Hand Coded Adsense Templates?
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
Wow! I looked out my window this afternoon and saw it start to snow heavily here in Chicago so I put on my coat, gloves, and hood and went down to grab a cup of coffee from the Starbucks around the corner from my apartment. But by the time I rode the elevator from my 15th floor to the ground floor it had stopped snowing completely and the sun was brightly shining! WEIRD!
Just a quick update on yesterday’s Amazon fluctuations article. Yesterday I had another relatively decent amazon earnings day, selling $742.13 worth of items (13 items purchased) netting $48.24 in commissions, but that was on only 45 visitor clicks! Weird. On the other hand, Adsense earnings for the day were $50.32, which is an improvement post panda. I’ll keep you updated!
Today I want to spend a few minutes talking about my Adsense templates because I’ve been getting a lot of questions about them lately. Actually, the questions aren’t really about the design of the templates I use (how they look) but rather, they’re about my hand coding method.
What is hand-coding?
When I say hand-coding, I mean that I open Notepad, and start writing raw HTML and CSS to create the template I want to use. I then save it as a .php or .html file and upload it straight to my webserver. No wordpress or any other content management system (cms) is involved.
You don’t necessarily have to write the html code yourself, you can find html and css templates all over the Internet that can be modified to do exactly what you want to do with them.
What’s the benefit of hand coding?
I talk a lot about hand coding my templates instead of using wordpress and wordpress themes. I hand code my websites for two main reasons:
- I can customize them in great detail and do a lot of neat php tricks that, while possible, are a lot harder to do in wordpress.
- My hand-coded html files are very small, and very fast, and don’t use many server resources (both disk space OR bandwidth). Whereas WordPress is a massive resource hog.
The first one is sort of self explaining. I’m a nut when it comes to control and details. Hand coding my own sites gives me a level of customization that’s just hard to beat.
The second one is a little more tricky to understand.
When you start an Adsense empire, there are only a few real expenses; namely domain fees and webhosting fees. I keep expenses down by using cheap ($.67 each) .info domain names, and I keep my webhosting expense down by hand coding my sites.
For instance, right now I’ve got 300 websites on the cheapest Essential VPS solution at Servint. All 300 sites generally take up next to no space on the server, and use only about 30% of my bandwidth and cpu allotment each month. That means I could probably stick another couple hundred sites on that VPS account before I would need to upgrade to a more expensive hosing account with more cpu and bandwidth.
On the other hand…if I was using wordpress, I doubt I could get 100 sites on that account before I ran out of disk space, cpu usage, and bandwidth. Basically I’d have to use 3 of the same type of hosting accounts, paying basically triple what I pay now (more or less).
That’s quite a savings!
So that small thing right there dramatically lowers the cost to start and run my Adsense empire, and it’s a cumulative saving month after month. It all translates into more money for me at the end of the day.
There’s a time and a place for WordPress and WordPress themes. For instance, I’m using them to run this blog and I wouldn’t think of hand-coding html files to run this site.
Wordpress also has a place in an Adsense empire if you’re just starting out and don’t necessarily have a lot (or any) coding experience (though you could always learn or hire someone).
There are a lot of great wordpress themes geared towards Adsense sites, one that I highly recommend and have used myself in the past are Scott Blanchard’s Clickbump themes.
Whatever path you take, wordpress or hand coded html sites, the most important thing to do is…
Keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
