My First Steps, Adsense, Stats and some small promotion

LOCATION: UK, Train from Hastings to London.

Adsense was my first port of call so I went to work setting this up right away Joining was easy, setting up was easy and now i've been accepted and showing ads on this blog, as you can see.

The fact that blogger has simple links to set up Google Adsense made it a a breeze and even checking my account now i've started to reel in a tiny amount of revenue although I can't tell you too much about it apparently because of the Terms and Conditions. I don't want to be kicked off yet now do I?

I tried going to various Charity websites that I would like to support such as WWF, Born Free and Amnesty International and did not have any luck finding any banners that I could use for my website so I will need to decide which one I want to display and will email them today in the hope that they will send me some HTML code to put it. Blogger makes it really easy to add in little banners and things because the templating system just displays all this in boxes. I'm considering starting my links site in the form of a blog as the pages are so easy to create but i'm not sure if I can use a blog for this purpose, i'll have to read their Terms and Conditions, again obviously!!

I also spent some time reading various articles. Two articles on the blogger help were useful, the links are http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42377&topic=8934, http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42376&topic=8934 and an article by this guy http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/how-to-make-money-from-your-blog/, again here is the link gave me a better insight into a few things and the need to keep track of visitors and stats kept arising. After some searching around and reading a few forum posts I decided to join www.sitemeter.com and www.google.com/webmasters which both seem to give me quite detailed reports about various hits and things. I guess i'll write more on this when I fully understand it all.
Google also offered me the chace to submit my web page so that it's search engine could add it to the database and it's stats will let me see how many times people have hit it through a search and things, I think!!

Lastly I started the promotion on a very small scale. I posted my blog on the blogger forum here http://groups.google.com/group/blogger-help-share/browse_thread/thread/c91ee5f12fb7dcd6/92fbd71c7bf96ed6?q=brand+new+blog&rnum=2#92fbd71c7bf96ed6 and logged into my myspace.com account and sent ot my first bulletin asking people to come and join my blog.

The fact that after a very little amount of effort I have managed to earn a small amount has given me the immediate hope I need. Maybe this fantasy can be acheivable.

Next job is working out how people can subscribe to my blog and how I can tell who is subscribed. I'm becoming obsessed with who is looking at me. The article by Steve Pavlina also suggested I add a donate button, i'll have to decide if I think this is too cheeky at this early stage.

I'll keep you posted on my progress.

Forest.