Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online. You do not have to worry about creating a product, delivering the product or customer service. You do not have to do anything but advertise and collect commission checks. This is why affiliate marketing on the web is growing in popularity.

Unfortunately it is not as easy as some people proclaim. You see there is a lot of competition on the web. You have a big number of people trying to sell the same product.

So what you have to do as an affiliate is to stand out from the rest so customers buy through your affiliate link.

Here are 2 ways to help you stand above the crowd and increase your affiliate commissions.

1. Have your own website or blog

Do not just send your traffic straight to the product website. Having your own website will give you credibility in your niche. I would recommend using a blog. Get a webhost with cpanel access and fantastico and you can install a wordpress blog on your site in minutes with a few clicks on your part.

2. Offer a review of the product on your blog or website

Give your honest review of the product. Give the good and the bad. Potential customers know that there will be a downside to every product. Tell them what it is and how this will effect them.

Try and get a copy of the product to review or you might have to buy the product yourself so you can give the product a good solid review.

Do not be afraid to offer a bad review for a product. Tell your potential customers not to waste their hard earned money on a product that is not up to your standards or you feel is not giving you what it states. This is will not make you any money in the short term but your trust with your customers has just been increased and they might buy the next product you promote.

3. Offer a bonus for buying through your affiliate link

Make sure that the bonus you offer coincides with the product you are promoting. This helps them as they can use your bonus with the product they just bought. This gives the product more value.

If you in your review if you talk about a negative aspect of the product, your bonus can be something that will offset this negative.

Give these suggestions a try and watch your affiliate commissions grow.

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Blogging has become very popular on the internet. The search engines love blogs because they are always getting updated fresh content. Well, the successful blogs are always giving the search engines updated fresh content.

You can get a free blog with blogger or wordpress. They will even host your blog for you. But if you really want a successful blog then I suggest that you get your own domain name and hosting service. Be sure to get a hosting service with access to your cpanel and has Fantastico. Click on the Fantastico icon and you can install a wordpress blog on your site in minutes with a few clicks on your part.

Installing wordpress on your own domain gives you total control of your blog. If you have your blog on the wordpress domain your blog can be deleted without notice and then you will have lost everything.

Now that you have a blog, here are 4 elements to a successful blog

1. Get a theme for your wordpress blog.
You can use the generic theme that wordpress supplies or you can get a theme that is designed for your niche. Your blog will look much more professional and people will come back to visit your blog. You can find free wordpress themes by searching in google.

2. Content
You need your blog full of useful unique content. This is the best way to keep your readers interested and keep coming back to your blog. At first, try and put a new post on the blog everyday. After you have a good amount of useful unique content, then you can scale back to 2 or 3 times a week. In your content educate your readers about your niche and find problems that most people in your niche are having. Research the solutions to the problems and post them on your blog.

3. Give away a free report
Have an opt in box and make them give you there name and email address. This way you can start building a subscriber list and you can email them more information about your niche and also tell them about affiliate products they can buy which gives you a commission on each sale.

4. Monetize your blog with Adsense
Google adsense displays ads that are relevant to the content on your blog. This is very important because the visitors to your blog will be interested in the ads that are being displayed. It is a win-win situation for everybody. The visitor clicks on the ad to find the information he/she is looking for and you get a paid for the click.

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If you are just starting out in your internet marketing career and want to start making some income quickly from home, then here are 2 ways to get started fast.

These ideas will not cost you any money but you will have to invest your time to implement these ideas. Yes, you will have to do some work if you want to succeed online.

1. Start a blog

Starting a blog is a very easy thing to accomplish. You can set up a blog for free at blogger.com. Sign up for a free account and follow the simple steps. The steps necessary to set up a blog are very easy to follow and a blog can be set up in minutes.

Once you have your blog set up you can monetize your blog with google adsense ads. To add the google ads to your blog:

1. Click on the layout tab
2. Click the edit button on AdSense Page Element
3. Click on the link to add or get your publisher id
4. Choose the format and colors for your ads
5. Click save

You can click and drag the page elements to rearrange on your blog. For instance you drag the adsense page element above the blog posts if you want your ads ad to appear before each blog post.

The ads that will display will be relevant to the content on your blog. This is important because the probability of a visitor clicking on one of your ads increases because the ad is about content he or she is searching for.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Selling other people's products and getting a commission for each sale you refer.

This is an easy way to start earning money on the internet. To get started with affiliate marketing follow these steps.

1. Create a free account at Clickbank.com

2. Search the marketplace for relevant products that fit the theme of your blog.

3. Add these products to your blog with your affiliate link.

The next step is start generating traffic to your blog so you can make adsense income from visitors clicking on your ads and affiliate commissions by selling other people's products.

