Stylish design

No Comments Written by Robert on April 11, 2008 – 6:37 pm

Advertising is one of the most popular ways for Web site owners to make a few extra dollars online. You agree to display someone else’s ads on your pages, and in return, you receive a fee for this ‘‘rental space.’’

The exact fee depends on how many browsers visit the site in a given period (a week or a month, for instance). AdSense gives anyone with a Web site the ability to place ads there from Google. Google makes sure the ads relate in some way to the content on the Web page. You’ve probably seen AdSense ads before; they’re the contextual ads that often appear in a block of two or three and are often lined up vertically on the page.

A heading at the top reads ‘‘Ads by Gooooooogle.’’

The program works like this: you sign up and tell Google your site’s URL and whether it is for a business or personal in nature. You choose how you want your ads to appear; Google scours through its database of millions of Web pages and returns ads that are related to your site’s content.

AdSense also gives you the option to add a search box to your site. This enables your visitors to perform a search and turn up search results that complement your own content. In either case, if someone clicks on one of the ads you display, you earn a bit of revenue. You are paid either using the cost-per-click or CPC model or the cost-per-thousand-impressions or CPM model. In CPC, you are paid a small amount every time someone clicks on an ad.

In CPM, you are paid when your ads are displayed 1000 times, in other words, when the page that displays an ad is viewed 1000 times. In either case, the earnings you make depend on how rich your site’s content is and how many visitors your site attracts. Before you start working out the exact size and format of the ads you want to run, your first job is to create a Web site that has the content to make AdSense ads actually work.

Creating Web Content that Supports Advertising

One of the many nice features about AdSense is that, in a matter of a few minutes, it dynamically generates ads that relate in some way to the Web page content near it. For instance, if you create a Web page about science and astronomy, or if you simply make a passing mention of binoculars in your blog, you can place some advertising code provided by Google AdSense on the page and it will dynamically serve up a mixture of ads, all related to your site.

The question every advertiser on the Internet faces is how to come up with content to support advertising. You have two general options:

• Create a Landing Page. Gather links and content from anywhere and everywhere that are organized around a single theme. In this case, you don’t actually provide the content. You only create the page and ‘‘borrow’’ the names of Web sites or links to them. Such pages are only created to gain advertising revenue or to steer people to other Web sites, or both.
• Create the Site First. You devote your time and energy to a subject of interest; you build up the number of visitors gradually and by continually improving your products and services as well as the quality of their presentation. In this case the Web site is your primary interest; any advertising revenue you generate from it is ‘‘gravy.’’ Of course, every Web publisher wants advertising to be more than just ‘‘gravy.’’ For a lucky few, it becomes a viable source of income. In either case, you need to turn your initial attention and energy not to creating the ads (that’s done for you by Google) but instead to building a page that will attract viewers for the ads.

Layering Your Content

Web sites that are content rich that have many ‘‘layers’’ of Web pages a visitor can click on to ‘‘burrow’’ into the site will have more content that can be used to gather relevant AdSense ads.

Being Fruitful and Multiplying Your Content

It takes a lot of work to create content for Web sites, especially if you are continually expanding those sites and trying to run a business at the same time. But you need to make a commitment to add fresh and compelling content to your site, such as frequent promotions and new products. It’s one of the keys to keeping customers satisfied and coming back for more. Online shoppers are continually searching for sites with fresh and different content.

The really obsessive Web surfers churn through one site after another, clicking, scanning, and moving from page to page. These are exactly the kinds of visitors you want to attract: the ones who will stay online for hours at a time, searching for a product, a service, or a bit of information that will satisfy their current needs and interests (or perhaps I should say obsessions).

How Much Can You Earn? You’ll Learn, Eventually

Google doesn’t reveal exactly how much it receives from advertisers, and how much of that revenue is shared with you. It does say that if you use its AdSense for Search program, you are paid on a cost-per-click basis: when someone clicks on a search link, you earn a set amount for each one of those clicks. AdSense for Content pays either on a cost-per-click or cost-per-thousand-impressions basis; the payment system is determined by the advertiser (the company whose Web site or products and services are being advertised).

As Google says in its help files,

The best way to find out how much you’ll earn is to sign up and start showing ads on your web pages.

Once you start showing ads on your Web pages, you can start determining how much you’re actually earning by logging in to your Google account and clicking the Reports tab.

You’ll be able to see the total number of page impressions, ad clicks, page clickthrough rate (Page CTR, the number of times visitors click through one of the AdSense ad links to the advertisers page), Page eCPM (cost per 1000 impressions), and your total earnings so you can get an idea of how well the program is performing for you and how much you can expect to earn over time in the program.

Once you earn $100, Google sends you a check at the end of each month.

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