Adsense and php?
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
Welcome to the weekend! It’s a beautiful Saturday here in Chicago and I can’t wait to get out and wander around. But before I do that, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about something that I feel is pretty important.
Many people like Adsense because it’s such an easy way to make buckets and buckets of money. Because of that, I tend to get a lot of the “get rich quick” crowd here….and that’s ok.
But I like to look at Adsense as a business, and I like to treat it as a business. Sure I like the ease of it all, but that’s not why I started doing it to begin with.
In my opinion you have a couple of options…you can go at it half-assed and make some decent money…or you can really dig in, treat it like a business, and make a killing.
How to make a Killing…
If you want to treat it like a business, then there is no set ‘plan’ to follow. My method works right now, but it might not 6 months from now. Heck, last week Google threw us all for a loop when they released their new Panda update, literally wiping out over half my earnings overnight.
And I’ve seen that happen many times over the years…
What happens is, some new guru springs up teaching some cool “adsense method” for making money. Use X template, use Y SEO promotional methods, use Z content methods and the money will come pouring in!! And it always works for a while, till Google changes the game.
Then all those people who followed that method lose all their income and months of their time and god knows how much money that they’ve invested.
The people that survive in this business more than 6 months are the ones that adapt.
Period.
In order to adapt, you have to have a pretty strong tool belt at your disposal. And the most powerful “tool” in my belt is php.
php is a computer programming language that’s tailor made for web programming. If you take the time to learn php and use it on your web sites, then the sky really is the limit and you can feel confident that you’ll have the tools to weather any Google storms or Adsense shakeups!
How is php useful?
It’s useful in more ways than I can tell you! Here’s just a couple of examples of how I use it on my web sites.
Spinning. I wrote one 500 word article that’s very generic. Then I wrote a simple php program that spins that content for every page of every web site I own. It tailors that content to each page by using each page’s main keyword.
For instance…if I own a site about microwave ovens, I might have a page for each brand of microwave oven. The keyword is in the URL (ie: www.microwavemania.info/sunbeam-microwave.html – not a real website just an example URL).
My php code (embedded on each web page) will look at the URL, copy the words after the / (in this case sunbeam-microwave.html), parse out the “-” and the “.html” and realize that the keyword for that page is sunbeam microwave.
It then adds that keyword (via a variable) into the main content of the page automatically and on the fly, then spins the entire content so that it’s fresh.
All Automatically and Immediately…
Another way I use php is to toggle things across all my websites with simple “if then” statements. I have one master file that sits on my web server that ALL the pages of ALL my websites reference. On that master file I might have a variable named “$Twitter_feeds” and I might set that variable to “1” (ie $Twitter_feeds = 1;).
Then when every page of every site I own gets a visitor, it checks that file…if $Twitter_feeds = 1 in that master file, the web page goes ahead and shows the scraped content I take from Twitter on the page. If it’s set to something other than “1”, the page hides the twitter feed.
I do this for lots of different things, which allows me to update my pages instantly. That’s flexibility you don’t get any other way, not even by using wordpress!
It let’s you stay ahead of the game…
Google last week announced that they no longer like scraped content. So I can go into that one master file and change the variable $Twitter_feed = 1; to $Twitter_feed = 2; and suddenly all the twitter feeds on every page of every site I own will disappear! All done with a few simple lines of php.
Imagine going through the millions of pages I own on the hundreds of sites and manually taking them out (ok I was going to use a bot to do that till I remembered that I’d wrote a variable that covers that possibility already…but still, bots take time to build too!).
And what about wordpress?
Another example is wordpress. WordPress relies HEAVILY on php…if you want to use wordpress, knowing php allows you to modify wordpress in ways you couldn’t imagine! If you know php AND wordpress, you’ve got two very powerful tools at your disposal.
And that’s just a few example of using php, I’ve got many more.
The point is, php is an incredibly powerful tool that you should learn if you’re serious about this business. I know many people aren’t that computer savvy, but give it a try anyway, you might be surprised. You can learn it for free by reading free tutorials all over the Internet (just google the term learn php or something like that). If you can’t learn on your own, then spend $150 bucks to take a basic programming class at your local community college in the evenings.
This is your livelihood we’re talking about…those 4 months of php class at community college could be worth millions of dollars. It’s worth it to learn. Even if you just come away with the very basics…
Why? Because if you just learn the basics, you can hire someone to do the actual programming for you…but it will be MUCH MUCH easier to communicate with that person if you already know a little php to begin with. Really, it’s worth it!
And what have you got to lose?
Keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