I have given you 2 methods that will not cost you any money, only your time to implement the methods. This methods will get you started making your first dollar online.

This two methods are only meant for you to start making your first dollar online. If you intend to make a full time income with adsense and affiliate marketing, then check out this adsense templates package. This package comes complete with 100 adsense templates in profitable niches, video tutorials, free software, ebooks and more to give you the best chance at being successful. Get the full story by visiting: http://www.professionaladsensetemplates.com/

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Google adsense is about placing text ads on your web site. The beauty of adsense is that after you paste the code on your site, google then reads your content and place ads that are relevant to the content and theme of your site. This is important because you now have a much greater chance of an ad being clicked because it is about the subject that the user is searching for. You get paid every time someone clicks on one of those ads. That is it. No selling required. Once they click, you get paid.

Anyone can be an adsense publisher and earn money online. High school kids are earning thousands each month. Housewives, retirees, moms and dads have created full time income by just placing adsense ads on their website or blog.

If you thought that you could not be one of these people, then you are wrong. You just need to know how to get started. Well here is a list of things that you can do to get started with google adsense.

1. Find a niche that you enjoy and have knowledge about. You will be writing articles so having knowledge about the subject will save you time doing research about your niche.

2. Keyword Research - This is very important because the higher in demand the keywords are, the more money you will make per click. Your keyword research will also give you ideas for topics for your articles. You also want to target keywords that are not high in competition. By targeting the lower competition keywords you can get higher search engine rankings more quickly.

3. Write original quality content articles - Using the keywords from your research, write an article that is about 500 words long. By writing your own articles you will avoid being penalized for duplicate content.

4. Design your website - I would suggest that you find a good adsense template package that has all the design and placement of your ads all ready done for you. All you have to do is add your google adsense id number and add your content. Also look for templates that have good graphics, especially the header graphic. A good package will also allow you to edit the pictures as well.

5. Register a domain name. You can register domain names for less than 10.00.

6. Get a web hosting account - Find a reliable web host company.

7. Sign up for a google adsense account - This will only take you a few minutes.

8. Upload your files and start generating traffic to your site.

Google adsense is a win-win situation. A visitor to your site gets the information they are looking for and you as the publisher earn money. So get started right away and start earning your share of the pie with google adsense.

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1) You should make your Adsense ads look as a part of your web page. They shouldn't look like an Ad. People are negative to advertising. They search the internet for content not ads. Especially for Banners - they have a less of 0.5% response. Their days are over. Imagine if you have an Adsense ad looking like the typical Banner with different colors. It will not be profitable.

2) Text ads are better than image ads. Like before, people are more responsive to text than images. In a way it is considered as a part of the online document and is more clickable.

3) No Border ads. One of the best tricks is to erase the borders of Adsense ads and make them, again, having the same color with your website's background.

4) No other advertisements. The first reason is to be legitimate according to Google's Rules and the second more practical reason is that you do not want to distract your visitor's attention and go somewhere else without clicking your Adsense ads.

5) Placement. Even if you have the best Ad, people will not respond if they don't see it instantly. The best place to see the ad is the top of your web page and the next is aside your document's text. Visitors will click it more frequently since it will look like your text.

6) Traffic. Try to use legitimate ways of traffic. Some people use Google Adwords and other Pay-per-click search engines. The problem here is to search very carefully for the right niche and keywords in order to make your campaigns profitable. Other ways are link popularity techniques like link exchange directories, software or even mass blog submission techniques. Don't use link farms and classifieds for that, because the search engine's algorithms are extremely clever and they will ban your listings.

7) Do not rely on one website. Yes, you can make money with one website but try to make as more as possible.

8) Relevant content is King. Articles are one of the best tactics to create huge websites that will be crawled by search engine's robots. Don't forget search engines exist to provide relevant content at first. One excellent resource to automate your article directory procedure is http://www.articleequalizer.com .You can create an article database in minutes which otherwise is time consuming and it would take you a week!

9) Use site maps. Google's site maps visit your site and crawl it much sooner that any other submission process. More information is here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps

10) Relevant ads. It's one of the most important factors for Adsense success. If the internet user can't find a relevant ad in your page, he or she won't click the ad. Would you act differently? So it's critical to create relevant resource for your web page. In order to do that, you must do the following steps.

