1. Be realistic with your expectations. Google has close to half a billion dollars sitting on it's balance sheet, which is effectively made up of webmaster's money, where they haven't made enough to make the minimum cheque payment.

2. Be realistic with your expectations. Sure, there are people out there making a heap of money with Adsense, but they have a heap of web-sites and a heap of traffic. Don't be fooled with statements how you can make a million dollars overnight.

3. Be realistic with your expectations (ok, enough, I hope you've got the message). Typical, across the board earnings, for a page with an Adsense ad on, not targeting high end earnings, is around $0.005 per page view. Let me repeat, yep, every time your page gets viewed and assuming your CTR (Click Thru Rate) is anywhere near

normal, then you can expect to earn around HALF of one cent.

Don't believe me? Then why not ask Google. To quote from the Google Adsense site: "From a publisher's perspective, the effective cost-per-thousand impressions (eCPM) is a useful way to compare revenue across different channels and advertising programs. It is calculated by dividing total earnings by the number of impressions in thousands.

For example, if a publisher earned $180 from 45,000 impressions, the eCPM would equal $180/45, or $4.00. However, please keep in mind that eCPM is a reporting feature that does not represent the actual amount paid to a publisher.

4. Figure out how much you want to make from Adsense and then figure how many impressions you're going to need and then figure out how you are going to get those impressions. For example, let's say you want to earn $100 per day from Adsense.

Based on $5.00/1000 impressions then that equates to 20,000 impressions PER DAY. All quite achievable and doable (probably not in left handed basket weaving) but you need to align your expectation with realistic targets.

5. Once you have a few thousand impressions happening, test and test and test again. The main things to change and test are the number, size and position of ads, and the colors of the font.

There are some guidelines that suggest that the 336*280 works best, but my experience tells me that this isn't the case for every web-site. Best thing to do is to change ONE thing, then wait for 1000 impressions and if results have improved, keep the change, if no improvement, then revert back and try something else.

6. Always use the channel codes when creating ads. This is essential if you want to track where your earnings are coming from. I also use it as a quick stat counter when I'm building new sites.

When creating my codes I also include the layout for example 728*90 AGOP BOTTOM to me means the large banner ad at the bottom of the page on A Gift Of Poetry

7. If you are just testing a whole page layout, you can use the same channel code for different sized ads.

8. You can now put a lot of Google ads on one page. To max a page out, you can have Two text ads, THREE normal ads and THREE referral ads AND Two search boxes. That's a lot of ads and I wouldn't recommend it. For example, the Google search box is a waste of valuable territory . Again, test and test to find best combinations that work for you and your site.

9. The world of the hyperlink is blue and it is not the blue that Google defaults the ads to. For the record, the normal hyperlink blue is 0000FF, why not change to that and test the results? {HINT}

10. I have a few strategies when it comes to Adsense. On some sites, I don't have it at all. On others, I create a 'visual ad road block' where the visitor has to scroll through a screen of ads to get to the content and thirdly, on other sites, I take care to blend the ads in with the content.

To be honest, all three strategies work and if you haven't got the message by now, you should have, because you need to TEST to find out which works best.

My final note of caution, don't spend ALL your time testing, you're probably only getting paid $0.005 per page impression.

11. When you do achieve some reasonable page impressions then it is worth using the alternate ad option that Google gives you. You will be pleasantly surprised (or horrified) how many times your back up ad will get shown.