Part 1 of our 21 part Series on Viral Traffic Generation.

Viral Traffic Generation – What is it anyway?

Viral marketing has become an increasingly discussed subject in the past few years. Many bloggers and webmasters are forever discussing the value of this technique to drive large amounts of traffic to your website. So, you may be asking yourself; “What is Viral Marketing and how can it help me?” Is it a proven technique which works effectively or just another passing blackhat fad?

In its simplest form, Viral Marketing is a technique which gets others to willing talk about and spread your information for you. People read your information or hear about your latest offering and begin to tell others. The message begins to spread from person to person in this manner like a “virus”. When this occurs, it is referred to as” Going Viral”.

This type of marketing relies mainly on word-of-mouth techniques. Someone sees your information and passes it on to another who does the same. That person tells a few of their friends who tell a few of their friends and so the cycle continues As this goes on, the number of people who hear about your information increases rapidly. The more individuals who read about your information or product, the more traffic you receive.
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Google Adsense is the perfect place for any new fledgling blogger to get their feet wet with monetization and make their first dollars online.

Why is Google Adsense such a great place to start? Well for one thing there is no fuss and no muss in terms of getting it set up. Simply create your account, select the size and type of your ad, copy and paste the code into your blog, and away you go!

I’ll take you through the steps to creating your own Adsense account and get your blog making money.

Step 1: Set Up Your Account:

The first thing you will need to do is to set up an account. To do this simply hop on over to the Google Adsense page and fill out the form. If you already have a Google account, say for Gmail, Adwords, or Analytics, then this step will be incredibly easy and super quick.

If you don’t, this step will take you about 10 minutes to do.

Step 2: Select the Ad Size and Type:

This is a rather important step. Google gives you two main choices, text and image ads. Depending on your blog and your visitors expectations, one may prove to me more effective than the other. If you don’t put a lot of images or videos in your posts, then you should choose an image ad. This will break up all the text and stand out. If, however, you do tend to place images and videos in your posts, you should choose text ads for a more blending effect. It is a very delicate balancing act that takes a bit of getting used to and may require some testing, but it shouldn’t take you too long to get it.

Now, to talk about size. A good size for your ads is going to depend on your site and the placement. The most common sizes are 120×60, 200×600, or 125×125.

The 120×60 ads are the most common ad types which show as a horizontal banner.

200×600 “skyscraper” ads are a vertical banner with a little more space to them.

125×125: These are square boxes designed to house single image ads mostly.

Once you have selected the type of ad and the size, Google gives you additional options to further customize the ad. Font size, and colors can be changed and used to match your blog colors to give a better blending effect. Now you simply go to the next step which is naming your ad and grabbing the code generated for you.

For beginners I would suggest you select one 200×600 and one 120×60 ad code.

Step 3: Placing the Ads on Your Blog:

Now that you have everything set up, and you have the Google Adsense code, it is time to place it in your blog. It is important to remember that per Google’s TOS you may not place more than 3 ads on a page. This not only makes the page look spammy, but it also ensures that your readers will run for the nearest exit, looking for another site.

So, you will want to insert the 120×60 ad code into the bottom of your posts (there is scripting to do this for you automatically) and the 200×600 “skyscraper” into the side bar of your blog. This will coincide nicely with the basic blog design, while at the same time not inundating your readers with ads.

Voila! You now have your site monetized with Google Adsense! Your very first internet business has begun.

Now add that content and get those visitors!