Chapter 1 Adsense Money
AdSense is Google’s program which allows you to sell space on your website to host other people’s advertisements. Hosting AdSense ads on your website or blog is completely 100% free to you as the host and a great way to earn some money.
How do you earn money with Google’s AdSense? Simple, every time someone clicks on an AdSense ad on your blog Google pays you. Someone clicking on your ad is called “click through.” Your visitor is clicking through your webpage to another webpage via the AdSense link on your website.
Google pays you for these click through visitors because their advertising has successfully reached a visitor on your blog. You get paid because you agreed to host the ads and you provided good content which got a targeted ad and a resulting click on that ad.
AdSense is a very popular way to monetize a blog because it is simple to set- up and use, especially on a blog which is hosted by Blogger. Why? The answer to that is simple; Google owns both Blogger and AdSense so the two have been programmed to work very well together. Google wants you to host their AdSense ads on your blog so they have made it very easy for you to ad the ad blocks, and has made it simple to make them look great and blend in with the theme of your blog as well. They understand this makes for a higher click through ratio and want to help work with you to earn as much revenue for both of you as possible.
AdSense is also very popular because it makes you money without you having to go out and find your own advertisers for your site. Imagine all of the work you would have to go through to find other businesses to advertise their products that would interest your specific visitors on your website.
Rather than you having to go out and find other companies to advertise on your website Google brings them there for you to advertise on your site. This saves you loads of time and has the potential to make you loads of cash in the process. It also brings your blog some seriously high quality advertisers. Most all of the biggest companies in the world advertise through Google!
AdSense is intuitive, meaning that it reads your website or blog and then chooses ads which are relevant to the content it has found. This means that if you have a blog on cats, then AdSense will not put ads about working at home on your blog. The AdSense ads are great because they will be relevant to your topic and content which means you have a better chance of your readers clicking on them.
How AdSense works is that if, for example, you have a blog about dogs, AdSense will place ads for things like pet supplies, dog training and other relevant goods and services likely to get the visitors of your blog to click on them. You will not see ads on a dog themed website for irrelevant things like weight loss products or make tons of money at home stuffing envelopes schemes. The ads will fit the topics you are writing about.
What additionally makes AdSense ads great is that they can be made to blend in with the theme and look of your website or blog. This makes them less “ad” looking and they genuinely look like a totally natural part of your blog. While visitors to your website or blog don’t want to see blatant advertisements, they see the AdSense ads more as a part of your content or other links. This is good for two reasons. Number one, you do not want to appear to be trying to make money from your readers of your blog. Number two, your blog does not end up cluttered looking with a bunch of very obvious looking advertisements. You do not want your visitors to see a bunch of billboard type ads but rather ads which blend in with both your blogs colors and topic. AdSense does this very well and by using Blogger to host your blog the process is very simple.
AdSense does not allow you to select the specific ads which appear on your site, but it does an amazing job of keeping them in line with the content on your site. AdSense also allows you to exclude ads from your direct competitors on your website if for some reason they happen to appear on your site. If for example you have a blog on which you sell your own goat cheese, the last thing you want in advertising is your competitor who also sells goat cheese coming up on the ads. Google understands this and allows you to easily exclude those ads from your AdSense ads. This is done on the AdSense console and we will cover that later in this eBook.
How Does AdSense Know What Ads to Send?
The AdSense engine at Google sends its bot, called Googlebot, out to visit your site on a regular basis to examine your pages. This bot is simply a program which reads your pages. Googlebot looks at your key words, the structure and formatting on your web pages, the native language of your site, etc… Using the information gathered by the Googlebot, Google then sends AdSense ads to your site which are the most likely to entice your visitors to click on them.
The Googlebot will even tell AdSense if your blog is in a language other than English, so that your ads come to you in the language of your site. It wouldn’t be very good to see English ads on a Spanish site or vice versa.
AdSense is available in many languages and regions around the world. And, the ads you will receive on your blog will be from your own region and in your native language.
The longer your website is up, and the more you are scanned by the Googlebot, the more tightly matched the ads become to your content. At first the bot might misunderstand the meaning of your blog if you have not done a great job of using lots of relevant keywords. If you have a blog about coffee yet you talk a lot about your children in your blog message posts, then you might end up with ads which would interest readers of a children’s blog. If you want to monetize your blog it is important to stay on topic, most of the time, so that the Googlebot reads your blog and serves up the ads which you want to show up on your site.
Knowing what standards Google is looking for on your website with their Googlebot, and keeping your blog to be compliant with those standards, makes AdSense work it’s best for you. For some unknown reason AdSense prefers pages with lots of text and not too many graphics. Googlebot also sees larger or bold text as having more importance than regular text. This means that posting large and bold key words can help AdSense zero in on the subject of your blog better. It also means that you will want to keep the photos and graphics to a minimum and make sure you stay on topic a large percentage of the time. If you want to have a blog with a lot of photos you might consider starting a second blog and hosting them all there and then link the two blogs together.