First the file must be saved with the appropriate name. For example: Golf-Secrets.html if your article is about golf. So the webpage will be: http://www.yoursitesname.com/Golf-Secrets.html

Second thing you must change is your title tag. For example: Golf-Secrets article

Third is the heading. The first sentence must have this heading: 12 Golf secrets
About the Author

Christos Varsamis is a Business writer, creator and owner of the http://www.settinglifegoals.com & http://www.fastprofitbiz.com Sign for your 7 day FREE e-course " How to TRACE a Legitimate business Opportunity."

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They are calling him the million dollar man. Jason Calacanis recently revealed in his blog that he is on track to earn a million dollars from AdSense over the year ahead.

And if that number doesn’t wake you up and have you sitting on the edge of your seat, consider for a moment that he reached this level in less than a year. His company only started using AdSense in September 2004.

Calacanis runs Weblogs Inc., a network dedicated to creating trade weblogs across niche industries. And he’s quickly proven that AdSense is a credible advertising partner.

As their network has grown, so has their AdSense revenue. In January 2005 they earned an average of $580 per day. In March it was $737. In May it was $1,585. One day in July, just before he made the blog entry referred to above, they earned $2,335. Remember that is just for one day. If they can take that daily average to $2,740 they’ll be earning a rate of $1 million for a year. And Calacanis predicts that reaching daily earnings of $3,000 or even $5,000 is quite achievable.

That’s quite an achievement. Keep in mind that Calacanis has 103 bloggers on the payroll and nine staffers. Even so, many webmasters would give an arm or a leg to have even a third of that.

Google’s AdSense has been revolutionary. It has become firmly established as the darling of the online advertising industry. Although rumors are heard of major competitors launching a similar service, AdSense’s premier position seems secure for now.

In essence, AdSense has made it possible for almost anyone with a web site or blog to earn some revenue from advertising, without having to employ sales people or spend precious time searching for advertisers.

AdSense works like this. Webmasters sign up for an account in just a few minutes. They receive a small snippet of code to include on their web pages. Google will then automatically serve advertisements that are relevant to the content on the webmaster's pages. When someone visits the webmaster's site and clicks on one of Google's AdSense advertisements, the webmaster earns a fee. Advertisers can pay anywhere from five cents to a hundred dollars per click, and the webmaster receives a percentage of that fee.

Many webmasters are content with earning five to ten dollars from AdSense to cover the cost of web hosting. But many, unsurprising, have higher ambitions. At a popular WebmasterWorld forum, participants share tips and encouragement on reaching a goal of $300 per day from AdSense. So it is no wonder that Calacanis created quite a buzz when he made his million dollar blog entry.

Google have proven once again that they excel at designing innovative Internet services. If you are in the web industry and have not yet used AdSense, then perhaps you should try it out. Or if you are already using it, perhaps Calacanis’ impressive results will encourage you to track the performance of your AdSense units more closely, fine tune their positions and formats, and take your earnings to a new level.

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There are hundreds of thousands of web templates out there, but not all of them make for good Adsense templates. As the popularity of Google's Adsense program grew, many web designers started creating templates that allow for easy contextual ad integration. Making money online is now a possibility and you can win cash in no time with Adsense, once your business is set up. And there's really not a lot that you need to work from home using Adsense. Here are a few tips you should consider when purchasing an Adsense website template:

* the best Google Adsense templates are the simple ones. Forget Flash animations and complex menus and go for clear structures and logical link placements.
* Don't choose flashy graphics and don't use a lot of photographs, as these divert the visitor's attention from the ads.
* The best places to ad your contextual ads are the top of the site, below the banner, the left side menu and the center of the site. Your chosen Google Adsense template should allow for easy ad integration in these areas.
* Personalize your Adsense templates if you wish, but this is not going to make you more online cash. The best way to increase your Adsense revenue is to experiment with ad placement and colors until you see the best CTRs.
* You may think that, out of all work from home jobs and online job opportunities, Google Adsense is the less complicated one - true, but only after you manage to understand all the subtleties behind the system. This is why you should go with a Google Adsense template that plays by the rules and is not too complex or extravagant - you can develop funkier sites in the future, but for now stick with a simple hierarchy and logical structure.

Adsense ready website information

purchasing an Adsense ready website is a good idea, especially if you don't know much about web development, but there are a few things to take care of. There are basically two types of Adsense ready websites - the duplicate content websites which get sold over and over and custom-made, original Adsense ready websites. Let's have a look at both of them:

Recycled Google Adsense ready website - let's call them recycled because they get used over and over and over. You can purchase 10, 50 or 150 websites, each with hundreds of pages, for less than $100! Of course, these websites get sold, in their exact same form, to hundreds or thousands of other people. While these Google Adsense ready website offers are great because they offer a good structure and are designed to allow for easy and efficient contextual ad integration, they also rank lower in the search engine results.

