Introduction

Introduction

In recent years, there has been a great deal of discussion and information concerning Google’s Adsense program at

http://www.google.com/adsense.

There have been truckloads of eBooks and articles written on the topic.

But in the grand scheme of things, it is a profitable program that still gets overlooked by many who are just coming online to start a business, as well as those who have been around a while.

First, let’s take a look at exactly what Adsense is and what it is all about:

“Adsense is a program for webmasters which was implemented by the famous Google some years ago.”

Essentially, a webmaster (a person who owns and builds one or more websites) signs up for an account with the program, and once they are approved, they paste the Google Adsense javascript code into the pages on their websites.

Google then starts serving ads to those websites, based on the keywords that it finds in the text of the page. When a visitor clicks on one of those ads, the webmaster makes money – usually a few cents per click.

However, when a site has a great deal of traffic, and when the webmaster knows which keywords are the most profitable to target, there is a lot of money to be made.

It sounds simple enough, but it’s really NOT that easy. First of all, you have to be approved – and Google is picky these days. The good news is that once one site is approved, and you have a Google Adsense account, there is no need to seek Google’s approval to use Adsense on any other site that you own, as long as that site is within the Google’s terms of service guidelines.

Once you are approved, you have to know which keywords to target – the ones that will make you the most amount of money per click, and how to write (or have written for you) content that makes those high paying ads appear on your site.

Finally, you have to learn how to drive traffic to your Adsense site. Without the traffic, you won’t get any clicks, and without clicks, you won’t be making any money.

 

You may have heard gurus say that Google Adsense is dead? If you haven’t heard this, there will come a point when you will. But that really isn’t true. In fact, there are thousands of people just like you that are making very nice livings from the Google Adsense program.

Usually when a guru says that you should not use Google Adsense, they generally mean that you are better off not using it, especially when you are promoting your own product, and your website is tightly focused on that product.

However, you can use Google Adsense for a site that was built specifically for the Adsense program (Adsense Ready Sites), or on sites that you are using to promote affiliate products as well.

You should also note that many successful Adsense publishers have more than one website. They typically have numerous websites, on a variety of topics on which they display the Google ads. However, there are also those that simply have one high traffic website, from which they make money from the Adsense

program.

Regardless of this, all Adsense publishers start with just one website, and grow from there, and this is what you should be doing as well. You have to get the basics down, and learn the secrets that surround the profitability of Google Adsense before you can be successful with more sites.

Preparing For Your Adsense Account (Part 1)

Preparing For Your Adsense Account

The hardest part of getting started with Adsense is getting Google to approve your website. In fact, for many, it is easier to get a $100,000 bank loan than it is to get

a free Google Adsense account. The key is to be prepared before you apply.

You can’t start using Google Adsense on your pages until you are approved. This means that you must prepare to open an account, before you apply for an account.

The very first thing you must do is read Google’s Terms of Service (TOS). If your site doesn’t fall within the guidelines that Google sets out, it will be denied. Furthermore, even after you are approved and you start running Google ads on your site, if you break the TOS, you will be removed, and possibly banned, from the program.

Specifically, what you are looking for is the Program policies, which can be found at http://www.google.com/adsense. Scroll to the bottom of the page, and click on then Program Policies link. The first thing to note is that Google will not accept any site that is not complete.

Preparing For Your Adsense Account (Part 2)

This means that you can’t have any pages that are ‘under construction.’ All of the pages must be complete, and all of the links must be working. Make sure that all of your graphics are also appearing correctly, because even a broken graphic can prevent you from getting approved.

Google also has a set of Quality Guidelines that must be adhered to before you can be approved. These guidelines, along with the program policies, will tell you exactly what you can and can’t have on your site, and what is expected of you and your site in terms of meeting the qualifications for a Google Adsense account. You can find these guidelines at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer

=35769.

One mistake that so many would-be Adsense publishers make is not reading the TOS, the Program Policies, and the Webmaster Guidelines. Google lays these out in very specific terms, so there is no doubt as to the rules. They are also very serious about these rules.

Often, people skip this step in the preparation – reading the rules – work hard to build a site, only to be disapproved by Google, or to be approved, but then banned from the program later.

Don’t let this happen to you. These are rules that you must not only follow in order to get approved, but must continue to follow in order to stay in the program. You don’t want to spend days and weeks putting together sites, only to get kicked out of the program later. Google is very serious about this.

Once you’ve read the rules, and made sure you understand them, the next part of the preparation is doing research to find out which topics will be the most profitable for you, and getting the site built. We will cover these topics in more depth in a later article, but for now, you just need one website that will be approved by Google.

Remember that you only have to get approved for one site in order to get in the program, and from there on, you can publish as many sites as you want, on a wide variety of topics, and use Google Adsense on them, from the one account that you have been approved for.

While many just put up a website that will meet Google’s standards, without doing any research in order to get approved, you could also take a little longer, and go ahead and build a site that you can use to target the high paying keywords.

This is totally up to you, and it really doesn’t matter much which direction you go, as long as the site will get you approved for a Google Adsense account.

I usually recommend creating and building a  blogger.com blog, and apply using that one. You may not know this, but Google owns Blogger...