Although many people would have you believe otherwise, there are only a few ways to make money from a website. Selling something, banner ads, affiliate schemes or membership or listing fees.

Along comes Google with its Adsense and all of a sudden we can all have a piece of the pie. Their service places ads on your website that are relevant to that pages content, and you get paid every time someone clicks on the advert. The Adwords platform allows you to tailor the look and feel of the ads so they sit within your pages better. You can change the background color, font size and shape and the shape of the box they appear in.

Advertisers choose keywords and bid on them. This bid is then added to the existing pot for the keywords and your advert ranked within it depending on the bid. A daily budget is also set so that as an advertiser you can control how much you spend on your marketing. Through some maths I don’t understand, your advert then appears on relevant sites a certain amount of times until your clickthrough budget has been used up.

Adsense is currently one of if not ‘the’ most popular way of advertising on the internet, and has spawned many look-a-likes since its launch. It is policed quite heavily by Google as there are third party tools out there that will click on an ad to make money for the website owner. If the advertisers return diminishes then their use of Adwords reduces. Therefore Google protect it with everything they have. With this in mind, don’t try and trick people into clicking your ad, or copy content from other places. Google can figure out both and will penalize you by reducing your fee or kick you out of Adwords altogether.

The placement of the advert is key. You have to be aware of how a visitor reads the page and place the ads somewhere prominent within that area. They need to sit nicely within the framework of your site, and not be so obvious or out of place that it annoys your visitors. Embedding them within posts or content then coloring them so they blend in a little is a good way of making them unobtrusive without being invisible. According to Google the best place to put your ads is at the start of the site content, below the header and at the end of any articles or blog posts you may have.

Don’t overload the site with ads otherwise you will estrange your visitors. A single ad block will normally be sufficient per page to get the most clicks. Visitors will soon get fed up trying to navigate through adverts in order to get to your content. There are way too many other places to go for information or services to risk annoying them like that.

To maximise your return make sure you have good quality content to bring in the visitors and clever ad placement to get them clicking. Don’t expect to be a millionaire from Adwords alone, with a 5% click rate it isn’t going to change your life.

Adsense makes Sense is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design