AdSense is the lesser understood advertising medium offered by Google. It still seems that AdWords gets most of the attention? Basically AdWords allows you to display targeted advertising on Google and its network of partners. A very powerful thing indeed. AdSense on the other hand allows you to make a cut of the money that Google make from these advertisers by hosting the ads on you site. The clever thing about AdSense is that it uses Google’s technology to decided on the most relevant ads for your site’s content. As usual with Google relevance is the cornerstone of their success and mission in cyberspace!
To implement AdSense and start making money, you need a website and you need to sign up for AdSense Google.com/AdSense. When you apply, your website will be assessed by one of Googles team. basically they are checking for decent content. It doesn’t need to be anything special, just not riddled with blue material, dodgy downloads, missing links etc. not that I would think any of you guys would do such things ;o)
So, lets say you’ve now been accepted for AdSense and are ready to add some adverts to your website. AdSense makes this very easy indeed through a setup screen on the AdSense site. You can build an advert column in various sizes and colour configurations to fit with your site design. This is a very important aspect. Your adverts should look totally integrated with your site. It makes them less easy to scan past but your readers and invariably gets more attention and looks more professional. I advise actually wrapping the ads with text from you site.
So how do you make cash out of this. Well, when ever your site traffic clicks on an ad, you get paid. Simple as that. The more traffic your site gets and the better presented the ad, the more click throughs you will get and the more money you will make. There are things you can do to optimise this. Google uses your body text, keywords and titles (h1 and h2) amongst other things to decide which ads to display in your ad box. This is done dynamically each time your page is loaded.The secret is to help yourself by using keywords and phrases that you know are good money makers, but still highly relevant to your site. You can find these by using a good keyword tool, check the bio link for suggestions in this area. There are some corkers available. Alternatively a simple Google search using the possible keywords will give an indication. Count how many sponsored ads are displayed for your keywords. The more ads, the more competition and more money people are likely to be paying therefore if Google is displaying the same results on you page, you will be making a cut of the cash from these more competitive ads…simple!
To take this to a more advanced level, imagine a website that you have built with lots if good info on various topics… say a gardening site full of 1 page articles on various gardening dilemmas and tips. Firstly lets get some traffic so do a few link requests and forum entries around the web promoting your articles and tips. If your content is OK, you will start to get a few links and build some passive traffic from the bigger sites. now start to flavour a few of the pages with some highly competitive keywords for your topic and ad your AdSense code. These free links and traffic will start to make you money… keep adding info, pages and get more incoming links and before you know it you can be making a decent bit of extra pocket money, or offsetting your Google AdWords spend considerably. Other techniques which can make massive amounts of cash include buying cheap traffic from cheaper Pay per click providers like miva.com and then adding your highly profitable keywords and AdSense code to you pages. This way you are not reliant on free traffic to make money. Over several hundred pages, this method can be used to generate buckets of cash.
