Making money with Google Adsense

Are you making money with Google Adsense yet? If you have your own website, it is perhaps the easiest way to start earning money on the Internet.

What is Adsense?

Google provide a service where site owners can pay for adverts that will be placed on relevant websites and Search Engine results pages. This service is called Adwords. It is those adverts which, if placed on YOUR site, can earn YOU money. Every time someone finds an ad irresistible and clicks on it, you will earn. It is what is known as a Pay-per-click affiliate program.

Google is pretty clever. The ads that they place on your site are targeted towards your visitor. So if you have a page on chocolate, the ads will be of interest to anyone that loves chocolate.

Signing up for Google Adsense

As with other affiliate business opportunities you need to get your site up and running before you apply for an account.

It is also sensible to wait until you have a good number of visitors to your site each day, as only a small percentage of them will click on the ads. If you want to know how to build a site, from the ground up, that will attract lots of visitors, take a look at my page about the SBI! concept.

If your site has good, original content then getting accepted by Google Adsense should not be difficult.

Choosing what your ads will look like

You have a wide variety of shapes and sizes of ads that you can pick from.

You can also choose the color of the text, links and URLs displayed. It is perhaps a good idea to stick to the well known blue links, so that visitors can tell it is a link at a glance.

You can add a border around the ad block if you wish, although I tend to find that not having a border works best on my sites.

When you have "designed" your ad layout, you will be provided with some raw HTML code that you need to copy and paste into your web pages.

Positioning your ads

You will learn through trial and error, where to place your ads on the page. Generally they work better when they are "in your face" rather than tucked away in a side column.

Google provides placement suggestions that will help you to earn more, which are worth taking notice of.

Checking your results

Some ads will work better than others.

How do you know which ads are making money with Google Adsense? You can set up channels to monitor their effectiveness. Your reports will tell you which channels are working well and which are not. By the way these reports are real-time, so you can check at any time to see how well you are doing. It is a better use of time to create more new pages, however, than to keep checking your stats.

As with other affiliate programs, you need to reach a certain level before you will receive a payment. At present that is $100 or £60. It took me 3 months to earn my first check, but now I get a payment in the four figure range every month.

I can recommend the Google Adsense option as one of the easiest ways to earn extra income online. But do be careful to follow their rules as there are certain things that can result in having your Google Adsense account disabled!