Part 4 of the AM Getting Started Series

Okay, the next thing to learn with AM is that Google AdSense has rules. Sometimes you have content that doesn't fit AdSense rules, or free blogger site rules, and a desire to go beyond those rules. Don't break Google's or anyone's rules!!! The fix is to either use another ad network that isn't so picky, other sites that aren't so picky, or to bring up your own sites with your own web hosting provider. Saying that, however, I don't mean to EVER abandon Google AdSense or even the free blogger sites. Use it for some sites, but not all of them. You need to hedge your bets.

When you finally have enough cash to bring up sites, it starts out cheap, just a few small dollars each month, but it can get quite costly. So what do you do? First, you need to only bring up sites that either (a) you've tested on free blog sites and see considerable page impressions, or (b) you strongly feel will be a "hit". Second, sign up with the cheapest plan possible that supports MySQL and PHP on Linux. Use Linux because it often has better tools for free and better ways to keep your site from being defaced or hacked. Third, find a hosting provider with a good scalability program such as HostGator.com. Fourth, and this is key, purchase a domain with a generic name like "site.com" or "access.com", but therein I need to break that out and explain why.

When starting out to the point where you know you have a hit on your hands and it needs it own space, its own rules, its own ad network choices, better web page analysis tools, then you should pick a starter domain with a generic name and then, and this is key, use subdomains from that domain. With subdomains, you can incubate (try out) ideas for sites all with one single hosting plan. If your web hosting provider is flexible, they may permit as many as 100 subdomains, or even infinite ones. With a subdomain, you catch this on the home page of your site, then redirect to pages just for that content. Therefore, if I have an idea about Britney Spears, I can bring up spears.access.com off my access.com domain, test it out to see if it gets the traffic I want, and, if it does, I can then go ahead and purchase another domain like spearsdomain.com and start hosting a site on it. All users who then come to spears.access.com can then get redirected with some small code in the page to point them back to spearsdomain.com.

Many of these sites have something called a Control Panel where you can click to install software on the site without even needing to be a fancy web developer, and then grow it from there with points, clicks, typing, and cut/paste some small Javascripts. I highly recommend, once you know a site is drawing traffic, to go with bulletin board forum software packages like Vanilla or vBulletin. This encourages people to enroll in these forums and keep coming back. By the way, if JelSoft, the makers of vBulletin, ever get listed on the stock market, that's a stock to snatch up right away!