Adsense Primer: Getting Started, Tips, and Tricks
If you are looking for a quick, easy way to monetize your web site(s), look no further than Google Adsense. Simply put, Google’s bots look at your site, analyze its content, and return a set of ads based on keywords throughout the site. If you have a blog with several pages, with several topics, Google will still return relevant ads based on the post your visitor is currently viewing. What this means to you is your visitors will be presented with relevant ads that they are more likely to click on, thus earning you more money. Its an incredibly smart system.
The sign up process is relatively painless, you will need at least one website with a little bit of content. Once you sign up it takes Google about a day to approve your Adsense account, at which time you can place your ads on ANY site you own. Tips: Do not submit a page with broken links or an Under Construction site. If you are just starting, wait until your site is fleshed out before adding Adsense.
I am going to assume that if you are reading this article to better your website, you can sign up for Adsense, navigate the settings, and add code to your website. So we will skip the go here, go there and get to the meat. There are several different type of ads you can configure on the Adsense website. Refer to this link for an overview of the standard ad formats. There is no one format that is the best. The trick to picking the best for your site is experimenting and integrating the ads into your site so well, that a visitor does not realize its an ad. Over years and years of ignoring ads on the internet, we’ve become blind to ads (especially Google ads) and have learned to look over them. Tip: The most common mistake people make when configuring Adsense is keeping Google’s defaults. You can pick the colors of the ad units to blend in with your site.
Page position is also a very important factor to consider when integrating Adsense into your website. Google has gone through the trouble of creating a ‘heat map‘ which shows us where on the page an ad is most likely to be clicked. It is generally a good idea to make your sites navigation menus simple. This way, you can place an ad unit near them and format the unit to blend. This will place your ads in an area that your visitors will look, and hopefully click. Seemless design between your content and your ads is the key to results with Adsense.
Overall Adsense is by-far one of the most valuable tools to use when you are looking to make money from your website/blog. Another great tool to use, which you can integrate with your Adsense reporting is Google Analytics (which is a whole other monster itself).
This post was written by Tom Barton. I have been doing web design for over 10 years and have dealt with Adsense since its inception. Due to a recent increase in spare time (darn you economy), I have recently started blogging. A little over a week ago I created a Conservative blog: dPuncher, and a blog tracking my blogging experiment: BiggerBetterBlogging. I am still in the expirimental phase of designing and placing my ads as my traffic starts to increase. Best of luck and be sure to leave me a comment some time.