(Best Syndication News) Editor’s Note: We presented information at the April 14th 2009 Pinon Hills Chamber of Commerce Meeting concerning Internet Businesses. This is the second part of our seminar titled “Earning Money From Content”.

We have been discussing selling items on eBay, Amazon and other sites. Now we will discuss content creation. The most common content is written words and articles. Original content that is useful is best. There is endless duplicate content that searchers never find, but good quality original content usually pops-up as the top results.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that his goal is to supply solutions for publishers. His company provides a free Blogger for writers to share their work, along with image and video hosting, maps and calendars that can be embedded on websites along with a revenue solution.

Adsense is Google’s revenue program for publishers. Yahoo has their Publisher Network and Microsoft has their Ad Center, but Adsense is the most profitable. Advertisers bid on keywords and their ads appear in the search results and on the pages of websites. The more an advertiser pays, the higher up their ads will appear.

Advertisers use Adwords to drive traffic to their website. Not all keywords are the same. The lung disease Mesothelioma is the highest bid-on key word. Attorneys looking for clients are in fierce competition for that word. Although more bidders may be vying for Britney Spears, not many people are willing to pay much for clicks.

Google and publishers only get paid if someone clicks on the ad. You should never click on your own ads because it violates the terms of the agreement between you and Google and they will kick you off their network without commission.

Other advertising networks like Amazon, Commission Junction, and Linkshare only pay if someone does more than click. With Amazon the customer must buy, but with many of the others all they have to do is fill out a form. If they go on to buy it will pay more.

Hosts and CMS

There are endless hosting companies and content management systems. Like we mentioned before, you can generate income using Google’s free blogger service. But let’s say you want to have your own website.

Rather than investing a large sum for dedicated hosting, shared hosting sites are very affordable. They range in price from $2.99 per month to about $20.00. I recommend Bluehost because they offer unlimited bandwidth, storage space and FREE 24 hour tech support. We were able to serve over 200,000 webpages in one day with their service.

After you sign up for two years at about $5.00 per month (look for the deals on the Internet), you are given a control panel to begin your site. If you have trouble with this, give tech support a call and they can help you create a website in no-time.

The first thing you will need to do is log into the control panel and scroll to the bottom of the page to “Software Services”. This is where you will find two or three turn-key website creation tools. I recommend Simple Scripts, but Fantastico is pretty good too.

There are various CMS programs to choose from including Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla. Drupal has been popular for years, but I believe Wordpress has the edge right now. There are many developers working on all of these FREE programs.

After you have the program installed on your website you will need to start looking for a theme. Most themes are free, but be careful to match the theme with your version of the CMS. Themes will sometimes have crazy names like Lunatic Fringe and Voodoo Dolly.

Take your pick, download the theme, extract it using an extraction program and then FTP the theme into your themes directory on the BlueHost server (or whatever host you choose). Use and FTP program to upload the theme. Then browse to the themes section of your CMS and deploy it. If you have trouble, remember you can call tech support for help.

Addons are helpful too. They are installed similar to the way you installed the theme, but they are placed in the addon folder at the server. There are various addons for calendars, tabs, and much more. Check with the CMS website for a complete list.

Installing the Code

Installing the advertising code will require you to actually modify the code on your website. Remember to copy and save the existing code before you modify it. This way if you make a mistake, you can go back to the “original” without having to install the whole CMS again.

When you log into Adsense you can choose the size of the ad and whether you want image only, text only or either. Adsense will generate the code and all you have to do is copy it and place it inside your website code.

See the chart below for the hotspots. These spots are where most eyeballs will look when they browse to your page. They will look for navigation on the left or right side bars. They will look at the title of the page and they will look at the article itself.

If you are using Wordpress, navigate to the Appearance drop down on the left side of the WordPress Administration Panel. You will need to log into your website, not the control panel set up by BlueHost. Under Appearance choose Editor. On the right side of the page you will see links to the various code including the header and footer.

FIRST copy the code and paste it into a Word document. You may need it if you make a mistake. You can always go back and paste it back into your website to fix things. Save and don’t lose that Word document.

Paste the Adsense code into the Header and see what happens. You may have to play with the location of the Adsense code to get it right. View your website and see where the ads appear.

Content and SEO

Now you have your website up, all you have to do is create content and get people to your it. Whatever the subject you write about, try to create top quality content. For instance, if you write an article about “public speaking”, do a search and see what comes up first in the results. Make your article better than that.

There are two types of pages. The first is called a post. Posts are your articles. Pages are constant pages that people can refer to. For instance, an “About Me” page or “Contact Us” page are “PAGES”.

Create good quality content and then market that content. That is the difficult part. You may need to write articles that link back to that article. Place those articles on other websites.

When search engines were first created, they ranked according to word frequency. For instance: if you were looking for a mortgage, the article that included the word mortgage the most would appear at the top of the results. Google changed that. Now back-links are more important.

When you link back to your site, use a relevant word in the link, not just “click here”. If your article is about mortgages, then use the text “Click here for Mortgage Information”. This will tell Google that your article is about Mortgages.

Remember to tell Google about your website. Submit your URL to Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.

Do some research and subscribe to trade magazines. The two best magazines I have found are Website and Revenue Magazine. There are some great websites to help with SEO including Search Engine Watch and Google.

You may want to buy a book about the CMS program you choose. I recommend going to Barnes and Noble so you can browse the book before you buy it.

By Dan Wilson