subject: Making Sense of Google Adsense [print this page] Surfing the web lately, you've probably seen "Ads by Gooooooogle" on many of the websites that you've visited. Every day, more and more website owners are discovering exactly how to make money out of Google, so much so, that many web publishers are actually making a full time income just from having Google adverts on their websites. So, what exactly is Google Adsense?
You've noticed on many websites, those "ads by Goooooogle", followed by a number of adverts. Well visit Google themselves and you'll see on the right, and sometimes near the top of search result pages, "Sponsored Links". These are like the classified adverts that you see in your daily newspaper. Companies are paying to have their advert to be featured in this space, depending on the search phrases that you are typing in to the Google search box. Rather than a fixed price though, advertisers bid against each other to have their advert featured, with the highest bidder, getting the number 1 slot. This program is called "Google Adwords".
While that proved a great success, the advertisers were limited to have their adverts only seen on Google. Then Google came up with the idea of paying website owners a percentage of the fee they get paid by the advertisers, for featuring the adverts on their own sites. This became the "Google AdSense" program.
Free to join, this program has become a popular way of adding a new income stream, but more than that, some website publishers started to build websites specifically for this Google program. Working out which adverts the advertisers were paying most for (so the percentage commissions are the highest), website publishers are building sites specifically targeting these high paying advert commissions earning a living from sending people away from their sites!
As I say, the program is free to join, with an application to fill out, but Google must approve you before you can get started. The good news is that once you have been approved for your first website, you don't need to apply again for any additional websites.
But before applying, you need to have a website which needs to be complete. The site must also contain what Google considers valuable content. This is the first step to making those profits. But before you think about designing your website, it is vitally important to choose a popular topic, with preferably high paying commissions after all, you won't profit from anything without any website visitors, no matter how good your site looks!
