Google Adsense: Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Google's Adsense program allows webmasters of any level to earn revenue from their websites. This is done by placing a piece of javascript code (currently the only option) on your web page that will show advertisements of various editable sizes and should your users click on those adverts you will be paid a portion of the revenue. The ways to maximise site revenue seems to have given way to an "Adsense Fever" and general thinking has switched from "Build Site then Get Advertisers" to "Get Adsense Account then Build Site".

Firstly a quick preview on the ins and outs of a Google Adsense Account. What is Adsense? It is management centre for webmasters who want to display text and image adverts on their website that are automatically geared to showing advertisers relevant to the content of that site or individual page. Adsense advertising takes two forms: banners and search. Each banner comes in various regular sizes that you would expect and can display either text adverts, images or videos and can be colour customised to better integrate into your own design, font choice is fixed though. Adsense for search takes two variations in itself, you can place a search box on a page that either redirects to the Google country specific search engine of your choice or it can redirect to a bespoke results page on your own site showing Googles results. These results pages will have advertisers on them also. Each type of integration use a piece of script (currently javascript, no php yet) that you place in the location you want to show the ads/results. You make money whenever a user clicks on one of these adverts. These earnings are dictated by how much the advertiser has paid to be listed in the banner or searches and by what percent of the revenue you are allocated (this percentage is not openly discussed by big G). Each click is monitored through tracking systems that attempt to eliminate fraudulent clicks and the results can be seen in the reports section of accounts. See the terms of service (TOS) for more details on fraud. This tracker will let you see your click through rates (CTR) which is the percentage of people who have viewed your ads and clicked on one of them. You will also see how much you have earned per day and can create separate "channels" which allow you to track the performance of individual websites or even pages. But what is adsense to the website user? Well, here: Not exactly pretty are they ... but with hundreds of thousands of sites now using adsense for revenue people are getting used to seeing this form of advert. To find out if using Adsense makes sense for your website before opening an account there is a preview tool available. This is a download that adds a feature to your right click functions whereby you can click on any page and get a preview of what types of ad would be shown. It uses the words and other content available to determine what would be relevant and you can decide if such text would be something that your users would actually click on in the first place. Help is always available through their help database or through the contact forms available in the management centre. There is also adsense's blog that keeps people up to date with the current changes and new features.

Who wants to be a millionaire? Most people heading for the Adsense website these days have generally already had their head filled with promises of being a "millionaire overnight" or even just the phrase "steady income" will be enough to make some salivate at dreams of leaving their boring jobs to be self employed. Unfortunately many quit their jobs way too early and are sorely disappointed when "overnight" success turns into work 10x harder than their old desk job and the amazing "adsense income" doesn't even pay for the electricity your computer is using. It still amazes me that people believe there are secrets to be bought on the web. Any secret worth anything will always remain a secret ... eh, Nixon? Building an empire from a $9.99 ebook may sound possible when you read the gold whisperings of the salesmen but think about it just for a few seconds ... there we go, that clicking sound! Even Jade Goody's Autobiography retails at £16.95 (about $30) and it tells you nothing of any importance.

After the tips and tutorials have let you feeling confused and alone, next we have the Adsense Ready web sites or the "business in a box" purporting themselves as the saviours of the newbie webmaster. These template driven software packages allow you to enter huge lists of keywords and at the click of a button a site of up to 1000 to 100,000 pages is instantly created and uploaded to the web.* Again, let us take those few seconds to just think about that ... got it yet? Let us take the small estimate of only 10 such software companies who sell only one software package a day = after one year there will be 3,650,000 to 365,000,000 auto-generated pages vying for position in the search engine rankings. Of course, there are probably about 100+ such software companies out there and they most likely sell more than one copy a day but my calculator doesn't go that high. Templates for disaster more than anything. Most of these auto generate business models will rely on adsense arbitrage which is the process of paying low amounts on Adwords (e.g. £0.05 per click) for keywords that land on pages where the adverts shown are worth £1.00+ per click. Sounds simple but again, take into account that you are jockeying for position against many other people attempting the same thing and you'll find yourself earning an average of 1p on turnaround. Take the high value keyword "mortgage" - currently there are 163 adwords advertisers bidding to show in the results. At 5p your ad will be shown on results page 14 and will never be shown on a content page. There are easier ways. You have to remember that it's not just you vs. the search engine. It's you vs. a hundred thousand other webmasters. You think you're the only one to ever think of targeting misspellings? Here, try this: morgage, mortage, mortgae - search for those keywords and you'll see that there are already 100+ advertisers. Misspellings have been overrun and they are pretty low volume phrases. There are no back doors to making money with any program, (see our google adsense keyword research tips for more info). 

