A Quick Guide to Making Money With Google AdSense

I'm sure you've seen Google AdSense ads. Google started their AdSense program a few years ago and the revenue they get from it is over 70% of their entire revenue. In other words, AdSense is Huge with a capital "H"!

The type of AdSense ads you run on your web sites are called "contextual". Google basically "reads" your site and figures out what it's about. Then they place ads on the site that are related to your content.

You've seen these ads. If you're on a cell phone site, then the ads usually are for cell phone stuff. If you're on a site about diabetes control, then the ads reflect that.

Whenever someone clicks on one of these ads, the webmaster gets paid! Now, Google won't tell you what percentage of what the advertiser is paying they're passing along to you, but that really doesn't matter.

AdSense is usually my first step in monetizing any website. And it usually works very well. Let's discuss this in more detail.

I usually divide commercial websites into three types of site, authority sites, thin affiliate sites, and what I call squeeze page sites.

AdSense works very well with the first two. Since squeeze page sites are usually just a collection of unlinked squeeze pages, AdSense doesn't work well here.

By authority site, I mean a large site that has a lot of content about a certain fairly broad niche. These sites are made for AdSense. They tend to get a lot of traffic and some of that traffic is bound to click on your ads-especially if they're well placed.

AdSense also works well with what I call highly targeted thin affiliate sites. (As a matter of fact, in my experience, it works better with thin affiliate sites.) If you had a site selling a certain narrowly defined type of cell phone, then AdSense would work great there.

Sometimes I get asked if adding AdSense takes away from any other affiliate sales I might want to make from my site. My experience is that it does not. I think the reason for this is that visitors who click on ads are in a different stage of buying than a prospect for my affiliate product. The thing is someone actually has to pull out the credit card and buy the affiliate product for me to get paid. They only have to be curious enough to click on the AdSense ad for me to get paid. That's a much lower threshold!

How much you make from your site depends on a lot of factors-the amount of traffic, what the niche is about, and where you place your ads.

In general, you want to place your ads right in the middle of where someone's eye naturally flows. Placing ads at the bottom of the page is not a good idea-by that time the visitor is ready to leave the page. Placing ads at the top and in the middle works better.

To get a good idea of where to put your ads, look up Google heat maps. These are color coded templates that show you the most important real estate on your website.

The thing to do with AdSense is to experiment with the placement to maximize your profit.

One more thing-personally, I use AdSense as extra gravy. I don't depend on it as my main income source. That's putting all my eggs in one basket, and I like to spread stuff around.

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