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.

I Have My Account – Now What (Part 2)

 You should use all of the search engine optimization techniques as possible when building your site. Not only will this attract the right ads, but it will also help your site to move up in the search results, for the purpose of driving traffic to your site.

You want your site to look nice, to be informative, and to load fast. You want it to attract the right ads. You do not want anything on your pages that will irritate your visitor, such as blinking, blinding text or music.

Make it a site that you would want to visit, and then ask an uninterested party, such as your neighbor (not your best friend or your mother) if it is a site that they would want to visit, if they were interested in the topic.

Now, you are ready to place the Adsense javascript code on your pages. Log in to your Adsense account. Click on the Adsense Set up tab at the top of the page.

First, click on Channels, and set up a Channel for the topic of your site. This will come in handy later on, when you are analyzing which of your sites is pulling in the most money.

Next, click on palettes, and create a color palette that matches your site well. You want your Google ads to blend into your site. If they stand out like a sore thumb, they will get fewer clicks, simply because people really do try to avoid advertisements.

You want the ads to look like content on your site. Once you’ve set up a palette that matches your site, click on products. Choose Adsense for content to create your ad units.

Here, you can choose ads that are enclosed in a box, or ads that are more free standing, but still just text links. It is a good idea to choose the link unit to add above or below your navigational links, and you can design your site navigation links to look just like the Google link units.

 

You can use the ad units (boxed in) on other sections of your site. Those who have been in the Google Adsense game for a while have done years worth of testing on the topic of ad unit placement.

Ideally, you will use ‘text ads only’ as your setting. Note that Google has limits as to how many Google ads can be used on your page, please check with the TOS.

As you can see, it is fairly easy enough setting things up, but it takes a lot more thought and effort than that. What you must remember is that you often only make a few cents when someone clicks an ad. Each click can pay as little as one cent, but I have seen amounts up to a couple of dollars.

The most successful Adsense publishers are targeting keywords that pay the most amount of money. These Adsense publishers use a variety of tools to find out

what the high paying keywords are. These tools include keyword research tools,

such as Word Tracker and Keyword Elite.

http://www.wordtracker.com

http://www.keywordelite.com

They spend a great deal of time researching those keywords, finding out what the top keywords are, in terms of number of people searching for them, and what word combinations are being used. These are words and phrases that they will target in the content of their sites.

Next, they determine which of those top keywords topics pay the most money per click. Those who have been in the Adsense “game” for a while are not going to build sites that target keywords that only pay one cent per click!

These Adsense publishers use the tools that Google provides to help determine which keywords are paying the most to the publishers. Unfortunately, you won’t find these tools inside your Google Adsense account. No, You need a Google Adwords account for this -  http://adwords.google.com/

You see, Google has two programs that work together: Google Adsense and

Google Adwords. Business owners use Google Adwords to promote their products and websites and it’s those ads that are shown on your Google Adsense ads.  The business owner pays Google for each click generated on your website, and Google

pays you for the service.

It’s free to create a Google Adwords account. Once created, You just get in there and start using the tools that are there to see how much bids are for the keywords that you’ve discovered using keyword selection tools such as Word Tracker and Keyword Elite.

By doing this, you have access to the same information that the people who are paying for ads has, and this helps you to build more profitable Adsense websites.

This is a nice trick that Google won’t tell you about, and that most Adsense publishers won’t care to share it with you. Having a Google Adwords account is

  the key to finding out which keywords are going to pay you the most amount of money per click.

Choosing the right high paying keywords, however, isn’t everything; You need traffic – and lots of it, simply because low traffic sites will NOT make you a full- time living. This is why most publishers have more than one website.

They find the top keywords in terms of number of searches, figure out the keywords from that list that pay the most amount of money per click, and then build sites, lots of sites...

A successful Adsense publisher may have sites on topics such as fishing, weight loss, video games, making money, and many more. When you have multiple sites, you can make a nice living with a mid level amount of traffic to each site.

If you have hundreds of sites, like I have, you can make a living even with low traffic. So, here is some food for thought: The more traffic you have per site, the fewer sites you will need to earn a living from Adsense.