How Your Family's Home Page Can Pay for Itself

You don't have to be a "marketing guru" to make some extra bucks with your website.

My dad recently retired after many years working in the concrete industry. He suddenly had extra time on his hands, so he started doing some fun things with concrete. One of his most successful projects is the unique concrete leaves that he molds from real rhubarb leaves.

He gives his leaves away to grateful friends and family, even though leaves just like them are showing up in many landscaping magazines as garden sculptures. Concrete leaves are also being used in expensive fountains. My dad thought about selling them, but the freight is just too expensive. And besides - he's supposed to be retired.

I talked him into making a website to show other people how to make the leaves for themselves. It took a few months of nagging, but he finally agreed to it.

The whole family got in on the project - his wife helped him write it, and was very patient when we grabbed the digital camera and made her pose. My daughter helped with some design ideas, and my dad took all the pictures. My job was to put the website together.

This family project was a lot of fun, and gave us something that we could all work on together, even though we live in three different cities. And, thanks to AdSense, my dad's website is more than paying for itself.

My dad signed up for a free AdSense account at google.com, and I put the necessary lines of code on all his pages. He has fun watching the daily stats for his AdSense account, even on days when there are few clicks, because it shows him how many people are seeing his web page. Of course, he has a lot more fun on the days when he gets lots of clicks, and the $'s mount up.

I'm always surprised when I find a home page on the Internet that doesn't have the AdSense ads. My dad's page is about concrete leaves - not a subject that tons of people search for. But his page is now number 9 in Google for "concrete leaves." Some of the best informational pages on the Web are built by people like my dad, who have a skill or information that they want to share with others. Because their intentions are not primarily commercial, they can concentrate on the subjects that they know and love best. Their sites really offer a good value to the hundreds of people who find their sites.

So, if you have a family home page of your own, and you share some of your experience or knowledge, why not add one more way to help your visitors? Get an AdSense account. If you can build a web page, you can easily add the code, and the ads will be specifically relevant to your visitor's interests. Plus - your web page may pay for itself. Who knows -you may even get the "bug" like I did and start building more pages. You could end up making a good part-time income from your web-page hobby - thousands of people do, and getting started is easy!

To find out more, just search for "adsense" on Google.com