Affiliate Marketing Resources

 Google Adsense

This is a relatively new advertising program which Google introduced to the market in 2002-3. Like everything Google does it the simplicity of it hides it's sleek design, high level of automation and the very powerful business opportunity that it presents for website owners.

Adsense is a very clever extension of the very popular Adwords system. Now as well as being able to create and place ads for products or services you can now host the very same ads on your own website and collect advertising revenue.

Just in case you are not sure what they look like an example of Google Adsense ads is shown to the right on this page. This is what is called the vertical skyscraper and consists of 4 ads in a vertical column in a 60x120 pixel format, and is one of the most popular formats. There are now a number of different formats so that you are almost sure to find one that fits in with the style and layout of your website.

The standard Adwords ads appear in the right hand column of the page when you do a search on Google, if no ads appear then it's because the terms you are searching for have very little commercial value and so far no one has placed any ads for those words or phases. The ads have a very specific format, just 4 lines of text and specified number of characters per line.

Because of this simple well defined format Google has been able to develop a very simple system for extending the reach or coverage of the ads. It's really quite brilliant, why limit the ads to just Google search pages?. The system enables a website owner to host ads automatically just by just cutting and pasting a html code snippet into a web page. Everything else is taken care of by Google including:

• Automatically deciding what ads to run on your site

• Collecting payment from the advertiser

• Paying you monthly

• Providing detailed statistics including impressions, click thru's and revenue on a daily basis.

So why is Adsense important for the affiliate or internet marketer you may be asking?. When starting out in affiliate or internet marketing one of the problems that faces most people is cash flow. You need startup cash for web hosting fee's, software, advertising fee's plus a selection of "how to" information books from the "experts" etc.

Adsense maybe the perfect vehicle to get your business into a positive cash flow position before trying develop your own or to sell other peoples products.

To generate cash from Adsense you need a content website, maybe you already have a website which gets traffic but produces no sales or revenue. By adding Adsense to the your site you can make immediate cash.

Alternatively you could decide to design a new site from scratch on a specific theme with the intention of running Adsense. Google has very specific requirements for eligible websites so if you intend to go down this route make sure that you read the guidelines carefully before starting.

The perfect combination is of course to develop a content based website, add Adsense and also add a selection of appropriate affiliate links as well.

The amount of revenue you can make from Google Adsense is going to be determined by the following:

• The number of websites you have

• Number of web pages that host Adsense ads

• Number of visitors to your site

• Number of clicks generated

• The type of ads being run

One of the terms of service conditions is that you do not disclose specific revenue details, but it is fair to say, based on my own experience and other information found on the internet, that you can generate anything from a few dollars a day to several thousand a month, depending on the size of your business.

Needless to say there is a whole lot more on the subject of Adsense and we have only scraped the surface here. The starting point for further information is of course to read everything provided by Google

See also Adwords and Google Cash