So how do you make money with Google Adsense? Well having spent a long time as an adsense publisher, the best trick I've learned is: there are no tricks and there are no secrets. What you have to do is keep adsense earnings as an afterthought. Put this in real world context (an art that is steadily becoming lost), if you were to focus on the sponsors of an event and build an event around them that's a pretty lousy event. However, if you put on a Monster Truck show Ford will pay you a fortune to advertise as they know loads of people will come. Traffic is the only way to a successful AND LONGTERM business model on the internet. Think of the major ad sense players right now - YouTube and Digg earn millions but they were not created for that purpose. These sites were created to develop traffic and then the income came later. You need to develop something that people want to come to (technical term is "sticky web pages") so that you do not rely solely on search engine traffic. You only have to spend a few hours trawling through the webmaster forums to read about the number of businesses that go under just because of a simple algorithm change. It doesn't even have to be an original thought, you can take a larger concept such as Digg and just make it local e.g. Scotland, Texas, Sydney etc. Trust me, you are more likely to get a decent stream of revenue from being the top of a small niche than from throwing a billion pages at a huge industry. Also, with traffic and a niche comes prestige so that even if you do not rank for the best keywords in your niche you will have a strong base of regular visitors that will keep coming back.  

Top paying Adsense Keywords are, in essence, a myth. But if you are determined that the only way forward is to work out the best words that make the most money and build a site around them then I do have some advice. The reason I say they are a myth is because although someone might pay out $50 a click for a keyphrase this is not always an indication of what will actually appear on your pages or of how much adsense will pay you. In most cases these "high paying" lists are created using the keyword addition tool from adwords, or one of the many API tools, where the person enters a word and sees what the bids are. But as part of the adwords model, merchants can place a completely different and much lower bid for banner adverts being shown on content pages through Google Ad sense. Then take into consideration the much secreted Smart Pricing feature where content pages that do not convert well are paid a much lower percentage that those that do. We ran a test on this for the word "mortgage" which the bid selection tells us has a high paying bid of £30 per clickthrough. We built a section totally devoted to this word and set it running. The adverts shown were spot on and the advertisers being shown were the same that were ranking top on the actual Goog site. Average money made from adsenses ads for those pages was £0.57 per clickthrough. (Sidenote: we earned an average £1.23 per click with our regular banner advertisements selling mortgage products!) Now that would work out at as 1% of advertiser revenue being the money made with adsense but that is unlikely. What is more likely is that advertisers were paying much lower amounts for content clicks because of the high level of fraud as everyone and their dog was targeting their keywords. There are loads of "top paying adsense keyword" retailers out there: 
With that in mind I'd like to bring up the less popular theory of building a decent site that gets lots of traffic and lots of clicking over a spam site that gets less traffic (because of a crowded market) with slightly higher paid clicking. Any successful affiliate, discussion forum and even the Google Adsense website will tell you this. †† Any person looking to make a quick buck by selling you ebooks and out of date keyword lists will tell you differently. Do I add sense to the situation? (Oh come on, surely you've heard worse puns?

