There are two different possibilities as to why you have a click worth $0.00.  The first is the most common, the big G has determined that the click is invalid and therefore does not pay out for it (they also don’t charge the person that bought the advertisement).  If you see a lot of clicks worth zero you should be concerned about your adsense account.  If Google suspects you of fraudulently clicking on your own ads they will suspend your account.  Either you need to stop clicking on your own ads or you need to inform Google that someone else is clicking on your ads in a manner that looks fraudulent (you do this so you have a paper trail to at least fight an upcoming ban).

If you aren’t the culprit of the fraudulent clicks the best thing you can do is take down all of your adsense ads immediately.  You won’t be making any money while your ads are down but it’s better to not make any money for a few days than to have your adsense account banned.  Before you decide to put the ads back up check your logs and make sure that none of the IP addresses that were clicking your ads have been to your site recently.  When you do decide to put the ads back up take a couple hours and watch your IP logs and check your adsense account often.  If you see any fraudulent clicks take them down again.

Make sure you are detailing all of this so that you can eventually send a letter off to Google with all the information you have gathered.  Google does not like fraudulent clicks, it wastes their time and resources and defrauds their adwords customers of money if not caught.  The more information you can give to Google the better.  This will also help you if they decide that your adsense account is a risk to their customers and ban it.

The second possibility is much less common.  The ad clicked on your site was worth less than $0.01 to you.

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The easiest way to pay for your websites hosting costs is to sign up for an ad program.  There are a lot of them out there though.  So to get the most bang for your click what program should you go with?  Well the three big players are Google, Yahoo, and MSN with their contextual ad networks.  MSN has a pretty big sized ad network that pays pretty well, but both it and Yahoo are in their infancy when compared to the big G.  Google consistently outperforms Yahoo and MSN in terms of the ads being relevant to your site (meaning they have a large number of ads to display) and the payment per click.  In fact, Yahoo recently inked a deal with Google to share their ad networks with each other so that Yahoo can get in on some of Google’s action.  If you can’t beat them, and Yahoo certainly can’t beat Google (neither can MSN), join them.

Now that you have the major player picked the question revolves around your desire to dabble with some of the other players in the market.  In order to do so you’d have to make sure it’s not agains the Terms of Service for either provider to use another ad network on your website.  You will also need to realize that using another smaller ad provider will cost you a few clicks from your primary provider.  The main advantage to the secondary provider is that it allows you more ads per page (Google only allows 3 ads per page).  It also gives you a back up should you do something that your main provider deem agains their TOS and ban your account.

There are a number of smaller ad providers out there but the biggest one out there is called adbrite.  Using adbrite you can place ads on your page just like you can with Google.  An advantage with adbrite is that you can set the prices you want to be paid for the ads instead of just accepting whatever Google/Yahoo/MSN pay your for each of your clicks.

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So you’ve managed to make a website and gather a decent amount of traffic on the web.  Now you want to put some ads on the site, but the question is do you go with image ads or text ads?  The easy answer is text only ads.  Text only ads typically do better than image ads on a given website.  Though this performance is scewed because most people that use text only ads blend the ads into the content as well as possible to make the ads look like part of the content.  This is effectively tricking the reader into clicking the ads since they look like content.  So I like to think that the value on text ads is a bit skewed.

If the ad won’t be masquarading around as content on your site the answer is a bit more difficult.  I prefer to use a mix of text and image ads on my site in places that don’t interfere with the content.  The text ads give the reader more options to click on and these typically have higher pay per click.
The reason for using image ads is that they give an allure to your site.  Chances are you don’t have a site that’s ranked in alexa’s top 100,000 sites in terms of traffic.  Most sites that are highly trafficed will have an agreement set up with some third party ad placement agency that puts image ads on your site.  If you don’t have the traffic to attract such an agreement the image ads can give your users the illusion that you have more traffic than you do.  Perception is everything on the web.

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There are a lot of things to consider when using adsense. First and foremost, you need to experiment a lot. Because each website is different some things work well on one site and horribly on others. You’ll find a lot of good info on adsense from google (it’s in google’s best interest to see you succeed). You just need to search for it.

Some things to consider:

• Placement of ads
• Ad colors
• Blending ads into content/make them stick out
• size of ads
• number of ads on page
• what types of ads to use (link unit/video/text)

All these things will affect your earnings and there aren’t any straight forward answers. I find that people click my ads when the stick out more. You might not find the same. Play around with all of those things and be patient. Set up ads in different channels and over the course of 8-10 thousand impressions make an informed decision about what works best.

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The number one mistake everyone makes when starting a website is that they do it to make lots of money.  Very few websites ever make more than a few thousand dollars a month let alone the millions that google or facebook make.  The best kind of site to make is one that you like writing about.  That said, there are different ways of making a website to get your ideas out on the web.  Different methods produce different results.

Forums: if you liked a particular topic, say batteries, you could easily make a forum on the topic and write all kinds of posts on different kinds of batteries that you liked.  If your forum picks up members you get the added bonus of the members writing most of the content for you.  The downside is that you have horrible click rates from members so most of your page views won’t result in any clicks.  Another downside is that if you don’t pick up members you’ll be talking to yourself and you won’t get any of the free content and then
your website looks like a graveyard to any potential members.  And no one wants to be a part of a dead or dieing community.

