Google Adsense Resources, Services, Replacements, Help, and Assistance 1
How to get Started: The Basics of Using Adsense
Adsense placement on blogs was taboo at one time, you were almost an outsider of you used them. I think that over the last few years most have realized that it takes a lot of time (and sometimes money, depending on bandwidth) to author a quality blog or web site. While “information should be free” sprit of the Internet is still alive, placing text ads on a web site is more and more common every day.
What is Google Adsense?
Adsense is a contextual ad-serving resource provided by google. Signup for a free account, place the code they give you on your web pages, and when visitors come to your site the google ads will appear in and around your content. How ‘relevant’ the ads are to your web site visitors depends on where you placed the code in your pages, and what format(s) you used to create the ads during setup. If your visitors click on the links in the ads – you get paid for each click. Each time an ad is shown it’s called an impression, and each time someone clicks an ad it’s called a click-through. The number of times someone clicks an ad per 100 visitors to your site would be your click-through percentage. How much you get paid per click depends on many variables, including what advertisers are willing to pay per click on a site like yours – and what your search relevance or page rank is.
Can I Really Make Money with Adsense in My Web Site?
Yes, you can make money with ad-sense in your web site. In fact, this entire web site is full of information and tutorials to optimize your web site to make the most money it possibly can from adsense and affiliate programs. Of course – this is hard work, and you will only be successful if you learn the tools necessary and put them to work. Adsense dollars don’t fall from the sky, you have to create them. Google won’t even pay you until you’ve made more than $100 in revenue. Let’s hope you don’t get discouraged before you reach that landmark. Also – if you don’t have original quality content in your site to begin with to generate quality traffic in the first place, chances are you won’t be too successful with adsense. The more successful your web site, the more successful you’ll be with Adsense. In fact, some people are making from $100-$1,000 per day in adsense revenue – making it a potentially lucrative opportunity.
Maybe you’d like to read some real stories – directly from web site owners, about their success with adsense. You should read Blogging for Dollars and find out how a quality, well-written, passionate blog or web site can go from $5 a month to $100 a day revenue with adsense. Or, if you want to shoot for the moon, you might want to read $1 Million Dollars per year in Google Adsense. Probably the best real word account I’ve read of adsense success or failure is Is Google Adsense Making Me Rich? over at ProBlogger. Darren Rowse is right-on -the-money with that post. He also has a poll and post about the rise of six figure bloggers, that illustrates the growing number of people making a very good living from adsense.
Where Can I find the Best Adsense Resources?
We will be publishing many adsense articles, but in this post I will give you links to some of the best adsense resources to get you started:
Google itself publishes a lot of quality information about adsense. If you doubt for a second that people are doing well using adsense – go and read some of the adsense success stories and case studies that google makes available.
You will find that (as I already mentioned) quality content in your blog or web site will get you not only the best page rank and relevancy – but also that it will get you the highest ad relevancy and click-through, generating more revenue per capita. Eric Wolfram’s article on “How to Score Higher in Google Search Engine” is very much on a par with the best there is in regards to authoring a quality web site, with quality content.
For quick adsense help (from adsense subscribers), I recommend the google groups adsense forums. You could also visit the google adsense help center, or browse adsense topics.
Google also has it’s own adsense blog, called “Inside Adsense”. I would subscribe to this in your RSS reader, so you always hear the latest adsense announcements – directly from the source.
Subscribe to some other RSS feeds from Adsense-related blogs – like Jensense.
Is google perfect? Any huge service used en masse is prone to it’s share of problems, and reading some posts from disgruntled adsense users probably wouldn’t hurt in case you run into problems.
What’s the Best Way to Place Adsense in Your Web Site?
Well, the only one who can determine that is you, but I can point you in the right direction to get some expert advice. First, head over to google and look over the adsense ad formats to see which ones might fit your site the best. Once you choose a format, you might want to do some research to find out layouts and placement tend to give the most click-thru, earning you the most revenue. You should look at the AdSense Heat Map to see where google thinks the best placement of ads is.
For instance, some say that placing the adsense ads within the confines of your content or blog post is the best way to get the most relevant ads (and highest click-through). Others might say that it also offends more of your readers. I guess that would be a judegement call on your part, and depend on what kind of site and content you have. At very least, you should read this post on How to Place Google Adsense Ads Next to Your Text.
Are There Alernatives to Adsense?
Sure there are, and you should check them out to see if one might work better for you. Just be aware, that some of the ‘articles’ you find out there may be slanted towards using something other than google (for the benefit of that site owner getting credit for you signing up, and not based on the merit of the service). In that sprit, check out Don’t Settle for Google Adsense.
But that’s just one example. I’ll add more here, as I research which ones are the best adsense alternative. In the meantime, here’s a link to 130 Adsense Alernatives or “Online Advertising Network roundup”.
I use Wordpress (or Drupal, or Joomla, or PHPNuke, or Xoops, or Mambo, or Blogger, or Typepad…
How do you use Adsense? It should be pretty easy, if you search for the information. Most of these blog services, packages, or Content Management Systems (CMS) have the ability to set adsense up via plugin – so you don’t have to manually edit the PHP or HTML code yourself (which many people don’t know how to do). For example, here you can find the Wordpress plugin for Adsense Deluxe.
Is Adsense just for Web Pages?
Well, it was, but now google has opened up adsense for feeds beta. So, now you can add adsense to the rss feed of your web site, and when people read your feed in their favorite rss aggregator – you will have a chance to earn even more revenue!
As always – there will be more to come with this post and on this subject!