Start of my Adsense Qualification Journey

Its been a long time coming, i've had the idea to obtain my Adsense qualification for some months but only managed to get around to starting to study and take it serious recently.

This blog will hopefully help me be able to put some thoughts out there and maybe help others who are on the same path or decide to get qualified in the future.

Let me start by explaining some of my experience and why i am choosing to study and become qualified (hopefully!!).

I've worked in IT for many years, initially as a DB programmer and Unix/Linux systems administrator. This type of work is not something i was suited for, i just don't have the mentality to be a programmer so i left that life behind and walked away to become an English teacher. This was probably not the best decision of my life, i'm not cut out to be a teacher either but i try to learn from my mistakes. Life would be boring without them.

Anyway, i literally fell back in the IT world by starting a business and not knowing anything about SEO. Our company website didn't rank for any keywords and our website designer didn't know anything either. With this, i decided to teach myself how to make websites and how to improve the ranking. To my complete surprise, i am actually quite good at this and have been working on my own for the last 3 years, building websites, trying to rank them and have varying levels of success and failure.

I've used Adsense on and off over the last few years but to no great success and usually a loss of my own money. Ok, so that means i'm not a complete newbie to this type of work but i've decided to step it up and take my knowledge to the next level. I see this next level as becoming qualified in Google Adwords and using that knowledge to help my own business and hopefully others in the near future.

So my goals:

• Complete the Google Adwords foundation, Advanced Search, Advanced Display qualifications within the next 4 months. The timeframe is due to being an expectant father, our first child arrives in February so now is the time to take action before its all changing nappies and crying toddlers (yikes!!)
• Complete our new company website which will offer SEO/SEM, Social media, Adsense services initially in Spain.
• Complete a second website on a topic i am passionate about, that is the city i now call home, Malaga.

I'll try to post some details on what i learn along the way along with the inevitable mistakes, hopefully these can help others from making the same mistakes.