Excel And Adsense
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
Rain rain rain again here in Chicago. Well, at least it’s not snow snow snow so I really shouldn’t complain.
Today I want to talk about something that may or may not be useful to most people, but for me it’s incredibly important to my Adsense empire. What am I talking about?
Excel and Adsense
If you’ve been following my Adsense empire on this blog for very long, you know that I have hundreds of websites and thousands of domains purchased and ready to be deployed.
It can be a huge pain in the ass to keep all of those domains straight, and that’s why Excel is so important. If you aren’t familiar with Excel, it’s basically just a spreadsheet program developed by Microsoft that ships as part of their Office suite of products.
Most people think of spreadsheets and their eyes roll back in the their heads and they immediately tune out. I get it, but it’s really not that complicated.
What do I do with them?
I studied economics back in college, so I tend to use spreadsheets a lot…I mean A LOT. But for the purpose of this article, I’ll just share my basic Excel Adsense setup with you.
Basically I keep one masterfile that has 5-6 columns in it.
In the first column I list every website domain name I own, one domain name per row. In the column next to it, I list the main keyword that each site is built around.
For instance (this is not a real domain just an example), if I owned ElectricDogCollars-pro.info that domain would go in the first column and the keyword “Electric Dog Collars” would go in the column next to it…you get the idea, pretty simple.
In the next column I put the Amazon Category related to that site. In our example above, it would probably be “Pet Supplies”. I do that because I use an amazon widget called phpzon and you need to tell it what amazon category to use so that it shows appropriate results.
In the next column I put the ebay category ID for the site’s main keyword. In our example above it would probably be “116385”. I find that category ID just by heading over to ebay and typing in my keyword and seeing what category pops up. I use ebay data on some of my sites for freshness purposes by pulling in data from ebay’s rss feed thing, which is why I need that ID.
That’s about it!
That’s basically the main thing I use Excel for. Seems simple, but it’s really helpful to have all that information together in one place. (I also backup that file to the cloud just in case of emergency).
I use that file to help speed up the site building process, I use it to check if I’ve already got sites on certain topics whenever I’m doing keyword research for new sites, and I use it just as a basic record keeping device that helps me stay organized.
It’s all well and good if you only have a handful, or even a hundred websites. But take it from me, when you reach the thousand site point, or two thousand site point, or the five thousand site point or more, you HAVE to have some sort of system to stay organized. Spreadsheets work perfectly.
Not only that, but they’re powerful too. If you take the time to learn how to really use Excel, you can do some powerful stuff with it. I use it to build RSS feeds and sitemaps for my sites, to generate keyword variations in the hundreds to thousands of keyword range, and a whole host of other things that are beyond the scope of what I want to get into with this intro article.
The bottom line…
I highly recommend you start using spreadsheets today. Excel is pricey (and the newest versions 2007 and beyond are a little tricky to use from a user interface standpoint so I use an older version – 2003 I think?) but they’re the clear industry standard.
But if you aren’t using all the bells and whistles, and if you’re basically just using it to keep a list of your domain names like I outlined above, then you can go with free options like Open Office (which comes with Open Offic Calc – their spreadsheet program), or even Google’s free Google Docs spreadsheet thing.
I actually use Open Office’s spreadsheet as well, but for other things. It works just fine and has nearly all the bells and whistles that Excel has, just slightly differently implemented.
It may seem like a hassle, but learning how to use a spreadsheet will save you a lot of time and hassles in the future, and you’ll thank me someday!!
Keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