One valuable tip for all bloggers is to make sure you start all of your blog posts with a large, bold, title at the beginning of the text section of each blog message post. It is very quick and simple to do this and yet it is very effective with AdSense. If your blog is about frogs and you mention frogs in your title and then again as a bold title at the beginning of your blog message post, the Googlebot can better understand that your blog is about frogs. Taking the time to do this simple thing will insure that the Googlebot understands more quickly what your blog is about and serves you up relevant AdSense ads. It also looks natural to your readers and isn’t distracting to them. It is also less time consuming than dealing with special tag words or any other search engine games bloggers play.
Another good tip with AdSense is to make sure you use your topic’s keywords often in your blog post titles, and use them again within the content of your posts as well. For example, if you have a blog about chickens you will want to make sure your post titles mention the word “chicken” in them. You will also want to make sure you mention chickens, eggs, and other related words as much as possible within your posted messages. The more you can post relevant titles and content loaded with keywords, the better AdSense will work for you and send you relevant ads. You have a much higher click through rate for ads which are relevant to the topic of your blog. Think about the times you have clicked on the Google AdSense ads on a website you were visiting. Generally speaking, was it for something related to the topic you were already reading about? Of course it was.
However, all of that being said, you do not want to overload your posted messages with keywords. Your reader wants to know that you publish your blog for them to read, not to make money from them. By posting a sentence which reads; “the chickens in my chicken coop are working on having more chickens in the spring...” looks like a sentence I tried to use the word “chicken” in as much as possible. There is definitely a balance to be struck between pleasing your readers and pleasing the Googlebot who serves your AdSense ads on your website. Instead of stuffing in those keywords try making more sentences or using them in the title and adding a bit more text to your message posts.
You also do not want it to appear that you set-up your blog with a bunch of keywords simply for AdSense. You also do not want to copy content from free sites like wikipedia and then paste them into your blog. These blogs are called splogs (short for spam blogs) and doing this can get you kicked-off of AdSense and Blogger as well. You need a blog with good original content, not just a bunch of keywords. By creating a splog you can get a high search engine ranking temporarily but why would readers want to visit or return to your blog if all it offers them is some keyword garbage and ads to click on?
It can take a bit of time for the Googlebot to visit your website and determine what its main topic is. If your website is new to AdSense, Google will not guess about your topic, it will simply place ads on your blog for charities or public service announcements as to not waste the advertising dollars of its AdWord clients. This is good for you the blogger as well. The last thing you want to do is to see ads on your blog which have nothing to do with its topic. By putting up the neutral ads Google has solved this problem.
Where do the Ads Come From?
It is logical that at this point you might be wondering where the advertisements Google puts on your site come from. Google has another program called AdWords where businesses and individuals can pay to advertise their websites via AdSense. These companies and individuals are assured by doing this that the websites their advertisements end up on will be relevant to the goods and services which they want to sell. Just as AdSense saves you time in looking for advertisers for your site, AdWords saves a lot of time, energy and money for those businesses who want to advertise on relevant sites without having to go out themselves and search for the sites to host their ads.
Using the AdWords program, businesses and individuals buy AdSense advertisements in large blocks by bidding on them. Generally a business will pay for 500-1000 ads at a time. Based on their specified keywords, a business allows AdSense to put their ads on sites which would likely interest people who would be their potential customers.
For the example above of the chicken blog, if you were a hatchery, or a supplier of chicken accessories, then you would want ads placed on blogs such as the above one for chickens. This is exactly what AdWords and AdSense do. And, they do it very well for both the advertiser and the host of the ads. The hatchery wants to find chicken lovers and the blog about chickens is the place it can easily find them. The blog wants ads which will appeal to chicken lovers, and the hatchery is one of those ads.
Just as AdSense can be a good way to make money from advertising, AdWords can be a good way to advertise your business or even your own blog! If you are looking at driving targeted traffic to a website what better way than to use AdWords where it will place ads on similar websites to yours? There simply is no easier way. If you have a blog on a unique topic and are struggling to bring it traffic, you can buy AdWords advertising and your blog link will show up on similar sites to yours, and this will bring you added traffic. From this added traffic you will get more clicks on your AdSense ads and will likely make more money from those than you paid to advertise with AdWords.
Using AdSense for Monetization
Many websites and blogs use AdSense to monetize their sites. AdSense is good for monetization because it tailors the ads to your site content. AdSense also allows you to sell space on your site by setting it up once and then not having think much about it ever again, other than tweaking a bit the location and side of the AdSense ad blocks themselves on your site. Passive income is always the best form of income to have because it frees you up to be working on other things and sits there in the background making you money.
