Adsense is one of the most popular ways for online marketers to achieve revenues. You are essentially becoming part of Google’s massive moneymaking machine and piggybacking on their proven understanding of what drives people to certain pages in the quest for certain types of information.

Adsense is the opposite of Adwords or “pay per click,” and is part of a marketing strategy where the advertiser gains partly qualified leads, the affiliate (you) gains revenue and Google, of course, gains income.

As affiliate programs go, Adsense is one of the simplest and requires very little effort on your behalf to sign up. As long as you are not involved in certain banned topics including firearms, tobacco and alcohol, Google will generally accept your site for display purposes.

To make sure that you get the most out of Adsense, you need to optimize your page and content accordingly. This goes to basic SEO, but you must ensure that your primary keywords appear in file names, title, heading, description and content. Google spiders will be looking for relevance and you need to be as crystal clear as you can. So long as you have taken care of this, relevant ads will be displayed by Adsense on your pages.

The whole principle behind Adsense is that a visitor to your site is keenly interested in your content and the Adsense ads displayed are highly appropriate. Understand that by clicking on the Adsense link, the visitor will be going away from your page, so you need to be prepared for that eventuality. However, his or her act of clicking on the link means that you are going to earn some money.

The amount that you will earn from each “click” varies enormously and Google does not publicize its rates and details. Some clicks will get you only a few cents, while others will be valued at a few dollars or more. Generally speaking, the higher value niche/keyword, the higher click through rate and as an idea you can see rates applicable to keywords within Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool.

Once you have Adsense ads up and running on your site, keep a close eye on what is being displayed. It is perfectly common to see ads for significant competitors. While you may coil back in horror when you first see this, all you need to do is go to your Adsense set up page and enter the URL of the site that appears in the competitor ad to exclude it.

Engage in tracking once you have some results under your belt to see which clicks represent the best payout. Adsense channels allow you to try different page setups, ad placements, color matching and so on.

When you are setting up your webpage for Adsense placement, try and give the ad block as prominent a position as possible. It doesn’t make too much sense if it is tucked down in the lower left, below the fold. Many say that the top left is best. Understand that the more content and more links that you have on a page, the lower number of Adsense clicks you’re going to achieve.

As is common within internet marketing, keywords are everything. You want to be sure that you are trying to score for keywords that have a high demand and low supply. Once again use Google’s keyword tool and find out what the estimated average cost per click is for each idea.

Create a meaningful page with good content, well optimized. Only rank for one keyword per page. Don’t be tempted to just create a page of Adsense ads only (known as “made for Adsense”) as this is against the rules.

Tell us about your experiences with Adsense