Adsense Alternatives? There are two main reasons that you will be looking for an alternative to Adsense. Either you have been kicked off of the program, or all you get is public service ads and/or really low earnings from each clicker. Well, although popular, adsenses strength lies in it's relevance matching capabilities. If your site deals with several products or subject then chances are your ads will never really match the page's content and therefore hardly anyone will clickthrough and therefore you won't make money withany form of contextual advertising. This is particularly common with blogs and forums. Sometimes having just 2-3 good image banner ads through affiliate networks such as Tradedoubler or AffiliateWindow can results in far higher earnings that you ever could get with the ad matching programming. Plus, good selection of advertisers can add visual value to your page, a cluster of text ads can generally detract from such. We have sites with just contextual ads, some with just affiliates banners and some with both. The tip is to change them each month and check the results until you find what works. What's popular isn't always what's best.

How do I get started making money with Google AdSense?

I've been reading a bit about how people can make money off their Web site by joining up with the Google AdSense program, but I really don't understand how it all works. Do I need to find advertisers? Do I bill them for showing up on my site? Or does Google do all this? Thanks a million (hopefully!)

You're not alone in being interested in the terrific Google AdSense program. Leveraging its powerful page analysis system, Google's AdSense program automatically matches the best possible advertisements with the content on your Web page, making the ads magically quite relevant to your content.

Behind the scenes, it works like this: an advertiser goes to the Google AdWords system, signs up, and creates one or more advertisements that they want to pay to have appear either on Google's search result pages or on "content pages". Those content pages are Web sites run by individuals and organizations that include AdSense, which is the "consume" side of this equation.

What makes this more interesting is that advertisers don't pay to have their adverts show up on either Google or separate content sites, but instead pay when the ads are clicked by customers, what we call "pay per click" or PPC. A percentage of the amount that the company pays Google for displaying the ad is then shared with the AdSense-enabled web site owner.

If, say, the advertiser pays $1.00 for a visitor to their site through AdWords, then Google will pay a percentage of that amount (the exactly amount has not been stated by the company) to you, perhaps $0.20, perhaps more.

I realize that $0.20 doesn't sound like much money, but if you have a few hundred visitors a week, and some percentage of them click on these adverts, you could easily make $20-$50 or much (much!) more from your site each week, without having to do any work other than add the special AdSense code to the pages in the first place.

It's simple, easy to accomplish, you never have to negotiate (or even talk) with advertisers, you don't have to bill anyone at all, and every month or two you'll get a nice little check from Google corporate. Nice!

So let's talk about the exact steps required to actually get going with the AdSense program. First and foremost, you need to sign up for the AdSense program, which you can do by clicking in the cheery button:

Note that when you sign up, you'll need to specify a Web site or weblog that you plan on incorporating AdSense: not every site is approved, however, so make sure yours has valuable and unique content and a design that doesn't include too many advertisements.

Once you're approved, it's time to log in and configure your new AdSense advertisement to include on your site!

When you first log in, you'll see the following navigational bar:

Click on "AdSense for Content" and you'll be ready to configure your ad. Now, don't worry: configuration is pretty easy and kinda fun too, you get to pick colors, sizes, and much more.

Once you've clicked on the "AdSense for Content" tab, your next step will be to decide what type of advertisements you want Google to serve up on your own pages:

I suggest you start out with a text "Ad unit", as shown here: the other type of content adverts are less generally useful, less flexible, and typically also have a much lower payout, according to the grapevine. When you are ready, note that you can learn more about the different formats by clicking on any of the last three lines in that view.

The next section of your task is to specify the format and layout of your AdSense ad, and there are a rather amazing number of different size and format options. Google has a helpful AdSense Ad Format Reference Page that's worth a quick peek.

Here at Ask Dave Taylor, I use a Leaderboard (728x90) on the top of the home page and a Large Rectangle (336x280) on this very page. Your layout will inevitably be different and you might choose a different layout entirely. Further, you are allowed to have up to three different ad units on a given page, so you can experiment with them one atop the other, adjacent to each other, or interspersed with your content. Just try to remember that if there's no content, there's no page. :-)

Now that you've picked an ad layout size (and yes, you can change it at any time too) it's time to have the most fun: changing the color scheme of the ad itself. My handy tip: use a border color that's the same as the background color of your page (as I do on this page) so that it's less overt that the ads are actually advertisements. It helps people not gloss over them and, hopefully, click on the ads a bit more frequently.

