Tom | 
02 8th, 2008| 
For my first post on the Internet Gangsters I wanted to tell the story of how I got my first taste of internet riches/pennies. It started with the epic failure of my “I’ll sell your crap on ebay for you” venture. I thought I had a decent domain, my cousin had his own hosting servers and was able to host it for free so right out of the bag I was only $8 in the hole for the domain, not bad at all. So time to setup the website and honestly I don’t even know why I needed a website, but I thought I’d get customers over the internet. So to start I put up a splash screen saying “Coming Soon, We’ll Sell Your Stuff on eBay!” accompanied by a horrible logo (it was meant to be temporary). Well the internet brought me no clients, but then again the site sat with a “Coming Soon…” banner for the entire time. I did sell a few things for family friends after telling a few people that I was going to try to do this, but that turned out to be more of a pain in the ass than it was worth. So that ventured died out quickly, but the site itself did not.
I still had this great domain just sitting around doing nothing so I started to think about other ways I could make money and that’s when I discovered adsense. Google adsense is a great way to monetize your sites as it views your site context and bases the ads it shows on what you are writing about. That way the ads are relevant to what is being posted on your site and therefore more appealing to viewers. Nobody wants to come to a site about Dogs and be shown ads about the latest perscription pills, they want to be shown ads about Dogs and things related to dogs. So I signed up for adsense, but didn’t really know what to do with it, so I started reading. And looking back at what I did, I do not recommend doing it, yes it can work, but I don’t think google likes it and it’s hard to keep people coming back after they know what you’re doing. So what I found from my searching was a way to make a page that was basically all articles that were taken from free article sites on the web and just reposted on my site. The trick to making the adsense ads work was making the links to these free articles, look like adsense ads. Now it sounded like a good idea at the beginning, but at the time a lot of people were doing the same thing and with the same articles that I got (since I was lazy and just copied another site). So search engine traffic barely existed since all my content was the same as a million other sites out there and by spamming (the only way I could get visits) those people weren’t coming back. I did make a few bucks though, which gave me the itch to do something more with this.