This is because they have duplicate content - hundreds of people have the same site as you, only hosted on a different server and under a different domain name. However, what you loose in search engine rankings you make up in structure and content quality. And with a few dozen Google Adsense ready websites like these, you only need to handle some high quality link exchanges, or get visitors on your sites through the other program offered by Google to advertisers - Adwords.

Unique content Adsense ready websites are the other option. You will most likely pay a few hundred dollars for a unique website with 15-25 pages of original content. Instead of a hundred duplicate content websites you will have just one original website.

It's hard to say which option will allow you to earn more from your online business, but it's clear that your unique content website will outrank duplicate content in the search engines. An original Adsense ready website offers a more stable income level, and you can grow it into a top ranking site in time. Your online earning will depend on numerous factors, but one thing is for sure - the search engines will love your site for bringing new content to the Internet and will reward you by ranking it higher.


For more useful tips & hints, please browse for more information at our website: -
www.guardadsense.com
www.adsense.reprintarticlesite.com

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I’ve been reading a few forums and blogs about Google Adsense tips lately, and thought it would be helpful to consolidate as many as possible in one place without the comments. I’ve also thrown in a few tips of my own. We start out with some of the basic general stuff and move to the more specific topics later on.

Build an Empire?

When you’re deciding to become a website publisher you will fall into one of two broad categories:

• Publish 100 websites that each earn $1 a day profit
• Publish 1 website that earns $100 a day profit

The reality of it is, most people end up somewhere in between. Having 100 websites leaves you with maintenance, management and content issues. Having one website leaves you open to all sort of fluctuations (search engines algorithm’s, market trends, etc). You can adapt your plan on the way, but you’ll have an easier time if you start out going in the direction of where you want to end up.

General or Niche

You can build your website around general topics or niche ones. Generally speaking niche websites work better with adsense. First off the ad targeting is much better. Secondly as you have a narrow focus your writing naturally becomes more expert in nature. Hopefully this makes you more authority in your field.

If this is your first try at building an adsense website, make it about something you enjoy. It will make the process much easier and less painful to accomplish. You should however make sure that your topic has enough of an ad inventory and the payout is at a level you are comfortable with. You may love medieval folk dancing, but the pool of advertisers for that subject is very small (in fact it’s currently zero).

Once you’ve gotten the hang of how Adsense works on a website, you are going to want to dabble in some high paying keywords, you may even be tempted to buy a high paying keyword list. This does come with some dangers. First off the level of fraud is much higher on the big money terms. Secondly there is a distortion of the supply and demand relationship for these terms. Everyone wants ads on their website that make $35 or more a click, however the number of advertisers who are willing to pay that much is pretty limited. Additionally the competition for that traffic is going to be stiff. So, don’t try to run with the big dogs if you can’t keep up. If you have to ask if you’re a big dog, then chances are, you’re not. I have used a high dollar keywords report from cashkeywords.com and was pleased with my results (see cash keywords free offer recap).

New Sites, Files and Maintenance

When you’re building a new site don’t put adsense on it until it’s finished. In fact I’d go even farther and say don’t put adsense on it until you have built inbound links and started getting traffic. If you put up a website with “lorem ipsum” dummy or placeholder text, your adsense ads will almost certainly be off topic. This is often true for new files on existing websites, especially if the topic is new or different. It may take days or weeks for google’s media bot to come back to your page and get the ads properly targeted. TIP: If you start getting lots of traffic from a variety of IP’s you will speed this process up dramatically.

I like to build my sites using include files. I put the header, footer and navigation in common files. It makes it much easier to maintain and manage. I also like to put my adsense code in include files. If I want/need to change my adsense code, it’s only one file I have to work with. TIP: I also use programming to turn the adsense on or off. I can change one global variable to true or false and my adsense ads will appear or disappear.

Managing URL’s and channels

Adsense channels is one area where it’s really easy to go overboard with stats. You can set up URL channels to compare how one website is doing to another. You can also set up sub channels for each URL. If you wanted to you do something channels like this:

• domain1.com - 728 banner
• domain1.com - 336 block
• domain1.com - text link
• domain2.com - 728 banner
• domain2.com - image banner
• domain2.com - 336 block
• domain3.com - 300 block

While this is great for testing and knowing who clicks where and why, it makes your reporting a little wonky. Your total number will always be correct but when you look at your reports with a channel break down things will get displayed multiple times and not add up to correct total. Makes things pretty confusing, so decide if you really need/want that level of reporting detail. TIP: At the very least you want to know what URL is generating the income so be sure to enter distinct URL channels.