The built-in color schemes are nice too, of course, if you want to use them, but just as with the sizes, I strongly recommend that you experiment with different color schemes and see if you get a better percentage of clickthrus and greater revenue. Perhaps every Sunday night you can change to another color scheme and then track week-by-week what works best?

The next step is to specify an alternate Ad URL or color, and a specific channel for your ad:

The idea behind alternate ads is that sometimes no advertisers have bid on advertising for the keywords, leading Google to a pickle: what to display? By default, it instead displays public service ads (PSAs), but if you want to create an HTML snippet that produces the same size content, you can use that instead, or, you can simply have a solid box in the color of your choice that blends into the design of your site.

I am a much stronger supporter of channels, however. Channels let you organize your AdSense results by Web site (if you have more than one site) or by areas of your site. On this site, for example, I have a channel for "home page leaderboard" and another for "large rectangle" so I can compare how each format is doing, rather than just guessing in the aggregate. It's much easier to start correctly than to retrofit this sort of thing, so take the time and set up a basic channel or two to begin categorizing your results.

Finally, you've made all the settings you need and it's time to grab the HTML snippet that'll generate the ad block on your own site!

Your specifics will be a bit different from what you see in this screen shot, but the code will generally look identical. Just select all the text in the box, then use Edit --> Copy to get that code into your copy/paste buffer.

Now open up a page where you'd like to include the AdSense code, or a template if you're working with something like a weblog system, and paste in the new code by using Edit --> Paste.

Save your template and rebuild your site, or, if it's just a page, save the page back onto the server and bring it up in your web browser. That's it!

Important Warning: do not click on your ads!

I think one of the most common mistakes that new AdSense participants make is to click on an advert or three to "make a quick buck". Sounds good in theory, but you'll end up kicked out of the AdSense program if you click on ads shown on your own pages, which is not a good strategy for earning money!

Anyway, that's the basic set of steps. Don't delay and don't wait for tomorrow: pop back up to the beginning of this article to sign up for AdSense, then go through these steps and you can start turning your cost center of a Web site into a revenue generation system, modest or otherwise!

.. and who knows, maybe you'll see one of my own advertisements on your site!

Tips for Avoiding Your AdSense Account Getting Banned by Google

I have seen quite a lot of AdSense publishers posted in different forums stating that their AdSense accounts were banned by Google due to fraudulent clicks. Most of these people claim that they are innocent and have never clicked on their on AdSense ads. So they have no idea why click fraud can occur on their AdSense accounts. The truth is click fraud can happen in several ways and not necessarily caused by the AdSense publisher himself/herself who accidentally clicked on his/her own AdSense.

Below are some of the tips to protect your AdSense account:
1) Do not use autosurf programs to promote your websites that contain AdSense. Autosurf programs can substantially increase your website traffic or hits, AdSense page view and ecpm but people who surf your site only to earn advertising credit or other type of incentives. So the traffic generated from autosurf programs aren't counted as real and thus against AdSense policies.
2) If possible, do not involve in any traffic exchange networks and programs. If you have join one or more programs or networks that can make you a steady AdSense commission, you should start worry about your AdSense account as this could mean that members of the program(s) were clicking each other AdSense ads all the while whether intentionally or unintentionally. As soon as Google detected a group of people were clicking each other AdSense, many of the members AdSense account in the program will be suspended. Also traffic exchange can be another mean to artificially generate tons of unreal website traffic or hits and boost up AdSense page view & ecpm and it is strictly prohibited by Google .
3) Do not join AdSense exchange networks. They are similar to traffic exchange programs except members are participate just for clicking each other AdSense. This should be a guaranteed way to be banned by Google.
4) Read all the Google AdSense policies at 

5 Tips to Boost Your Adsense Revenue

1) Comment on Blogs
Look for large traffic Blogs in your niche, visit them and leave your comments on their blogs posts. You may use blog search engine like www.blogsearchengine.com, www.google.com/blogsearch and www.searchengineblog.com to find blogs in your niche.
2) Submit Articles
Write articles that are related to your blog and submit them to popular article directories such as ezinearticles.com, Isnare.com, Articledashboard.com, Articlealley.com and goarticle.com. Quality articles may drive you a lot of free targeted traffic.

