I don't recall ever having written about Google Adsense before and given the amount of publicity that Adsense has received over the past few months, I did kind of assume that everyone knew what it was all about. It would appear though that I was wrong....

Following my offer earlier in the week (if you missed it, you can find out more by clicking the link at the bottom of this article), I received a number of emails from people all with different questions about what Adsense was, how it worked and how it could benefit individual website owners.

So let me explain..... :-)

Google Adsense basically allows any website owner to act as an affiliate for Google by displaying Google's paid 'Adwords' adverts on their own website. If you are not familiar with Adwords, just do a search on Google - the boxed results down the right-hand side are Adwords and every time you click on one of them, the owner of the site being advertised gets charged a set amount. The exact amount of the charge depends on how popular the keyword is that you searched for and a few other factors - without going into too much detail, you just need to be aware that this charge can be anywhere from 5cents to several dollars.

If you sign up for an Adsense account (which is completely free - more details from the link at the very bottom of this page), you are able to place the same adverts as are shown on Google's search results pages on your own website pages. But the real beauty of the system is that Google will only show adverts that are relevant to the content of your page. They do this by crawling your web page automatically before displaying any adverts. This allows Google to get an idea of what the web page is about and they can then display the adverts that are most appropriate to your visitors which in turn means that there is more chance that your visitors will click on an ad....

So why would you want to do this?

Simple - because Google will pay you a percentage of every cent they earn when someone clicks on an advert on one of your pages. Now I know what you are thinking, 'If some people are only paying 5cents a click, then my percentage of 5cents isn't going to be much is it?' In truth, no it isn't but as I have always said, the Internet is a numbers game and whilst a proportion of 5cents is always going to be small, what about if you got a proportion of 1000 5cents each day? You also need to bear in mind that there are very few search terms out there that only cost 5cents - in my experience, a more accurate average would be about 20cents - 50cents.

I know many people that have been using Adsense for some time on their main websites and easily make a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars a month and that's great. Quite frankly, it is probably the easiest income you will ever make because other than adding a bit of code to your web pages, there is nothing else to do. If you have a website with a reasonable level of traffic, I would definitely give it a go. Some people have a concern that by using Adsense, they may lose potential customers as they could click away from their site and this is a genuine possibility so you should take care when considering where to place adverts and on which pages. On the flipside, I know a couple of people that are now making more money from Adsense each month than they were selling their own product so they are more than happy with this arrangement!

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