Maintenance and Updates

The hardest part of the job is undoubtedly building a new AdSense website. But once it is up and functioning, you have two phases that you have to follow through with. Each one is less urgent, and you can relax a little and not have to push yourself as much, but it is important that you do them, so that you can really profit from your work.

1. Finish work - Fine Tuning Your Site - At first, your major purpose is to get a site that is ready to upload and register with the search engines. About the time you get the site uploaded and start your initial marketing efforts, you'll need to come back and do some general fine tuning.

Fine tuning includes things such as optimizing your page title and metatags for each individual page, adding in some visual accents to make the site sparkle a bit more, optimizing the AdSense ads for each page instead of just the template ads, tweaking the wording on the pages to target your ads better, etc.

You'll start the process of analysis and adjustment at the end of this phase, and you'll create a plan for regular updates.

2. Long Term Maintenance and Updates - Analysis and adjustment in ads and site wording is an ongoing process. You can be aggressive about it, or casual, your choice. I am pretty casual about it as long as my income shows an upward trend!

Long Term Maintenance includes such tasks as correcting 404 errors, insuring that your site is showing and functioning properly, and making sure your hosting is functioning right.

You'll need to update your site on some kind of regular basis also. Updates can consist of improvements to individual pages (as you learn more you may wish to modify content on some of your pages), or adding in new content - that is, entirely new pages or sections. A monthly schedule works nicely to strike a good balance between frequency and work load, but you can get away with as little as every three months if you have a hand written site.

Usually your work load per site can be reduced to an hour or two a week once your site is functioning. That gives you room to build another site if you are following a plan to build multiple sites, or to build a new site section if you are focusing just on one large site. So you have to learn to balance your long term maintenance and updates with your efforts to expand and build more.

Eventually, you'll reach "critical mass", when you KNOW that you cannot manage ONE MORE SITE! At that point you can scale back, sell the less successful sites if you have multiple sites, or find other ways to keep the work load containable.