Well to start with, if you are already an established webmaster, then you need not heed my words. Because, you would then know what works on a site and what does not. This article is meant for newbie webmasters and bloggers who are in the dual search of gaining traffic to their websites and making money from their pages.

I presume that you have already zeroed in on the concept of your site or a blog. The next thing you would think on is what are the subcategories(you know them as Links) that you can sum up on the main page, and also what else you are going to present on the main page so that the visitor understands what this site is for.

Now comes the question, To Adsense or not to Adsense...(If you do not know what Adsense is, they are Google Sponsored context-targetted ads that you can place on your sites which can earn you money when someone clicks on them).

I will take two similar examples and bring out the subtle difference between them to let you know which site will make profit from Adsense. Let us consider two hypothetical sites A and B.

Let us say that site A brings out reviews of all science-fiction books in the market. The homepage gives a brief idea about the site and this is linked to all the reviews, one review per page.

And now take site B which also deals with science fiction books, but focussses on the writing aspect. In short site B teaches people how to write such a book.

Now, guess which will make more Adsense money? Lets take it on a case-on-case basis. Site A, no matter brings out the review on every possible Science fiction book in market. But Adsense ads are context targetted. That is, Google scans through the page and provides ads based on the words it sees on a page. That means the first book could deal with Michael on his time machine and second book could deal with Rob on his rocket. Do you think the ads would be very relevant to the visitor. The ads would then pertain to rocket science books and stuff which the visitor is not likely to click.

But take Site B. Here every page is likely to deal with how to write such a book. And when Adsense scans through such a page, it provides ads about sites that also provide writing skills and techniques; very relevant to the context of the site. That means the visitor is more likely to click on the ads.

And what about the owner of Site A? Will he make money? Why not, since the site deals with book reviews, the visitor is more likely to proceed to purchase the book. So provide Amazon links to the books which is likely to get you commissions in tens of dollars rather in cents in case of Adsense ads.

So, it should always be a wise decision to choose the kind of ads that you serve on a site, because too many ads on a site is likely to make the visitor tired of your site and you might end not seeing him again.

Anand Srinivasan is a Software Engineer by profession and a part-time webmaster. Look for other articles by him at Nice-Ideas.BlogSpot.com or visit his message boards at XooXonline.info