There are tried and tested techniques to make money online with Google AdSense. You would already know that Google makes ten of billions of dollars each year by selling advertising, not just in it’s search results but also across millions of other websites.

An advertiser can sign up to the AdWords program and place ads based on keywords they want to rank for. For example, a pet shop might be happy to pay Google $5 every time someone searches for “pet shop” and then clicks on their ad.

The flip-side of the advertiser program AdWords is the publisher side called AdSense.

“Google AdSense is a flexible, hassle-free way to earn revenue by showing relevant and engaging ads alongside your online content. You can easily show AdSense ads on your website, mobile sites, and site search results.”

Contextual Advertising

AdSense is a “contextual advertising” program that allows people with a website (known as “publishers”) to host Google ads on those sites.

When someone clicks on one of those ads on your website, Google charges the advertiser and gives the publisher a cut. Google recently revealed that they pay out between 60% and 70% of click revenue to the publisher.

The reason AdSense works so well is that Google examines a website’s content and finds the relevant keywords or phrases to figure out the website’s topic. Google also knows how one website links to another, such as by linking the words “pet shop” to a pet business.

To make money online with AdSense, you’ll need to create an “authority” website – one with a lot of information about a narrow topic. If you already have a website using Adsense or you’re thinking about it, read Joel Comm’s eBook Adsense Secrets 5 which goes into details about how to optimize Ad placement, the how’s and why’s.

Find Your Niche

If you already have a blog for your business or want to create a brand new website for the purpose of generating revenue through AdSense or affiliate marketing, you’ll need to find your niche – your narrow area of expertise – and write blog posts about it.

This narrow focus helps AdSense determine the topic of your page and display appropriate advertising alongside your content.

If you focus heavily on this subset of a broader topic, you will find it easier to dominate over your competitors in the search engine results.

To find the best keywords to focus your efforts, Market Samurai software does a great job at finding new keywords and analyzing the competition to make sure you can rank easily.

Once you have mastered one particular niche topic, you can broaden your range and expand your traffic potential.

For example, a business that offers personal loans may decide to first focus on the smaller niche of, say, “bad credit personal loans” and write a series of blog posts specifically about “bad credit personal loans”.

Each post should be at least 500 words in length and be 100% original. You should not include duplicated content in your blog or copied content from other websites.

Once you have exhausted your niche topic, you can move on to the next, say, “no credit check personal loans” or “unsecured bad credit personal loans”.

You should aim to write at least 2 substantial posts per week and keep at it for several months to ensure your blog becomes indexed in the search engines and start ranking.

KEEP AT IT! This is the most commonly heard advice in blogging circles. If your website is new, don’t give up. Keep posting, don’t get yourself down by staring at statistics.

Keep the front page of your blog fresh and dynamic, which Google loves to see.

The purpose of doing all this is to rank highly in Google search results for your keyword, in our example, “bad credit personal loans” – hopefully in #1 position or at least Top 3.

It’s highly recommended to do your research about what keywords you’d be more likely to rank for. I use Market Samurai to analyze SEO competition and find untapped keywords.

But it’s important to realize that only 0.1% – 3% of people visiting your website will click on advertising (known as the click-through rate), but each click earns you commission from Google. Joel’s eBook Adsense Secrets goes into more detail about earning better commissions.

Ad Placement

The best way to maximum your click-through rate is to play around the the placement of your advertisements. Often, ads placed in a column separated from the main content does worse than ads placed directly within the content.

However, and this is crucial, ad placement that annoys or distracts your readers can be a turn off and those readers may never return to your website. Return visitors, and building an audience, is just as important as building revenue.

When your website is small and only has a few dozen visitors per day, ad placement may not matter too much. At 1% click-through rate, you’d need to wait a week or two before receiving a click.

When your website is receiving a decent amount of traffic, tweaking your ad placements can mean an increase to your click-through rate and result in earning a few extra dollars a day.

I’ve read studies of large websites fiddling with their ad placements that change the click-through rate by just 0.5%, but due to their huge traffic, this resulted in tens of thousands of dollars in extra revenue every month.

If only we could all be so lucky… which brings us to the clincher.

Traffic = Visitors

We can’t talk about making money with AdSense without addressing the elephant in the room.

Without visitors to your website, you’ll earn nothing. It doesn’t matter how fantastic or insightful your posts are. If no-one knows you exist, what’s the point of all your effort?

And since the click-through rates are mere single-digit percentages, you need a lot of clicks to earn serious money. Therefore, you need a serious amount of traffic.

You could use software like Backlink Beast to help boost the number of websites linking to yours. That’s one strategy.

How to get more traffic? Well, that’s a whole big kettle of fish.

Let’s see…

Do your keyword research with Market Samurai (they have a free trial version).
Read 10 Easy Ways How To Get Backlinks To Your Website.
And also How Copywriting Killer SEO Page Titles Destroy The Competition.
Definitely read 8 Google SEO Mistakes That Will Choke Your Search Ranking.

Buy the Adsense Secrets 5 eBook.

Drop a few dollars on the Google Sniper course to learn how to create Adsense money-making websites.

Best of luck. Let us know your progress.