3) Participate in Community Forums
Use google to search for forums that are related to your blog. Look for forums that has over 10,000 members and read the rules of the forums to see whether you can promote your blogs and websites in your signature. Join forums that allow you to add a link to your blog in the signature and start participating in discussion. You can ask questions, answer other members questions and post your articles, ideas and thought in the forums.

4) Submit Your Blog to Directories
This isn't working to me but some bloggers claim that they gain a good amount of traffic from their listings in directories.

5) Post Often
You can lose traffic if you seldom update you blog, try to make it at least 5 posts per week. This not only will maintain your traffic but possibly attract more readers.

6) Write about Blogging
Write helpful and quality articles related to blogging can attract other bloggers link to your articles and gain may be truckload of free traffic.

7) Post Breaking News
If your found a breaking news of your niche very earlier, post it to your blog. It may give your blog's traffic a boost.

8) Social Bookmarking
Bookmark you blog posts in the large social bookmarking sites like Netscape.com, Digg.com, Simply and Reddit.com.

9) Run a Contest
Start a contest on your blog. Think about the prizes that people really want. It will create a viral effect and bring in new visitors.

10) On-page Optimization
Make sure your blog's title tag and description tag contain your targeted keywords. When you have posted plenty of quality blog post and done a lot of blog promotion, don't be surprise to see your log ranks top 10 in Google and get free search engine traffic daily.

4 Steps to Creating A Website Specifically to Earn AdSense Revenue

Building a website to earn Google AdSense advertising revenue has become a popular way to make extra money online nowadays. It is easier to earn AdSense income versus generating sales by selling products or services online. However it does involve works, time and money before you start earning from Adsense program. Below are the steps to creating a content website for earning AdSense revenue.

Step 1
Decide the content of your website. You can write a topic or subject related to your interest, hobbies or experience. You can also provide educational information and advice on your website if you are expert at something.

Step 2
Use a website builder to create your website. One of the easy-to-use website builders that can help you build a website is Bluevoda website builder. Bluevoda site builder allows users to build a website without technical knowledge. You don’t need to build your site from scratch. The trick is to use a free professional template provided by the site builder and then start adding your text and links to your website. You can add some graphics and pictures to make your site look nicer. After completing your website project, your next step is register a domain name and sign up for a hosting account to publish your website on the Internet.

Step 3
Join Google AdSense program. It will usually take several days for Google AdSense team to review and approve your site. If Google accepts your application. You can start learning how to generate AdSense code for inserting to your website to generate Adsense revenue. If your site rejected by Google, don’t get upset easily. Google will let you know the reasons of the rejection. You can fix the problems and reapply again.

Step 4
You need to drive targeted Visitors/Traffic to your website to generate Adsense revenue. The higher your website’s traffic the greater your Adsense earning will be. Below are some of the ways that can help you drive some traffic to your website in short period of time.

1) Use Per-per-click (PPC) advertising. The two most popular PPC search engines are Google and Yahoo. Google and Yahoo can deliver instant traffic to your website but it is costly to advertise on Google and Yahoo. There are other alternatives like Bidvertise.com and Clicksor.com which are cheaper to advertise with.

2) Introduce your site to your family and friends.

3) Write several articles with a link to your website on the resource box and submit them to article directories. You can find a list of article directories by going to Google and entering the search term 'article directory'.

4) Post messages on community forums with a link to your site on the signature of each message posted.