Choosing an article site template
For those of us who are "web-design-challenged," there are lots of choices for templates to use for an information article web site. Awhile back, I got such a content site made for me. It had all the bells and whistles that you could ever imagine. It came ready-made for three different types of ads for monetization. It was specifically designed with SEO in mind. It even came with starter articles in the niche of my choice. How could it miss? I was gonna rake in the bucks with that site.
The layout was nice. The graphics were professional. The SEO job was phenomenal as I did NADA to generate traffic, yet the site got plenty of hits. There were some things that I did not like about the site, though. First, I had to get over my panic when I was told to edit the config.sys file so that the ads would come from my own personal accounts with the included systems. Second, it wasn't immediately obvious how to add new articles to the site. Third, the article content and the article titles were displayed at random, but independent of each other. You could call up the url and find on the site an article title that did not match the article underneath it. I guess what really drove me nuts was the fact that I had no control over the site, short of taking a crash course in programming.
Hope this rant gives you some food for thought if you are in the market for site templates. Oh, want some stats on that site of mine? It has received over 2500 impressions since it went live several months ago. 23 ads were clicked for a grand total of $7.23 USD. Mind you, that site has never been updated. The bulk of those impressions were received in the first several weeks after the site went live. Imagine how that site could have done if I had just updated it a few times to bring back the search engine spiders and got the site re-indexed. Hmmmmmmmmmmm.
2 comments:
There's one thing to keep in mind about those ready made sites, mostly an AdSense monetization site.
Most of them are a scam! By saying that, I mean the front page allows you to enter your AdSense publisher ID and every click the visitor makes, the earnings goes to you, but the following pages thereafter do not contain your ID, but the ID of the person or company that created the site for you. So if the site seemed like a good deal, say $10 for a ready made site, then there's a good chance that the money from clicks other than the front page of your site are going to someone else. Something to keep in mind...
You are right about the ad publisher IDs. The site I was talking about had the IDs for the owner of the company that made the site already installed in the scripting. That was why I was supposed to change the config.sys file, to put in my own IDs.
To be fair, I was instructed to edit the config.sys file to reflect my own IDs. Now, I am not a newbie, and I am not scared to mess with HTML, but I was really leery of touching the config.sys file.
To be sure, there are unscrupulous people out there banking on newbies not changing the publisher IDs. You must do your due diligence before spending your money or time on anything.
Thanks for the comment and input.
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