One of the reasons you are building your first site is to persuade Google to give you an Adsense account. That is only going to happen if the company sees that you are serious about being online. This is why you should start your own long-term website ASAP.

Your daily addition of new material to a domain you have paid for should go a long way towards getting you your Adsense account quickly.

Search engine spiders will visit your website more often if you post new content more often. This will help to get all of your posts and pages indexed and in search engine results sooner.

You will not be getting any real life visitors for a good while yet, so do not worry about what theme you have on your site. What you are doing at this stage of your website’s development is building credibility. A four page site with no content has very little street cred. It takes time and a lot of work.

You need to categorise your posts to allow your future visitors to find the information they are looking for. An easy to use navigation system is one of Google’s requirements before you are given an Adsense account.

It is tempting to set up multiple websites at this time because each requires very little time, but resist and concentrate on one or two at the most. Each one will take up a whole working day, every day in a few months time and spreading your efforts too thinly means that neither site will ever reach the critical mass it needs to take off.

You need to have a vision of where you want your business to be at various points in the future. Once you have these goals you can measure your success by how close to them you are.

Forget airy-fairy cash flow forecasts. To be realistic you have no idea of how much your business is going to bring in. On the other hand you have only very limited costs, disregarding your time, so your financial risk is extremely low.

Your only outlay is for a domain name and hosting for that domain, $85 a year or less.

Do not, under any circumstances, sign up to any paid program at this early stage of your business. They just suck money out of your bank that you do not have. There will come a time after the first six months when you might profit from one or two of these, but in the initial six months just concentrate on building your website up, making contacts and learning.

Start thinking in terms of short, medium and long-term income streams.

Writing for upfront payment is short-term income. It is essential at times, but be wary about devoting all of your writing time to it.

Writing for InfoBarrel and similar article directories gives you recurring income from each article. Your own websites are another form of recurring medium-term income.

Your long-term income comes from building up your website visitor numbers to such a level that someone will offer to buy it from you. Think of each website you grow from scratch as an investment for the future.

Your targets for the first year will be more concrete than for two years and longer, but it is useful to have longer-term targets written down even if you modify them later.

HTML Versions of Articles

Sometimes an employer will specify that he wants H1 and H2 tags with specified text. You look a bit silly if you don’t know what a H1 tag is. What do you do if your employer wants the HTML version of your article?

If you have access to any WordPress Edit box, like the one I am typing in now, there is a simple simple way to do H1 and H2 tags. You paste your article into the Visual Editor, complete with Header 1 (H1) and Header 2 (H2) formatting from your word processor. You click the HTML tab and you see all the fancy HTML stuff that web browsers read.

You then Copy and Paste the text from the HTML tabbed page into a text editor like NotePad and send your HTML article off.

HTML Link Codes

Sometimes you will be offered the opportunity to put in your own link with anchor text.

I still have a crib sheet in NotePad that I alter every time I need this. all those inverted commas, < and > symbols blow my brain.

Here is your own crib sheet, just copy it and change it around. If you get it wrong just start again.

This is one of the links from my Escape Teaching Link to Us Page…

Let us help you to escape teaching

Here is the code that produces that link

Let us help you to <a href=”http://escapeteaching.com/” target=”_blank”>escape teaching</a>

The target=”_blank” just makes the link open in a new page, so someone is more likely to paste it into their website. In this example the anchor text is “escape teaching”.

Just replace http://escapeteaching.com/ with your own web page address. Replace the blurb at the start of the sentence with your own and use your own anchor text and you can build your own HTML links.