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Monetize Your Site with Google AdSense
by Rob Sullivan
With the advent of blogs and other informational sites, the search engine market space has become
increasingly competitive. Sometimes website owners begin to wonder if they will ever make money off
their product or service. In this article I give you other ideas on how to make money with your website,
even if you don’t sell products or services.
My experience with AdSense : As an owner or contributor to many sites, not just search engine related,
I’ve come to learn a thing or two about monetizing a site.
The thing is, I don’t mind writing for these sites – it gives me an outlet because my mind is always
racing with new article ideas.
On one of my sites is about console gaming: Xbox, Nintendo and so on. It’s not a huge site, but I get
some decent visitors. I have a friend who writes for a similar site that deals with portable gaming
units like the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP.
When we started writing it was for fun and to bring some news to the world. Kind of like a console
gaming news aggregator. So when Google came out with their AdSense product I applied for an account
immediately. Since I work in the industry I knew about AdSense long before most people and got an
AdSense account within 48 hours of applying for it.
The setup was quite easy. I logged into a web based console and the system helped me pick the types
of ads I wanted to display and even helped generate the code to insert into my pages so the ads
matched the same font and background color of the site.
All in all it took me about 15 minutes to sign in, generate the code and paste it onto my page template.
Now, every page on this site has Google Ads displayed. And the great part is the ads are related to the
content of the pages. For my Nintendo pages, all the ads relate to Nintendo while for the Xbox pages
all ads relate to Xbox. And the best part of this is that for every click on an ad I make a few cents.
Now, I don’t make a lot of money on AdSense, but there are sites out there that do. Weblogs Inc. is a
series of blogs all built around themes. A recent interview with the founder showed that the sites are
on par to make over $1 million in AdSense revenue this year. That’s right $1 million from AdSense.
So you can see that AdSense could be a way to make money in addition to whatever else you do on your site.
How do you get an AdSense account?
Well the first thing you need to do is apply for an account. It’s quite simple really, you give some
basic information such as the URL of the site that will host the ads, your contact information and
so on, and submit your application.
Google responds fairly quickly and generally your site will be accepted if it meets their guidelines
and policies. You can find more information on these policies on the AdSense site. Once you’ve been
accepted it is a matter of creating your ad code, of which there are two basic types.
AdSense for Content
AdSense for Content is the most common type of ad displayed. These are the ads you see on sites that
are marked with “Ads by Goooogle” either above or below the ads, much like the ads you see on Google’s site.
The display formats vary for these types of ads which you can see on the AdSense site here. As you
will see, there are a variety of layouts available, from text ads to banners. Once you’ve selected the
type of ads you want to display on your site, you pick the number of ads, and apply a style. Pick a
style which matches your site. In other words, try and pick one that has the same color background and
text as your site. This way they don’t stand out as much.
Finally, copy the code provided by Google (yup they even provide that for you - pretty simple hey?)
and paste it on your page where you want it. Google even provides ideas on the best placement of your
ads. Check this page out for more information on ad placement.
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