Site Design and Integration

Once you know you are going to put adsense on your website you’re going to have to consider where to put it. If this is new site it’s easier, if it’s an existing site it’s more difficult. While there are some people who will be able to do it, in most cases I’d say if you just slap the adsense code in, you’ll end up with a frankensite monster (props to Tedster of WMW for the buzzword). While every website is different, Google has published some heat maps showing the optimal locations. No surprise that the best spots are middle of the page and left hand side. Now I’ve done really well by placing it on the right, but you should know why you’re doing it that way before hand, and be prepared to change it if it doesn’t work out.

Google has also has published a list of the highest performing ad sizes:

• 336×280 large rectangle
• 300×250 inline rectangle
• 160×600 wide skyscraper

From the sites that I run, I do really well with the 336 rectangle and 160 skyscraper. My next best performing ad size is the 728 leaderboard, I don’t really use the 300 inline rectangle too often. So really it depends on how well you integrate these into your site. Placement can have a dramatic effect on performance. TIP: When working on a new site or new layout you may want to give each location it’s own channel for a little while until you understand the users behavior.

Another ‘trick’ that can increase your CTR is by blending your adsense into your body copy. For example if your body copy is black, remove the adsense border and make the title, text, and URL black.TIP: Try changing all of your page hyperlinks to a high contrast color (like dark red or a bold blue) then change the adsense title to the same color.

The one area where I’ve found blended ads don’t perform as well is forums, especially ones with a high volume of repeat members. Regular visitors develop banner blindness pretty quickly. One ‘trick’ to keep the ads from being ignored is to randomize the color and even the placement. As with any of the decisions about location, placement and color it’s a trade off. How much do you emphasize the ads without annoying your visitors. Remember it’s better to have a 1% CTR with 500 regular visitors as opposed to a 5% CTR with 50 visitors. TIP: For forums try placing the adsense ads directly above or below the the first forum thread.

Using Images

One of the latest ’secrets’ to make the rounds is using images placed directly above or below an adsense leaderboard. This has been used for a while but came out in a digital point forum thread where a member talked about quadrupling their CTR. Basically you set up the adsense code in a table with four images that line up directly with the ads. Whether or not this is deceptive is fuzzy and very subjective. Obviously four blinking arrows would be ‘enticing people to click’ and be against the adsense TOS. However placing pictures of 4 laptops over laptops ads isn’t, so use your best judgment here and look at it from the advertiser or Google’s perspective. If you have a question as to your implementation being ‘over the line’ write to adsense and ask them to take a look.

As far as using the images, I’ve done it and can tell you it definitely works. You get the best results when the images ‘complete the story the ads are telling’. For example if you have ads about apple pies, use pictures of freshly baked apple pies, instead of granny smith, Macintosh, pink lady, and braeburn apples. TIP: Don’t limit yourself to using images only on that size ad unit, it works just as well with the other sizes, like the 336 rectangle.

Added:
I got a little criticizm for this and rightly so, as I wasn’t specific as I could have been. Do not use very identifiable brand name or products for your images. Use generic non-specific stock images whenever possible and appropriate.

Multiple Ad Units

Another way to increase ad revenue is to use multiple ad units. According to Google’s TOS you are allowed to post up to three ad units per page. Similar to standard search results the highest paying ad units will be served first and the lowest being served last. If there is enough of an ad inventory, place all three ad units. However you should pay attention to the payouts. Current assumption is you get 60% of the revenue (on a $0.05 click you get $0.03). So if a click from the third ad unit is only paying between 3 to 5 cents you may want to omit it from your page. This is one are where giving your ad units channels does have value. If one ad unit is getting a higher percentage of click throughs you’ll want to make sure the highest paying ads are being served there. TIP:Use CSS positioning to get your highest paying ads serving in the location with the highest CTR.

Adsense in RSS

With the growth of blogs and RSS feeds you’re starting to see adsense included in the feeds now. IMHO this doesn’t work, and here’s why:

• You only get to place one ad unit.
• You have no control over finding the ’sweet spot’ for the ad unit.
• The ads are usually poorly targeted (this is getting better).
• People develop ‘banner blindness’.

I know people like being able to read full postings in their feed reader, and there are at least a dozen other reasons for full posts from pleasing your users to mobile offline computing, all of which are completely valid. However if your website depends on generating adsense revenue to survive, then bring them to the site and show them the ads there.