If you spend a bit of time placing the AdSense ad boxes on your site when you build it, and then keep your titles and content inline with the topic of your blog, you can make money with AdSense without much further thought. AdSense is a great source of passive income. Passive income is very important and valuable. Passive income is money which you receive without having to do daily work for it. It is simply something you set-up once and then sit back and collect your money from it over time.
One way to publish a successful monetized blog is to find a blog topic which is fairly unique. Find a unique topic means you do not have a lot of websites to compete with in the search engines. By doing this you can generate a lot of natural visitors through search engine listings and then from those visitors a lot of clicks on your AdSense ads as well.
There are entire books written on how to find “the” topic to publish the best monetized blog. However, the easiest way is to simply search for topics that interest you and see how many page hits sites like Google return; the lower the number, the better the topic. Understand however, that everything you search will have a ton of hits. Any search with results lower than about a two million is probably a great option for a blog topic. Any search over about ten million is probably not the best topic to choose.
Trying to get good search engine rankings with a topic like chickens is much easier than trying to get a high ranking with a topic like computers. With a topic of computers there are literally millions of websites; some are very large sites, dedicated to the topic. All of whom you will have to compete with for rankings! Why try and compete with IBM and Dell when you can simply find something easier to blog on? It just doesn’t make sense to try. Stick to the lesser keywords and you will see better traffic and AdSense income.
Rules of AdSense
When you sign up for Google’s AdSense, you will be asked to agree to their “Terms of Service” agreement. This is one agreement which you should read and make sure you fully understand everything on it.
Google has very specific rules as to what you can and cannot do with their AdSense ads. And Google is very serious about their rules. For instance you are prohibited from asking your readers to click on the AdSense links. You are totally prohibited from clicking on the links on your own sites. You are also prohibited from putting Google AdSense links in pop-ups, pop-unders, or websites with any type of pornographic material. You are only permitted three AdSense boxes per website page. By understanding the terms of the AdSense agreement it will go a long way towards helping you to stay both ethical and profitable with their program. Ignoring their terms of service will only cause you problems and likely get you kicked off of the program forever.
Google tracks websites which are created with a bunch of junk content specifically to get AdSense clicks. Google does not like splogs and goes after them with a vengeance even encouraging other bloggers to report them when they find them online. These sites generally copy content from other websites or free content sites, and then post it on their site solely for AdSense revenue. This is against Google’s policy and they will pull their ads from these sites when they find them. As an ethical blogger this is actually a good thing for you and your success because it can keep the splogs from getting higher search rankings than your real and valid blog which you put your time into creating and keeping up to date.
AdSense for Search
Google also offers a companion program to AdSense which is called “AdSense for Search.” The AdSense for Search program allows you to host a Google search box on your website or blog. When a visitor to your website searches via that search box you will be paid if they go on to purchase something online from the search. In other words, Google does not pay you for the search itself, but does pay you from any revenue earned from the search which originated on your website.
AdSense for Search can be a great income generator for you. Assume for a moment that your blog is about appliance repair. Someone finds your site that is looking for information on the problem they are having with their washing machine. You have a Google Search box on your blog. After the visitor is done reading what you have suggested the problem might be, they decide to go on to search for a new washing machine. Maybe you had a review on your blog of a good washer they might consider buying. If they buy this washing machine from the search then you will get part of the revenue from that purchase because the search started on your blog. How entirely cool is that? All you did was simply host a search box on your blog!
How Much Money Can I Make from AdSense?
So, this all sounds easy so far and you want to know how much money you can earn through AdSense and AdSense for Search, right? The answer to that question is that it depends. Sorry, I know that’s not a great answer, or the one you were likely hoping to hear, but that’s the best answer anyone can ever give you. Anyone who gives you a different answer is lying to you!
Google does not release how much it pays for various clicks. The money you can make from AdSense and AdSense for Search depends largely on the volume of traffic to your site and how often you get clicks on the Google ads.
Obviously the more traffic to your site then the more potential clicks you will receive. No one knows how many visitors you will have an no one can tell you how many of those visitors will click on your ads. It is simply impossible to know.
What most people do know for sure about AdSense is that some clicks pay you mere cents and others pay a few dollars for a single click. It all depends on the specific topic and very specific keywords for the ads. For obvious reasons, Google does not release which clicks pay more and which pay less. This is one of those things you have to try and guess about.
The single absolute best thing you can do to insure that you make the most amount of money possible with AdSense is to set-up a quality blog with a good topic, post quality information on it regularly, and promote it to get the maximum visitors possible. Using this model you will make the most money possible from AdSense without having to play games with Google or your readers.