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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A lot of people with websites make the website for the explicit reason of making money online through ads.  This is done by a number of people successfully right now and you could be one too.  Don’t expect to make enough to quit your day job, but you could get lucky.

One of the mistakes people make when using pay per click advertisers is that they pepper their page with ads in an attempt to get as many clicks as possible.  These webmasters don’t realize that the amount they get paid per click will drastically decrease because of this.  Ad programs are happy to have you place multiple ad blocks on your page for users to click.  But they also like to place the highest paying ads at the top of the site.

That means if you have a banner ad at the top that doesn’t get clicked very often and you have another ad placed somewhere in the content the banner ad will always pay more money per click.  You should set up your ads in different channels to see which channels are clicked the most often.  That will give you an idea of what ad placement works best.  Then you should eliminate the ad placements that don’t get clicked very often, especially if they’re higher than the ads that do get clicked often.

Overall you might see a reduction in the number of clicks you get, but you should see an increase in the cost per click (cpc).  Hopefully the increase in cpc will make up for the lost clicks.  Of course the added bonus is to the readers, they get to see a website that isn’t peppered with ads and are more likely to return or encourage others to go to your site.

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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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The fold is something that’s talked about a lot by webmasters.  When a user find your website they’ll be presented with all the information that you provide to them.  The Fold is the part of the page that they can see without scrolling at all in their browser.  The fold is considered the most important part of your page by many webmasters.  If the fold looks good and flows well then the user is likely to scroll and view the rest of the page and also visit more pages on your site.

Most people using the internet are doing so at a pretty good resolution.  But it would be prudent to make the width of your page 800 pixels since there are still a number of users on that resolution.  These users will not have to scroll left to right on your page at all.  You’ll also want to provide the most important information in the top 600 pixels on the page.  The users with their resolution set to 800 width have 600 tall pixels to look at.  Though with scroll wheels on every mouse these days having to scroll vertically is not as big a deal as having to scroll horizontally is.

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People in the webmastering business will tell you that content is king.  Well if content is king then traffic is queen.  You can have all the great unique content in the world but if you only get a dozen visitors a day then your site isn’t worth much.  There are a number of ways to get traffic to your site.  First you need to make sure that your site is in all the search engines index, you can do this by submitting your site to the search engine or by linking it to an already existing site (when the search engines index that page they’ll follow the link).

Now that your site is known to the search engines you need to start building up links to it from other sites.  Doing so will help to increase your traffic to the site as well as increase your pagerank for search results pages.  There are a number of ways to build up links.  You can link to it through blogs.  Linking to your site through a blog post is easy and if you can find a blog that pertains to your sites topic then not only do you build a link for the search engines but people visiting the blog will click the link and probably visit a few pages on your blog.

Another common way to build up relevant links is through forum posts.  Find some forums that relate to your site and put a link to it in some of your posts, make sure your posts are on topic though.  If the forum allows it you can also link to the site in your signature, that link is less likely to be followed by visitors but search engines like it all the same.

Directories seem to be a common thing sprouting up all over.  Directories are like phone books.  You can submit your site to the directory in the relevant categories and if they approve your site you’ll be listed.  Most of the top ranked directories have stringent requirements for being listed and some require that you pay a yearly fee.  Others will ask you to provide a link back to their directory in exchange for their link to your site.

Link exchanges are like directories in that they link to you, but they require that you link back to them (hence the name).  If you can get on a link exchange with a high pagerank site you’ll see your pagerank go up that much more.  It’s important to note that the major search engines seem to frown on link exchanges, they will randomly go through sites listed on link exchanges and knock the rankings of each site listed down a few notches.  So proceed at your own risk with those.

Ads are another way to drive traffic.  A clever ad on the right site can bring in a lot of good traffic to your site.  This method is pretty difficult since most of us are not ad marketing guru’s as well as webmasters.  This method can also be very costly as you try to find the right ad to drive traffic.

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