Affiliate Sites

Placing Adsense on affiliate sites is tricky. Are you giving up a $10, $20, or $30 sale for a $1 click? This is something you have to test on your own to figure out. If you aren’t converting now it’s definitely worth a try. I like to use adsense on my article pages. For example let’s say you had an affiliate website where you sold shoes. You’re going to need some related articles to ‘flesh out’ the site. Things like ‘getting a shoe shine’ or ‘finding a shoe repair shop’ these are excellent spots for adsense. While you won’t get rich, they will usually provide a small steady income and cover things like hosting costs.TIP: If you find you have pages getting more than 50 clicks per month add more pages about this topic, and link the pages together. Mine you logs for the search terms used.

PPC Arbitrage

This is a dicey subject so I’m going to steer clear of precise examples. Basically you bid on low volume uber niche terms at a very low cost. You set up landing page that contains high payout ads for the related general topic. You are looking for terms with a large gap between the price you are bidding on adwords and the price you are getting on Adsense. If you pay $0.10 a click and get $1.00 a click you make $0.90 each click. To get your adsense ad approved you will need to ‘add some value’ along the way. You can make a killing or get taken to the cleaners with this one, so make sure you know what you are doing before you try it.

Have any other adsense tips, tricks or secrets? Drop me an email and let me know, I’ll give you credit.

Added
728 leaderboard works very well if it is just above the end of the
“above the fold” area on what would be considered your viewers average
resolution/browser window size if there are few other enticing links
above the fold. Makes for an interesting layout but if you’re building
a site for AdSense it may be worth it. We consistently receive very
high CTRs from doing this.

Try to build sites that allow you to quickly try any and all of
those locations outlined in the heatmap guide or at least allow you a
wide degree of freedom to easily change ad/content locations.

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Google just released a Newbie Central for their AdSense program, those ads webmasters can include on their site to earn money for every click on the ad from a visitor (if you're using the program, part of the advertiser budget will go to you, and the other part to Google). I wanted to add some tips from my own experience:

1. Ads can work well in-between other stuff. On a games site of mine, some of the games don't contain ads next to the game area; the AdSense ad will only be shown in-between game rounds. This is the time the visitor is not concentrating on performing a task but might take a small break, and be open to the option of visiting new sites.

2. Put too much emphasis on AdSense and your site may be linked to less. The more available space you dedicate to AdSense on your site, and the less you differentiate between ads and content in your design, the more money you earn with the program, right? Not quite. While pushing the AdSense may result in short-term gains, it might also convince some visitors that the site is too crowded to be worth visiting again. And some of those visitors may also be bloggers or other people who might otherwise help to promote your site with links to it. And the less your site gets linked to, the less traffic it gets, meaning AdSense revenues may go down in the long term.

3. Even if you get huge traffic, the AdSense income from the site is more dependent on the site type and audience. Google targets AdSense ads automatically to the site content. Or at least, it does so ideally – but some types of content fare better than others with this targeting. I noticed for instance that AdSense does better on a games site than on a technology blog. I also heard people say that AdSense does quite good on product oriented blogs; say, one post solely about the iPod; another post solely about Gadget XYZ, and so on.

4. Image ads can be relevant and work for you, but they might also apall some visitors. Google's AdSense program gives you the option to choose between a couple of different ad formats. Two main groups are text ads vs text & image ads. When you choose the latter, Google will deliver what they deem works best for your content (or so one would hope, and it would be in Google's best self-interest to serve you the best possible ad, it seems).
   
   However, Google doesn't really know your layout preferences, and they don't really understand when your audience thinks ads are "too much"; and considering image ads include Flash animations (which you can't disable, once you go for image ads), Flash animations may well push some people away. One thing you can do is to only show image ads in areas where they don't disturb the content, e.g. at the end of posts. Also, you might want to listen to visitor feedback on the ads being served; I received emails before that the blinking ad on this or that site made a person want to leave the site, at which point I blocked the specific advertiser via the AdSense Setup -> Competitive Ad Filter option.

5. When it comes to context sensitive targeting, you can increase or lower the importance of certain parts of your page. To help Google find a matching ad for your content, you can use the HTML comment syntax by encapsulating more important parts with
   
   

   
   ... your important site content here ...
   .

   Or, to lower the importance of a section, use:
   
   

   
   ... your not so important site content here ...
   

   (Google notes that it may take up to 2 weeks for this change to your site will be taken into account by the AdSense.)
   
   What if your site doesn't have any good matchable content to begin with, though? Say, the page just includes an image. Well, for the reasons of search engine optimization but also ad optimization you might want to consider using at least a descriptive title, an explanatory footer containing the important keywords or keyphrases (the kind of footer that actually helps the human visitor by explaining what the page is about). In the case of image content, reasonable alt and title attribute texts should be used as well.*
   
   *Whatever you do, don't resort to "keyword-stuffing" as it doesn't help your visitors and may get your page ranked lower in search engines.

