Working with AdSense
Google revolutionised the world of internet marketing with their ‘contextual adverts’ - adverts that the system chooses automatically according to the content of your page. So if you have one page about cheap airline flights and another about the beaches of Thailand, both on the same site, different adverts should be shown. With no effort on your part.
But do they make money? Well yes they can. There are lot of people who earn enough to pay their hosting costs by having AdSense on their sites. There are quite a few people who earn more. And there are a few people who earn a very great deal. One story doing the rounds for a while was of the site www.plentyoffish.com earning $10,000 a day - nice work if you can get it (although I think they get about 12 million visitors a day to their site, or some other enormous number). True story? Of course, I have no idea.
But yes, having a few adsense ads on your site can make money - but with a big proviso. If you get very few visitors to your site, you will make very little money. Stands to reason. So your focus (as with all ‘make money online’ posts) is to attract as many interested visitors as possible.
There are a lot of sites nowadays that have lots of adverts, very little content, and are more or less designed to leave visitors no choice but to click on the adverts. These are known as MFA (made for adsense) sites. In the long term they don’t do very well in the search engines, they get no repeat visitors, directories and link exchange partners won’t accept them. They also clutter up the internet with worthless sites.
So they don’t seem a very good idea for any but the most lazy webmaster - in any case they are often against the AdSense terms and conditions (read these before joining adsense - they are important!).
This site in due course will describe ways of optimising and improving Adsense income, but will not condone trickery, cheating or misleading people!
One useful feature of adsense is that you can block competitor adverts from appearing. This means that if your site sells holidays in Turkey, you can stop your main competitors adverts from appearing on your site, and diverting your potential customers to their own sites.
Anyway, it is worth trying out - there is nothing to lose. There is a link on the right of this page if you want to investigate further
If you do try adsense on your site please remember the cardinal rules:
- never click on the ads on your own site, even just ‘to check its working’ and
- never ask your friends to either. google will find out, they will ban you, and they will not pay you!