What is Google’s AdSense?

If you read about ways to make money for article writing, blogging, and web sites generally one name will keep appearing time after time; Google AdSense. It’s talked about often as an great way of generating money, but it’s seldom explained in any detail exactly what it is and how it works to make you money.

Let’s start by answering the basic question of what AdSense actually is. The AdSense program is a method by which you can display contextually relevant adverts from the Google AdWords Advertising Network, and place them on your own content. Google then matches adverts to your site's content and you earn money whenever your visitors click on them.

What makes AdSense so attractive is that Google do all the hard work for you, that is matching relevant ads that your users are more likely to click on, to your content. Because of this, and the size of the Google Ad Network, the AdSense program is often one of the more profitable income streams of the online publisher.

How Much Money Can I Make from AdSense?

There’s no quick answer to that. Many factors go into the equation when you’re looking at the value of the ads on your content. Here are some of the main determining factors:

• Competitive Value of your content.
  This is how much Google can charge per click for adverts, and this varies dramatically depending on the subject matter. See the related Keyword Targeting For Improved Earnings article for more on this.

• Volume of Traffic to your content.
  Obviously the amount of times the ads are shown has a direct correlation to the possibility of a visitor clicking on one.

• Format and Placement of the Adverts
  Obviously how well you integrate the ads and where will have an impact on how well they convert too. See the related Formatting and Placement of AdSense in Content article for more on this.

• How Trustworthy Your Content Is
  If your content is professionally laid out and looks credible, visitors are much more likely to trust any adverts you display, AdSense or otherwise.

There are of course hundreds if not thousands more nuances and factors that go toward getting more most out of the AdSense program, but as a beginner all you need to focus on are these main areas to get a good idea of whether you’re ready to start using AdSense straight away.

Getting Approved for AdSense

If you’ve decided to join the Google AdSense program, you have to fill in their online application form. Inclusion is by no means automatic and I regularly here of reject applications so it pays to put in a little effort before you apply to get it right first time.

Don’t worry too much if you get rejected as you can always try again later. If this does happen to you though, you should make sure your second application is significantly better than your first otherwise you’re just wasting time.

In the application process you need to tell them where you intend to implement AdSense by providing them with a URL. This serves as a quality check so that Google can review your site and make sure that it’s of sufficient standard for acceptance.

You don’t need to have an all singing, all dancing super site with thousands of pages of content to get approved. You do need to have a few pages of good quality content written in English so that their crawler can effectively search and find relevant ads to match your content.

Some people recommend Google owned Blogger as a good route to start with if you don’t already have a site, suggesting acceptance might be easier from another Google owned property. To be honest though, if you submit a blog hosted on any of the main platforms with a few good quality postings on it, chances are you’ll get approved.

Once you’ve submitted your application, continue to update the content of your site or blog as normal. It can take a few days for approval to be granted and the fact that it’s still getting updated during the process suggests continuous development.

Setting Up and Optimising your Ads

One of the best investments of your time would be to read as much of the AdSense help pages before you do anything else. This will give you a really good insight into how the program works in lots of detail.

If you simply can’t wait, set up some ad panels, put them up on your site and then start to look at how you can improve them. This method will require more rework as you’ll need to redo the ads again, but it will give you a few days data to see how well your first set of ads have performed.

For more information on optimising, you can read the related Optimising AdSense for Better Earnings article that covers this in more depth.

Don’t be disheartened if you don’t start earning money straight away. There’s a settling in period with AdSense where you become more accustomed to the basics of how the program works and how to improve your ads placements.