6. Be aware of risks when you change ad layouts too much. I once had a system on the server to randomly differ between various AdSense layouts on the same page. Doing so I was hoping to add some good variety to keep the ads at least somewhat interesting and notable. Shortly after I stopped doing so and simply included a rather big static area for the AdSense to "do what it wants," the AdSense revenues for that site increased. Now, I don't know if this was a coincidence of some sorts, as revenues often go down or up even when you don't do anything, but it might well have been that there was a connection between adding too much homemade randomization, and lowered revenues.
   
   At another time, during the redesign of this blog, I switched from one ad format to another for the end-of-posts AdSense ad space. This, combined with perhaps other layout changes, suddenly cut the ad revenues in half for the blog. It took me some time to realize that I had some ad channels* set up for the specific old layout size, and by changing this I must have kicked out all those advertisers who were pushing their ads through the channel.
   
   *This setting can be found at AdSense Setup -> Channels.

7. Use competing ad systems when AdSense doesn't seem to work for a site. At CoverBrowser.com, which shows galleries of comic and book covers and so on, I tried including AdSense ads in "non-annoying" places in the layout (including trying to use AdSense affiliate links via AdSense Setup -> Referrals), but this didn't seem to work at all. However I then tried "affiliating" the "buy" link below individual covers, utilizing the eBay affiliate commission system offered by AuctionAds.com*. (Disclosure: Patrick Gavin, co-owner of AuctionAds, paid me for consulting before on other projects, like Sketchcast.com.) This worked a lot better, and as it was simply connected to an existing site feature, it also didn't add clutter.
   
   A good start to find other ad programs is to search for adsense alternatives on Google... you will see a lot of lists which are dedicated to competitors. (Note that some of these competitors may be US-only.) You may also want to join an ad or blog network like The Deck, Federated Media (disclosure: I was part of Federated Media before), or 9 Rules. Before joining such a network – which might require you to show them your traffic stats and so on – check if their typical ads and campaigns fit with your site layout and your general ad type preferences.
   
   *CommissionJunction also offers an eBay affiliate system but CommissionJunction has really low usability, in my opinion; setting it up is confusing.

8. Sometimes you may get a sudden increase in traffic, hence ad clicks, but you can't locate the source of the traffic. I'm using Google Analytics to track my sites, though AdSense is also a good first indicator of traffic explosions... because it will show the combined page views of all your sites (provided you include AdSense on all of them), as opposed to Google Analytics, where you need to check site by site individually.
   
   However, sometimes even with Google Analytics, you won't be able to locate the source of your traffic because there's no specific new popular referrer being shown (a referrer is the site linking to your site, provided people click on that link). In these cases, it may well be that your site has been discussed in a TV show or similar, as the show won't "link" to you (but audiences will be entering your domain manually into the browser when they like what the saw on TV). When you feel that there has been a traffic explosion sometimes you may get additional email feedback in regards to your site, and it makes sense for you to ask your visitor: where did you first find out about the site? Maybe the can let you know about the name of the TV show, or magazine, or other "offline" source responsible for the peak. (I sometimes sent pointers to the BBC Click show for instance, with partly enormous effect.)

9. Consider using AdSense even when the page doesn't get any traffic yet. Who knows, some day the traffic suddenly explodes, and you might not realize fast enough and thus miss out on the action (as sometimes, traffic goes as fast as it comes).
   
   On the other hand, reversely I would suggest to never do a site just to make ad money with it. That kind of motivation may lead to spammy sites that don't help anyone really. (If a project is great, it's great even if it doesn't make any money.)

10. Making money with AdSense takes time. In my experience, it may take many months to years for a site to gain enough traffic to make OK money through AdSense... if ever. I have almost never experienced any site making quick and easy money with AdSense (though you may be getting quicker results than me of course, as it depends on so many variables!).
    I think for any site getting a couple of thousands of visitors a day, you might want to start playing around with AdSense to see where it takes you (if you didn't already include AdSense anyway just to see what happens, and following up on tip #9). As you are paid in US-$, the actual benefit the ad revenue will bring depends on your local costs of living as well (you might even ponder moving or going on an extended holiday trip if your local costs of living are too high for your site revenues to cover).

PS: What are your AdSense tips?

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Google AdSense is an advertising program that was launched in the middle of 2003 by Google, the popular search engine. Google acts as an intermediary between a vast number of advertisers and an equally impressive number of website owners.

