How Important is Your Site Template?

Hello good people!

It’s a good news bad news sort of day. The good news is that it’s still sunny and 50 degrees here in downtown Chicago! The bad news is that yesterdays Adsense earnings were $30 and $0 in Amazon commissions. Ouch!

There is a bit of a silver lining though. The 25 or so sites that I built a couple of weeks ago are pulling in steady income, in fact most of that $30 came from those sites. That means all is not lost, I’ve just got to focus on building more sites, which was the whole plan anyway. Like I always say, keep on building!

What’s on for today?

I’ve been getting a lot of questions recently about the HTML template that I use for my sites. Specifically, people are asking me to release the html code for it. I wanted to talk about that today.

I’ve said that I’m going to release some basic site templates as soon as I can get around to building them that show things like how I spin text with php and how I generate all the infinite pages of my sites. I still plan on doing that, but I’m hesitant to release my actual HTML template for the sites that I use for two reasons.

1. If everyone starts using that template Google will recognize it and start mass deindexing any site that uses it – I’ve seen that happen in the past for other adsense templates
2. The template is wholly unimportant. It doesn’t matter WHAT template you use.

I’m not successful because of the specific template I use, and using that same template won’t make you successful too. My success comes from spinning content on infinite pages and throwing up hundreds of sites.

You can use just about ANY template, as long as it is simple in design and follows the same general layout that I’ve shown here:

 

What’s important about this layout? Notice the adsense block at the very top, followed by your text. There’s also a simple header image at the very top of the page, but that’s optional. Halfway down the content I put my amazon widget using phpzon and at the very end of the content I put a small list of links to other pages of my site.

Oh, and there’s a small menu bar on the right hand side of the screen with links to my “about”, “contact”, and “privacy policy” pages.

Not much else to it…

That’s it. Any kind of template that follows that general pattern will work. You can use html, you can use wordpress themes, you can use dreamweaver or xsitepro or WHATEVER. Just keep it simple, put your square adsense block right at the top of the page before your content, and you’ll be good to go.

There are a zillion free html template websites out there were you can browse free templates and find hundreds that look just like that. Do a little Google searching and you’ll find more than you’ll know what to do with. Pick one that looks close to the picture above and go with it.

That picture above is something I drew in paint shop pro or something, it’s not even my actual template. My template uses a little color and a simple generic header graphic…like I said, it really doesn’t matter.

If you’re using wordpress, check out the clickbump themes (do a google search), I’ve used them with good results in the past and they’re not too expensive.

It doesn’t have to be complicated

This is really a simple business, and people tend to make it more complicated than it is. Stop fussing over the little things and just start building sites.

Build 10 websites, watch them for a few weeks. Are they bringing in a couple bucks a day? If so, clone that design and churn out a couple hundred more sites just like them and you’ll make tons of money. If they don’t, build ten different ones with different templates and go through the whole process again.

That’s really all there is to it. And isn’t that better than taking a template that I give you? That way you’ll always be self sufficient and won’t have to rely on some quack like me. 😉 I know it’s a cliche, but I’d rather teach you to fish so you can feed yourself for life rather than just give you a fish and feed you for a day. Boy that sounded stupid…but you get the idea.

Keep on building!

-John
The Marketing Fool!

PS..if you liked this, or any of my articles, please share them below on facebook, twitter, digg, or whatever social networks you like. Spread the word good people!!

John Elder is an Entrepreneur, Web Developer, and Writer with over 27 years experience creating & running some of the most interesting websites on the Internet. Contact him here.

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