AdSense is often mentioned as a great starting point for people who are learning how to make money online. While getting an account approved requires a website that’s already established, it doesn’t take that much to become approved. While many marketers look at AdSense as just a short-term thing or the beginning of a learning curve, there are hundreds of people (if not thousands) who make tens of thousands of dollars a month on AdSense. In other words, while it might not be the most popular method, there’s no question that there is plenty of potential here for dedicated marketers.
Among many marketers there’s agreement that AdSense isn’t the best way to monetize the far majority of sites, but it is a great way to start out and learning to be efficient in using this type of advertising will help marketers pick up the lessons that they need to succeed in a variety of other online marketing endeavors. The money earned along the way is just a bonus.

Learning the structure of a web page
One of the things all Internet Marketers need to learn to be successful is how to lay out a good-looking web page for advertising (or capturing e-mails) and the ads that can be used from Google allow you to have different shaded backgrounds as well as different colors for the links and text. This is because it’s important to learn how ads that blend in with the page will always have a better response rate than ads that look completely different and stick out like a sore thumb.

Where ads are placed on a pace also has a huge effect on total number of clicks, click through percentage, and more. A few inches off on a page can be the difference between a 0.5% click through percentage versus 5.0%. If you’ve never heard of heat maps, now is the time to start Googling. Heat maps focus on how visitors view an average website and what areas their eyes tend to focus on and read and which areas on the page get skimmed or barely glanced at. Placement of ads in the red areas, or those where generally a lot of attention is paid, is critical to getting any type of success.

Learning these things through the use of Google ads gives you a concrete way of knowing if you’re improving (more clicks, higher rate, means you’re nailing it) and this information of where people read and what parts of the site people skim over, that’s information that you can use all the time whether it’s the structure of a sales letter, collecting e-mail addresses, offering free reports, or introducing picture ads. Placement is critical and learning to understand the anatomy and heat map of a web page not only helps you make a lot more with AdSense but it also helps with all other marketing in the future.

Learn to target the right audience
All the time you hear marketers talk about how important it is to learn how to target your audience. This is absolutely true with AdSense for two major reasons:

• You want more clicks on more ads to make more money
• Really poor click through rates can mean you get “smart priced” which turns all your clicks into pennies
  The right audience plays into this quite a bit.

A highly technical audience that is familiar with online topics and computer technology are going to fully understand what Google ads are and there is virtually no chance of them clicking through. On the other hand, when you have websites that are built around products that sell or built around niches that have passionate hobbyists, then you’re likely to have a much, much better rate of ads being clicked on.

This all comes back to targeting the right audience. You wouldn’t sell chainsaws to Wall Street bankers and you wouldn’t talk about $500 silk ties to loggers making minimum wage. The online world is no different and in this situation there is no better starting point for

Specific AdSense tips and strategies of note
While there are always exceptions to the rule, in general bigger is better when it comes to AdSense blocks. The big square blocks tend to convert the best, but they also need to blend well with whatever site they are being put on. The background of the ad should match the background of the ad in color, and the text in the ads should match the text color that you see on the website. As long as they are blended correctly, the big blocks should convert the best.

The second best converting type of ad is usually a skyscraper on the left hand side of the page. Many webmasters will put theirs on the right hand side but a variety of studies show that most of the time the conversion rate will be better if it is on the left hand side of the website where the eyes of a viewer tend to stay quite a bit. A combination of both can do very well.

One other tip that works well specifically with AdSense involves heavily informational websites. If you have a website that is less based on sales and products, but answers informational questions in depth, then some people have found that an ad block at the bottom of the post once the reading is done can get a good click through rate. This usually isn’t the best spot but if you’re snagging full on readers, this can be a very effective way to get more clicks on your page’s ads.

Multiple WordPress plug-ins can help
WordPress has multiple plug-ins, both free and paid, that focus specifically around AdSense. Many of these plug-ins focus on the ability to move around ad spaces on your site and to customize where your ads appear on the pages of your website in addition to being able to help automatically set up Google ads within the actual posts themselves. There is a definite level of convenience here as in theory this means a one-time set up will then automatically take care of placing the ads within each and every post for maximum effectiveness.

The demand isn’t going away as more AdSense based plug-ins are being produced every year and older ones continue to be updated on a consistent basis. While Google ads can be frustrating for beginners, the lessons learned can then be used on a wide variety of Internet marketing projects moving forward into the future.

In conclusion
Whether AdSense works for you as a full time residual income or a method that makes you thousands of dollars a month, or whether it’s just a learning process to become better at a variety of online marketing techniques that will help your other efforts expand, grow, and succeed, there’s no question that Google ads will continue to play a major part in online marketing. Many major online marketers might not spend much time with AdSense anymore, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a viable option for thousands of others. From learning the ropes to cashing in on thousands of dollars a month, these types of success stories still remain possible with some hard work and careful on-going study.