A Beginner’s Guide to Making Money on the Internet with AdSense
By Douglas Hanna
If you’re interested in making money with Internet marketing, the fastest and easiest way to do this, in my opinion, is with Google AdSense.
If you’re not familiar with AdSense, they are the little ads that you see on many webpages that consist of a headline, two lines of text and a URL.
When you put AdSense on your webpages and people click on them, Google pays you for each click. Some of these clicks pay as much as $2 or $3 while others might pay as little as five cents or less.
How to Get Started With Google AdSense
To put Google AdSense on your website or blog, you must first sign up with Google AdSense and be approved to set up an account.
After you fill in all the blanks and submit your site or blog, Google will actually crawl it to make sure it qualifies for AdSense. This means that your website should probably have at least 10- 12 pages and your blog should have a fair number of posts.
After You are Approved
Once you have been approved by Google, you will need to go to the Google Overview page and click on AdSense Setup, which is where you create your AdSense ads or ad units. You will want to choose AdSense for Content and your ad unit should be Text ads only. Click Continue and you will then choose your format — which can be anything from a 728×90 Leaderboard down to a 125×125 button.
You will also need to specify styles for your border, title, background, text, and URL.
Most webmasters have found that the best producing format is the 300×250 Medium Rectangle with no border, a blue title, no background, black text and a colored URL. But this can vary from site to site and, ultimately, you will have to experiment and find the unit that generates the most revenue for you.
Next, you will be given the opportunity to create a Channel to track the performance of your AdSense units. Google allows you to choose up to five custom channels to track the performance of an ad unit.
You can name your channels just about anything, but it’s best to name them with reference to their size or their location on your webpages. For example, you might name one channel 300×200topleft. This is important because when you run your revenue reports, Google will report your earnings by Top Channels so that you can see which of your units are performing best and which are doing the worst, and you can then make changes accordingly.
The HTML Code
You will next go to a window with a Submit and Get Code button. Click on it and Google will provide the code for your AdSense unit. This code will be in HTML, which means you will have to find the HTML source code for your webpages so you can then insert the AdSense code in the appropriate place or places.
Experience has taught me that the optimal position for AdSense on my websites is the upper left-hand corner — either above or below the headline. But then, as with most anything in Internet marketing, you will need to experiment to see which AdSense unit in which positions generates the maximum revenue for you.
In Summary
Google AdSense can be an excellent revenue generator for the beginning Internet marketer. AdSense ad units are easy to create and place on your website and can earn you $100 a month or more — depending on the nature of your website or blog and the amount of traffic you can generate.
Douglas Hanna is the publisher and webmaster of several websites, including the popular HD Radio Home which provides reviews of HD radio and explains this new technology. He is retired and lives in a Denver suburb.
Tags: adsense
