Google AdWhat? Making Sense of Google Adsense

Surfing the web lately, you've probably seen "Ads by Gooooooogle" on many of the websites that you've visited. Every day, more and more website owners are discovering exactly how to make money out of Google, so much so, that many web publishers are actually making a full time income just from having Google adverts on their websites. So, what exactly is Google Adsense? You've noticed on many websites, those "ads by Goooooogle", followed by a number of adverts. Well visit Google themselves and you'll see on the right, and sometimes near the top of search result pages, "Sponsored Links". These are like the classified adverts that you see in your daily newspaper. Companies are paying to have their advert to be featured in this space, depending on the search phrases that you are typing in to the Google search box. Rather than a fixed price though, advertisers bid against each other to have their advert featured, with the highest bidder, getting the number 1 slot. This program is called "Google Adwords". While that proved a great success, the advertisers were limited to have their adverts only seen on Google. Then Google came up with the idea of paying website owners a percentage of the fee they get paid by the advertisers, for featuring the adverts on their own sites. This became the "Google AdSense" program. Free to join, this program has become a popular way of adding a new income stream, but more than that, some website publishers started to build websites specifically for this Google program. Working out which adverts the advertisers were paying most for (so the percentage commissions are the highest), website publishers are building sites specifically targeting these high paying advert commissions - earning a living from sending people away from their sites! As I say, the program is free to join, with an application to fill out, but Google must approve you before you can get started. The good news is that once you have been approved for your first website, you don't need to apply again for any additional websites. But before applying, you need to have a website which needs to be complete. The site must also contain what Google considers valuable content. This is the first step to making those profits. But before you think about designing your website, it is vitally important to choose a popular topic, with preferably high paying commissions - after all, you won't profit from anything without any website visitors, no matter how good your site looks! There are various tools on the web that you can use to check the popularity of keywords: www.wordtracker.com has a valuable free report that you can download, as well as a free trial of their keyword monitoring service. Overture.com is a company that competes with Google for placing adverts, and has a keyword research tool that also gives you the number of searches each term has had over the last month. You can find their tool here: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ Google also has a keyword research tool for their advertisers here: https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox Once you have identified your topic, and you know the keywords that you will target throughout the content on your website, you are ready to build your site. The design can be straightforward - in fact, do NOT go for some overly complex site design. You want your pages to appear fast; with the visitor seeing your content and those all important Google Adsense adverts. You also want to make sure that you have optimized your pages for the search terms you have identified. One way, is to use already published articles (on the topic in question) with reprint rights, but add an introduction, which uses the keywords/keyword phrases in explaining to the reader what the article is about. For example, for this very article, if you were targeting the keyword phrases "Google Adsense" and "Website Publishers" you could have written: Many web publishers are discovering the profits to be made using Google Adsense. Vic Carrara of onlyforprofit.com gives an introduction to what Google Adsense is, and how website publishers can build income from sending people away from their websites. - And, for emphasis, put the first line in H1 tags, with the second in H2 tags - When your site is complete with a good range of articles on your chosen topic, it's time to apply for a Google AdSense account. You can find the application form at http://www.google.com/services/adsense_tour/ It should only take a few days for Google to approve (or reject) your website. If, unfortunately you are rejected, simply follow Google's advice and make the necessary changes to your site, then apply again. Reading through the information on Google's AdSense website will help you to avoid mistakes that may get you rejected. Once approved, you will want to have a good look round all the facilities you have available, and customize your Google AdSense ads to fit in with your own website's style and feel. Once that is done, you can start to put Google AdSense search boxes on every page of your website, but make sure that you've read the terms and conditions at Google first. For instance, if you have a thank you page that visitors arrive at after signing up for a newsletter, Google AdSense ads are not to be used on that page! You are allowed to have two ad units on each page, as well as a Google Search Box. Make use of this, using perhaps a skyscraper on either the left or right hand side of the page. Google AdSense profits experts agree that the right hand side of the page gets the most clicks. Put an additional ad unit either at the top or the bottom of each page, using the rectangle ad units. Sidebar: There are various forums on the internet that focus on the techniques of using Google Adsense profitably. Here are a few of the more popular ones: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum89/ http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/forumdisplay.php?f=30 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=27 Put the ads on every page that you can on your website. This includes adding the Google AdSense ads to your blogs and your forums. It may take up to twenty four hours for relevant ads to start appearing on your website pages. Until then, you will probably have a public service notice. Once your ads appear, make sure that they are relevant to the content on your pages. If they aren't, make changes to the pages. You might need to change the names of the HTML files, using your keywords. Adjust the keywords in your Meta tags, as well as the keywords and keyword density throughout the page content. Change the text in the