It already seems a long while ago that Google Adsense was the flavor of the month throughout the world of internet marketing. There were tales of great wealth to be made just by putting up lots of sites and filling them with Adsense. It was at one time considered one of the easiest ways of making money online.

However, many have found that despite putting up hundreds of sites, their Adsense income is only reaching a few dollars a day, if that. So what happened?

You have to remember that Adsense is primarily for the benefit of the advertisers, not the webmasters who put the ads on their sites. Therefore, Google will always place the advertiser first when looking at sites on which Adsense is displayed. Google now comes down hard on sites that are put up solely to get income for the site owner, with no real content apart from the ads. With some webmasters trying sneaky methods to make the maximum amount of money from their Adsense, and making Adsense the focus of their site rather than the content, it is not surprising that Google is continually looking to improve their image.

For this reason, Google has changed the rules since those early days, and many webmasters saw their Adsense earnings decimated. Also site visitors are a lot more knowledgeable these days, and they are a lot less inclined to click on ads than they once were.

All these things have conspired to drive the earnings from Adsense downwards. So, is there any money still to be made from Adsense?

The key to making money online with Adsense is the placing of ads for high paying keywords on pages that are receiving high traffic. The more expensive the cost-per-click to the advertiser, the more money you will receive. Therefore do not target low cost-per-click keywords or place your ads on pages which do not receive a high traffic count.

There are three major ways that site owners are now using to make money online from using Adsense.

1. Getting a high traffic count. Check on your logs to see if your promotional activities are resulting in more visits to your site. More traffic generally means more clicks, and therefore more money for you.

2. Seamlessly integrating the ads into the general content of the page. An example is to make the Adsense block of ads look like it is part of the sitemap menu, using the same colors and similar format.

3. Making sure that the Adsense ads are relevant to the page content by making your header tag relevant to the content.

When done well, these three factors should produce the maximum amount of revenue from a page. This strategy works well on sites that focus on good relevant content for their visitors.

One other particularly good money-making feature of the new Adsense is the ability to put filters on up to 200 urls. This means that webmasters can block out low value keywords from their pages. And take only those ads that pay well while discarding the rest.

So, there is still reasonable money to be made in Adsense, but not perhaps the six figure incomes that some marketers were claiming in the early days, but webmasters must ensure that they comply with all the ever changing guidelines that Google is producing for Adsense, or they run the risk of having their Adsense account suspended.