Google Adsense - A great way to earn money from your website

We like bringing you stories about easy ways to get that extra dollar out of your web site, email lists, and so on. This program from Google allows web masters to add a simple code to their web pages that will place Google Adwords on their pages, allowing them to earn a percentage of the bid price when someone clicks on the ad.

Firstly, if you're unsure about what Google Adwords are, click here to read our article on them. Alternatively, click here to visit the Google web site. Type bunbury real estate into the search box. See the ads down the side of the page? They are Google Adwords. See the ad for South West Life? That's one of our ads.

These ads are placed by businesses who pay Google every time someone clicks on the ad to visit their site. It might be 10 cents a click, it might be $2.00 a click, it all depends on what the site has been willing to bid and pay per click.

Google (quite cleverly) allow web sites to place these ads on their own pages, without requiring any technical coding experience, and the web site then gets a percentage of all the payments made to Google from clicks made via their site. Examples of how they appear are to the left and to the bottom of this screen.

Google simply provide a few lines of code that you ad to your web page HTML coding, and the ads automatically appear. But even better than that, Google's technology actually works out what your page is about, and then places ads that are relevant to your content. For example, we placed some ads on the South West Life site (click here for an example) and found that the ads displayed were quite relevant (eg. south west accommodation or tourism sites). Also, see the bottom of this page.

The program is very well suited to websites that provide a lot of information on them. People visiting your site can then not only read through your information, but will also see ads that are relevant to what they're interested in.

So how much do you earn? Google do not state how much of a percentage you will get by having ads on your site. They also prohibit current users of the program (such as us) from telling people what we are earning from them. Therefore, we cannot divulge the actual figures, but can say that the returns are good enough for us to write this article and recommend the service to you.

Another handy control you have over the service is that you can screen out up to 200 web sites that you DON'T want to appear on your site. That means that you can screen out your competitors, so that their ads don't appear on your site. Related to this, you also want to make sure that you don't put the advertising code on any of your pages that are advertising your own services. You don't want other ads competing directly with your own services.

Is the system open to abuse? Possibly, but Google go to great lengths to say that they are able to tell if someone is abusing the system (eg. clicking on the ads over and over simply to earn themselves money) and they will take action. I actually believe them when they say this, because I suspect that at the end of the day, this program will only survive if the advertisers are happy with their results, so it is in Google's best interest to keep the system clean.

If you would like assistance installing Google Adsense on your website, check out our Google Adsense Installation Service.

Disclaimer: This page is designed to provide information only and is not a substitute for advice that is specific to your business. Before acting on any of the information above it is important you seek further advice from a professional who has taken into consideration the nature and circumstances of your business.

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