Although it’s been around for a while, many people continue to be confused by Google’s AdSense program. The way it works is that people buy ads through Google’s AdWords program. Those ads are then displayed on participating “publisher” Web sites that are signed up with the AdSense program. Google uses a complex algorithm to match the ads with the content on the publisher’s Web page. When people click an ad, Google gives the publisher part of the money. The good news for writers and publishers is that AdSense means you can make money by writing about things you are interested in and let Google manage selling advertising for you. In our case, we have sites about pets, vegetarian food, and computing, which are all topics we enjoy and like to write about. All of these sites have been quietly making money for years now.
For example, we started up a print magazine called Computor Companion in 1999. We put the magazine articles online in 2001. Since that time, the articles have been linked to by other sites all over the ‘net and ComputorCompanion.com gets quite a bit of traffic. Unfortunately, when the bottom fell out of the computer industry in late 2001, we had to stop producing the print version of the magazine and selling local advertising. But readers kept sending emails telling us how much the articles on the Web site helped them, so we kept the magazine articles online. We turned it into a quarterly and put out new issues, but for a while it didn’t make money.
All that changed in 2003 when I discovered Google AdSense and put ads on our sites. Google doesn’t like it when you talk about your earnings, but suffice it to say that I have been getting checks from Google consistently every month for years. (Since Google only sends out a check if you earn more than $100/month, you know I’ve been making more than that.) Finding a check from Google, Inc. in my mailbox still gives me a little thrill, since I know I’m still making money from stuff I wrote years ago.
Getting set up as an AdSense Publisher is easy. Go to https://www.google.com/adsense/. Read about the program, particularly the policies, terms, and conditions. Next fill out an application and wait a bit to see if Google approves your site. In my case, it only took about half an hour and I got an e-mail back from Google saying that my sites were approved. Armed with my log-in information, I used the Google tools to generate ads for four of our content sites: Computor Companion, Logical Tips, Many Veggie Recipes, and Pet Tails.
It is easy to use Google’s online ad tools to make your ad layout match the color theme of your site. Then you just paste the snippet of HTML code that Google generates into your site. Our sites use our Logical Web Publisher software, which works much like a blog. The article content comes out of a database and is stuffed into a layout template. So I was able to paste my Google AdSense code in just one place on the site (in the article template). I didn’t have to paste the code into hundreds of separate pages on my sites.
Once the code is on your site, Google pretty much does the rest. It starts serving up ads that relate to the content of your articles. However, there are a few rules when it comes to AdSense. First off, do not ever click ads on your own site. Along the same lines, don’t try and cheat the system or break the rules. It is far better to earn less money over time than try to skirt the edge of the rules and get thrown out of the program. In other words, don’t annoy the Big G. They can (and have) thrown out sites, and according to the terms of service, you can’t argue about it. Google always gets the last word.
Some people who really “work” the AdSense system do a lot of research to find high paying keywords and so forth. I take a more zen approach and write what I want to write. I have no interest in writing a bunch of junky articles on something I don’t know or care about just to earn a few more pennies per click. I’m not an AdSense gazillionaire, but then again I never worry that Google is going to dump my sites either.
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