to Blogger.com, register, and start writing. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, and don’t be in too much of a hurry. Just enjoy the experience. That enjoyment will keep you moving forward.
At the beginning of this section, I pointed out that while you can start developing web sites and blogs in minutes, it will take you a little longer to start earning money with them. That’s because you need content and readers, both of which take time to build.
Installing a system that can persuade people to give you money on the other hand is now quick and simple.
From Blogging to KaChing
Back in the old days, at the end of the twentieth century, there was a very easy and almost foolproof way to make a ton of money with a web site: You registered a domain, placed it on a server, and started writing.
You didn’t write content. You wrote a business plan, and in that business plan you included the word advertising about three times in each sentence. Then you bought a plane ticket to California, met with a venture capitalist, showed off your business plan, and waited patiently while he or she wrote a check for several million dollars in return for 1 percent of your new company.
For some of those investors, that actually turned out to be a smart move. The start-up would go on to attract lots of users and would be bought by an even bigger company, making lots of money for the developer and the investor. The company that bought it, on the other hand, was often left with a big write-off.
The problem was that while everything looked good on paper, no one had come up with a reliable way to turn lots of users into piles of cash.
It was as though someone had invented the shopping mall before anyone had invented the cash register. Lots of people were coming into the stores, but with no way to spend their money, they were walking right back out with it.
Google changed all of that. It did this in two ways.
First, it created a search engine that made finding content both easy and accurate. Before Google launched in 1998, Internet users searching for Web content through sites like Yahoo! and Lycos needed to either browse categories or check results based on the number of times a keyword appeared on a page. That didn’t always give them the best results. It meant that poor sites could game the system by stuffing pages with keywords, thereby sending the traffic and its benefits to the wrong people.
Sergey Brin’s and Larry Page’s idea of ranking sites according to the number of times other sites linked to them meant that their search engine didn’t just deliver the right results, it also delivered the best results.
Suddenly, the Web wasn’t just a random collection of sites that were difficult to navigate. It was a world that came with its own tour guide, who could point out the best places for anyone to visit regardless of their subject of interest.
If you wanted to know about stamp collecting, architecture, or celebrity news, Google would tell you. And it would not just tell you which site mentioned those things.
That was incredibly useful, and it enabled Google to quickly pick up vast numbers of Internet users keen to find a shortcut to the best content on the Web.
Up to that point, all Google had done was build a service users liked. No one was paying for it. Google still hadn’t invented a cash register. That happened in 2000, when Google began accepting ads on its search results pages. Because the ads displayed depended on the search term the user entered, they were always relevant. And because they were text-based, they were also unobtrusive. Ads were displayed based on the price the advertiser was willing to pay, as well as the number of click-throughs they had received in the past.
It wasn’t a completely new idea. (A site called Goto.com, which would eventually become Yahoo! Search Marketing, had been selling ads in a similar way. Yahoo! even sued Google for patent
Figure 1.2Google’s AdSense program: The service that launched a million KaChings.
infringement in a case that was settled out of court.) But it did create the Internet’s loudest KaChing ever. Even if the
