For those that aren’t aware Google Adsense is an advertising program that allows you to place ads on your website and when somebody visits your website and clicks on the ad you get paid. It’s painfully simple and one of the easiest ways to make money online assuming you know what you are doing.

Currently as of writing this post I make anywhere from $2-$8 a day with Adsense running on about 6 different sites. But this can vary widely from day to day and I’d like to find something more consistent so I can expect to make a certain amount of money each day. So, my first goal that I am setting will be to generate a consistent minimum $10 per day using Google Adsense.

Some quick math….

$10 per day x 30 days per month = $300 per month extra money

I know there isn’t always 30 days in a month but you get the idea. The extra $300 each month can be used for several different hobbies of mine such as photography! Or I could always open a savings account and deposit the money there for a rainy day.

I will update this post as things progress along. The long term plan is to generate as much money as possible but setting a small goal such as this should be much more attainable.

Carlos begs for the same amount of time as Jose, but only collects about eight or nine dollars a day.

Every day, Jose brings home a suitcase full of ten dollar bills. He drives a Mercedes, lives in a mortgage-free house, and has lots of cash to spend.

“Hey, amigo,” Carlos says to Jose, “I work just as long and hard as you do, so how come you bring home a suitcase full of ten dollar bills every day?”

Jose says, “Look at your sign, what does it say?”

Carlos’ sign reads:

I have no work, a wife and six kids to support.

“What’s wrong with that?” Carlos asks him.

“No wonder you only get eight or nine dollars a day!”

Carlos says, “Alright, so what does your sign say?”

Jose’s sign reads:

I only need ten dollars to get back to Mexico

—
Sent to me in an email from my dad

I tend to use the eBay Custom Banner that you can find under the Tools->Widgets section after logging into the eBay Partner Network.

The Custom Banner allows you to create a widget in pretty much any size that you need that provides real time eBay listings. Along with choosing the size of the widget you can also select the colors to better match your site for a more seamless integration.

Creating The Custom Banner Widget

I’m not going to go into the details of creating the widget and changing dimensions and colors, it should be pretty self explanatory when you are looking at the page. Once you get done changing the size and the colors you will come across the Ad Content section for the widget.

In this section you choose which program you want to use for the widget, the campaign that you want to use for tracking purposes and the search term that will show items in the widget. The Custom ID and Category ID fields don’t apply to what we are doing so don’t worry about those. As you can see in the picture above I’ve filled out the fields that I mentioned. You can place any search term inside the field since we will be modifying this in a little bit.

Once you have those filled out you will receive the generated code in the section below.

This is the code you are going to use to add to your site to display the widget. If you look at it you can see the values that you set previously added into the 2nd <script> tag. Make sure you select the code and copy (Ctrl+C) to your clipboard.

Adding The Widget To Your Site

Now that we have the widget code ready we still need to implement the part where it fetches the title of the post and inserts it into the widget code automatically. For this we are going to use PHP. So we need to grab the title of the post, replace the spaces in the title with the + sign since that is what the eBay Custom Banner uses and then insert it into the widget code to get relevant listings for each post the widget is displayed on.

Find in area on your page where you want the widget to be displayed, I have mine displayed directly under the content. Make a new line in the file and add the following code.

<?php $title = the_title('', '', false);
      $title = str_replace(' ', '+', $title);
      echo "<script src='http://adn.ebay.com/files/js/min/ebay_activeContent
-min.js'></script>
<script src='http://adn.ebay.com/cb?programId=1&campId=5335962740
&toolId=10026&keyword=iPad&width=728&height=90&font=1&textColor=333366
&linkColor=333333&arrowColor=8BBC01&color1=B5B5B5&color2=FFFFFF'></script> ";
?>

Your widget code usually won’t be split up like this but I had to split it up in order to keep it from running across the page. I italicized the widget code, DO NOT use the code you see above but instead use the code that you had copied when creating the widget from earlier.

All that we have left to do is to replace the keyword in the widget code with our PHP variable to have it automatically provide listings based on the page title. Look inside the widget code and find &keyword=iPad. The keyword after the = will be whatever you set as the search term when you created the widget. If you used more than one word each word will be separated with a +.

Highlight the keyword after the = and replace it with “.$title.”. So your code should now look like the following.

<?php $title = the_title('', '', false);
      $title = str_replace(' ', '+', $title);
      echo "<script src='http://adn.ebay.com/files/js/min/ebay_activeContent
-min.js'></script>
<script src='http://adn.ebay.com/cb?programId=1&campId=5335962740
&toolId=10026&keyword=".$title."&width=728&height=90&font=1&textColor=333366
&linkColor=333333&arrowColor=8BBC01&color1=B5B5B5&color2=FFFFFF'></script>";
?>

Notice that after &keyword= that instead of the keyword we had previously we have now replaced it with our PHP variable. All that is left is for you to save the file and check out your page. Now, whenever you visit a page that the widget is displayed on it will show eBay listings relevant to the title of the post.

Note: This post assumes you know how to access your website and edit it either through FTP or your web host’s file manager.

Adding Your Site In Analytics

This tutorial already assumes that you have a Google Analytics account. If you don’t, you can sign up for a free one at http://www.google.com/analytics/.

Log into your account and access the main account screen. You are going to want to find the section at the bottom that says “Add Website Profile>>”.

After clicking on “Add Website Profile>>” you will be taken to the page where you will enter the domain you want to start tracking.

Don’t worry about the first section with the radio buttons as the default setting is the one that you want. Under the “Add a Profile for a new domain” section is where you enter in the URL for your domain. In the box type in the domain that you are going to be tracking.

You can choose to either leave the box checked or uncheck it yourself under “Apply Cost Data” as leaving it checked won’t hurt anything.

Once you have all those details set go ahead and click the Finish button at the bottom of the screen.

Adding The Tracking Code To Your Site

Now that you have your site setup in Analytics it is time to grab the code that will be added to your website to track your visitors. If you are following the steps from above you should see a screen similar to the following.

Without going into detail about this page because this tutorial isn’t about that, look towards the bottom of the screen and find the area where it says “Paste this code on your site”. You’ll notice in the box below that setting some code as shown in the image above. This is the code that you will be adding to your website to track people coming to and moving around your site.

Click inside of the box and press Ctrl+A to select all the text inside. Once you have that done, make sure to copy it to your clipboard with Ctrl+C. Once you have that done you are going to need to gain access to your website. There are various different ways to do this and will be covered in a later tutorial.

I realize that most every website is going to have different code than the next one. So in order to keep this simple I will provide some sample code to make sure you know where to place the code. Typically you are going to look for an index.html, index.htm, index.php file or even possibly a header.php (if you are using WordPress).

Inside of that file should be some code similar to the following code below.

<html>
<head>
<title>This Is A Webpage</title>
<link href="stylesheet.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />
</head>

Google asks us to insert the code we copied before the ending </head> tag. So in the above example it would look like the following.

<html>
<head>
<title>This Is A Webpage</title>
<link href="stylesheet.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet">
Your Code Goes Here
</head>

I bolded and italicized the line where you should add in the code. Use the code that you had copied onto your clipboard by pressing Ctrl+V to paste it before the </head> tag.

Once you have this done and have saved your file back onto the webserver all that is left to do is to go back to the page where you copied the code from and click the “Save and Finish” button at the bottom of the screen.

If you did everything right you should be all set and Analytics will start tracking visitors on your website. You can check out the reports by visiting http://www.google.com/analytics/ and signing in with your account information.

So in honor of them and because I figure what the fuck, I’ll be starting this up once again.