Making money from a website can be particularly hard, especially when you are not selling anything. But if you are looking to make money from your website or blog without selling a product or service, then there is a way, and it goes by the name of Google AdSense.
Since 2003 Google adsense has been helping website owners make money from their content without having to deal directly with advertisers. No matter what industry or niche you are in, almost anyone can become part of the AdSense network and start earning money straight away.
If you have just made a new blog, or already have an existing website that you are looking to monetize, then Google AdSense could be the answer. With millions of advertisers looking to advertise their products and services, there’s a good chance someone will want to run ads on your site, and more importantly, pay you money!
To get you up to date with what Google AdSense is and how it all works, we first need to explore its inner workings and how it came to be.
So, for all you beginners wondering “what is Google AdSense?” Here’s what you need to know.
What Is Google Adsense?
As we briefly mentioned earlier, AdSense is Google’s creation that helps advertisers match up the right publishers and website owners for their adverts. With that being said, AdSense is very similar to AdWords as they both work together to match up advertisers with publishers.
If you’ve ever run an Adwords campaign before then, you’ll notice that you have the option to use the search or display partners network. When AdWords first came out, advertisers were only allowed to target keywords on Google’s website, limiting them to the number of people they could reach.
However, 3 years after releasing AdWords, Google had an ingenious idea: let webmasters display adverts on their sites and split the ad revenue. And that’s precisely what they did!
Today, almost any website can apply to Google to become an AdSense partner. If the website meets specific criteria, then they will be accepted into the network, and they’ll be allowed to display ads on behalf of Google.
Everytime a user clicks on one of these ads, the website owner will receive 68% of the ad revenue for that click. If the average bid for a keyword is $1 then that’s 68 cents for the webmaster, not bad for doing nothing!
How Does Google Adsense Work (for publishers)?
So, how does Adsense work? Should I run adsense on my blog? It starts with the advertisers who choose which keywords they would like to advertise on. Let’s suppose I want to advertise my new line of gardening tools that I just created. I would bid on certain keywords like “gardening, gardening tools, tillers, pulling weeds, etc”
The Adsense spiders would then match my ads up with :
- Those specific keywords that people type into Google and display them to the top and right of the search results
- Websites (like yours) that display adsense ads.
The adsense folks will send out Robots to crawl your site to see what all your content is about. If they find that you have content that has some of the same keywords that I (as the advertiser bid for) then my ads will show up on your site next to your article about gardening tools.
How to Make Money with It?
As you have probably realised by now, AdSense can help webmasters make a lot of money from their visitors if used correctly. However, how exactly can you use AdSense to make money on your own site?
Well, the first thing you need to do is to apply to become an AdSense partner. Once you have submitted your application, it will take a few weeks before it gets reviewed, but as you can imagine Google get thousands of applications a day. If your website meets certain guidelines, traffic, and quality metrics, then your account will get approved.
Once approved you will be able to start displaying ads on your website. To install the ads, simply copy the code over from your AdSense dashboard onto a specific page. Ideally, you will be aiming for around two ads per page as any less than two won’t be effective, and any more will look too spammy. The last thing you want is to scare all your users away with pages covered in ads.
How Can I Make More from AdSense?
Basically, your best bet for ad clicks is increasing your search traffic. When people are trying to solve a problem, they usually turn to search engines like Google or Bing. If you have a post that solves that problem, using SEO will help your post rank well in search results. SEO will also help AdSense serve up relevant ads. Therefore, when people click on your blog post, the ads may answer the exact question they’re asking. Result? Ad clicks!
Here’s an example. Let’s say I write a post about the health risks of liposuction. I use SEO techniques to help Google realize what my post is about, and my post is the third one when someone searches for “liposuction risks.” AdSense also knows what my post is about, so people reading my post will see an ad that might say something like, “Safe liposuction services in New Hampshire”(or wherever).
If the person is interested in finding the safest place for liposuction, s/he is likely to click that ad. As I said before, the rate per click depends on a lot of factors, but my concern is making sure that people read MY post and not others! If they go to another blog to read about liposuction risks, they’re possibly clicking that person’s ads instead of mine.
Important Points to Consider
There are a few things you need to know about AdSense before you ever put the code on your blog.
1. Never, ever click your own ads. In case you aren’t aware, Google pretty much knows everything. And they can tell if you’re clicking your own ads. It’s very tempting to click about 50 times and make some money, but all it will do is result in being banned.
2. Never, ever encourage friends or family to click your ads. Same as above. You can and will be banned from AdSense, and don’t ever think Google won’t figure it out. I don’t know how they do it, but I have seen it happen to people I know. JUST DON’T.
3. Pay attention to your ad clicks. If you average 2 clicks a month and you suddenly get 100 in a day, chances are that something is wrong. If you’ve pissed someone off and they decide to fight back by clicking all over the place, you can get banned even though you didn’t do anything.
4. Never rely on AdSense as your sole income source. Even if you get really good at SEO and you have 100 websites making thousands of dollars each month in AdSense, you never know when something could happen to trigger Google’s no-no sensors. You can make good money with AdSense, but you should also use other monetization strategies just in case.
5. Don’t use more than 3 ad blocks on a single page. Google allows up to 3 ad blocks on a page. So if you have one in your header, one in your sidebar, and one at the end of your post, that’s the limit for that page. Also, don’t plaster ads all over the place and annoy your regular readers! There are ways to implement the ads without making your site ugly.
The Darkside of Google AdSense
For many website owners, AdSense can be an excellent source of income for their website. So much so that many webmasters rely upon AdSense to pay their bills. With clicks generating anywhere from 10 cents to 1 dollar per click, it’s not uncommon for webmasters to use dirty tricks to boost their earnings.
These tricks are often always against Google’s terms and conditions, but with so money to be made from AdSense, lots of webmasters will take the risk.
A common tactic that many webmasters employ is to purposely click their own ads. Known as click fraud, this type of fraud costs advertisers billions a year in lost ad spend. The webmaster who clicks their own ads obviously has no intention of ever buying or purchasing that product. Instead, they just want to earn more money.
If you want to earn money from Google AdSense, then the best way is to do it legitimately. Clicking your own ads or paying other people to do it might seem like a good idea, but it can often end up in your account getting banned. Not only will you lose all your money, but you could also face legal action from the likes of Google and other advertisers.
Our advice is: don’t try and fool the system.
Many people have tried (and failed) in the past. If you genuinely want to make money from running a website, then AdSense is a great way to do so.
The Bottom Line
It is impossible to cover a topic as broad as AdSense in a single post. This overview gives you an idea of what it is for and how it works. But it still may not answer enough questions to make sense for you. If you have any questions in your mind which have remained unanswered, ask in the comment section below.
If you are interested in learning something about Google Pay, read our article about it which can help you to know how to work with it.