Advertisers sign up with Google and create text ads that they would like to be displayed. Google displays these ads on the results pages of searches that people conduct from Google.com. The Google AdSense program allows these advertisements to show up on pages all over the internet. To see some of the ads themselves, take a look at the sidebar on this page. The webmaster simply places a special code in their page and Google AdSense takes care of the rest. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the system is that robots (specialized computer programs that scan internet pages) analyzes pages that ads will be placed on to determine which ads are most relevant to the page's content.

The relevancy of ads placed by AdSense varies on all sorts of criteria, but most ads are usually very relevant to the page on which the ad is displayed. For example, the ads on this page should be related to the internet, advertising, and/or the Google AdSense program itself.

Advertisers pay Google a certain amount for each time one of their ads are clicked. Google keeps a portion of this payment and passes on the rest to the owner of the website itself. Page views of the advertisements are irrelevant in terms of generating revenue in the program - commissions are only generated when internet users actually click on the ads themselves.

Google AdSense checks are sent out on a monthly basis. Many webmasters wait in anticipation of their checks since AdSense provides them a simple way to recoup some of the losses associated with posting websites on the internet. In some cases, webmasters can even make a profit using Google AdSense.

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What is AdSense?

Google.com earns most of its revenue by allowing other website owners to advertise on their search result pages. All this is managed through a program they call AdWords.

Now you can earn a share of the revenue that Google earns from AdWords by displaying these same text ads on your site. In other words, you're helping Google advertise and they pay you a percentage of what they earn.

This program is called AdSense.

Every website owner should at least consider the program. Even if your site is just for information purposes, you can still participate and make decent money with AdSense -- or at least enough to fund your website.

So if you are one of those people that don't like the idea of paying for a site, this is an excellent way to earn your money back and then some.

How AdSense Works

Don't like to read a lot of text? Watch my 4-minute video on how AdSense works.

"Is Google Smart?"

I know what you're probably thinking...

"What's the catch here? Why would Google just give away money advertisers are paying them?"

The answer...

Because Google is very smart.

If you understand how AdSense works, you will see that it's a win-win situation for everyone involved, and the bottom line benefits Google. Let me explain...

Since the advertiser's ads are now being displayed on more web sites all over the internet (instead of just Google's site), they are getting much more exposure. More exposure means more clicks and even more traffic for their site over a shorter period of time.

This is good news for Google because the more traffic the advertisers receive, the faster their advertising funds are used up.

Remember, they get charged every time their site gets a visit; and of course, it is Google's hope that they'll continue to keep funneling more money into their account for more ad exposure.

What an ingenious way for Google to increase the amount of money they earn from advertisers while building loyalty with website owners (like us) who are now getting paid to help them advertise.

Of course, I'd expect nothing less from the most popular search engine on the web. :)

My Personal AdSense Story

I have been receiving monthly checks from Google since 2003, and I've read numerous success stories of websites earning 5 digit incomes per month with AdSense.

Now, I will admit, a 5-digit commission in a single month is probably not the norm for most participants.

I promote AdSense on three of my websites and my checks have been as high as $4,500.

The more information you have, the greater chance you have of attracting free search engine traffic. That's why it's so very important you choose a topic you have an interest in so you can keep building and building.

My checks weren't always that large. I think my first month's earnings in 2003 totaled less than $20. However, I kept getting more and more search engine traffic by adding more content and the checks slowly began to increase. I had no idea it would grow to anything like this.

"How Much Can I Earn With AdSense?"

Google does not disclose exactly how much you'll earn per ad that is clicked.

The commission you receive per click depends on how much advertisers are paying Google for the particular ad. You will earn a share of that amount. I've heard of earnings anywhere from 2 cents to $15 per click.

So it is logical to believe that keyword phrases like debt free, employment, make money, mp3, sex, etc. will earn you more per click since these are highly competitive keywords that are searched for quite a bit on the web.

Advertisers generally pay more for popular terms because they are searched for more.

Even though Google will not reveal how much you are earning for each ad that is clicked from your site, you can still login to your account at any time and see the total amount of revenue you've generated that day, week, month, year, etc.

For example, if you see that you've made $12.60 today from 9 clicks then you can calculate that your average click-thru commission was $1.40 per click. That's as detailed as their stats will get. Also remember, that's only an average. You won't know how much each specific ad brought in.

The amount you'll earn also depends largely on the amount of targeted traffic you receive to your own site, how well the ads match your audience's interests, the placement of the ads on your pages, and of course the amount you receive per click.

Ideally, you should create a site on a topic you know a lot about. That way you'll have a much easier time creating a generous amount of content on that subject.

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