Another format that’s popular is blogging.  With a blog it’s much easier to convert your traffic into clicks, you can put the ads right in the middle of your blog posts and anywhere else you want to put it where it’ll get a higher conversion percentage.  You also have the bonus of not needing members to contribute content or posts to make your blog look like it’s lively.  The main detractor is that you need to keep adding content to the blog every few days.

Social networking/news sites seem to be a big hit these days.  Though those formats are so overly used and created these days that you’ll have a hard time breaking into those niche’s, and you require a huge userbase to make it successful.  Though if it works the upside is much bigger than anything else these days.

If you’re good with flash you could make a few clever games online, though like social networking the web is flooded with these sites.  You’ll need to be really clever with your game.

Overall, the best kind of site to get into for beginners is blogs.  They’re easy to use and pretty flexible.  Once you have a good amount of traffic you’ll be bringing in money through advertising.  Once you get a feel for how websites work a forum would be a good addition to your blog.

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There are two kinds of websites.  Those that look good and those that look bad.  If you care about how your site looks chances are that you spent a lot of time designing it and thenr refining the design.  The ease of use and flow is important to the people that view it so it’s understandable to want to make your site as good looking and user friendly as possible.  This way users will have a good experience while on your site and are likely to come back in the future.

The problem with having a great design is that it encourages users to stay on your site, and then return to it in the future.  This kind of traffic is important if you want the users to generate the content (like on a forum), returning users on a user content generated site are the most important users.  But these users become ad blind quickly and will not click on them.  The first time user that finds your site and likes is it more likely to stay on the site longer, thus reducing the chance of them leaving the site through an ad.

If your site is repulsive to users they’ll want to leave it quickly by any means possible.  These users need to find your site through search engines since you won’t be getting many returning visitors.  The advantage to having a bad looking site is that the user is more likely to click on an ad to leave it since they’ll not be familiar with the layout.  These sites can succeed too since search engines are blind to website designs.  Put a lot of content on the page and you’ll get traffic.

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When a person visits any page on your site they scan it very quickly to see if it contains what they’re looking for.  All of that takes place in a matter of seconds.  They usually scan in an F pattern, so that’s where you’d want to place your ads.  One trick to helping your click through ratio is to offer fewer links to the user.

When they look at the page more often than not they’ll decide that they don’t think your page contains what they’re looking for.  After that decision is made they’ll either exit your page through the back button or a link that is on the page.  If there are a lot of links to choose from (including your ads) there’s a much smaller chance that they’ll exit the page through the ad.  So to increase the probability of them clicking an ad is to only provide ad links in that F pattern and put the other links you want to have on your page in another location.

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There a lot of people out there that will tell you to blend your adsense ads with the content of the page so that they look like a natural part of the site.  There are times to blend ads and times to not blend them.  It also depends on how you want to go about getting people to click on the ads.  Some people have had success by blending their ads into the content so that it looks like a natural part of the page.   While successful most of the time it can also be considered deceptive since you’re essentially tricking people into clicking the ads.

Others have been successful making their ads stand out against the page that they’re on so that people notice them right away.  I’ve had the most success with this method.  To find out what works best for your ctr you should do both.  Put each ad on a page that’s similar to each other and put each ad in a different channel in your adsense manager.  Over the course of 8-10 thousand impressions you’ll be able to determine what method works best.

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Most people would tell you that having a click through rate of between 1 and 5 percent is average for adsense publishers.  One way to make a decent amount of cash from adsense is to drive a ton of traffic to it.  The rest is how well your ads perform.  Your ad performance depends on a lot of different factors, one of which is placement.  Since google has a vested interest in people clicking as many ads as possible, they have done some research into the area.

The research shows that people generally scan web pages in an F pattern.  If they don’t like what they see they’ll spend less than a few seconds on the page before either clicking a link on it or hitting the back button on their browser.  The idea here would be that you hope they click on one of the ads placed on your page to exit it.

This makes optimal ad placement down the left column of the page, as well as right at the top.  Many sites have forgone a large banner up at the top in favor of a small one coupled with an ad.  The next area to look at would be right above the fold but below some content.

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There are differing opinions as to when a person should add Google adsense to their website.  Many people will tell you that you should wait until you have a strong userbase and are getting over 1000 unique visitors per day.  Their logic follows that if you clutter up your site with adsense ads then you’ll turn potential repeat customers off to your site and it’ll take that much longer to gain a userbase.

Others will tell you to not wait and put the ads on right away.  It can take years to get to over 1000 unique visitors a day.  During that time your website isn’t making you any money, little as it may be.

They’re right, you shouldn’t wait until you get 1000 unique visitors per day, unless you’re the first into a popular new niche that’ll take a long time.  But you should also not clutter up your site with adsense.  You should add your ads in a way that makes them part of the overall template so that they don’t look out of place.  To do this you need to incorporate them much sooner than 1000 visitors per day.  But when doing so don’t make your site look like it’s just made to serve ads.  You definately should wait until you have most of your pages indexed by google as your adsense ads will be wildly off target until google has most of your site indexed.  You can determine this by using google’s webmaster tools.

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