Starting an AdSense website is relatively easy. However, there are plenty of things that may go wrong, especially if you're doing it for the first time. For one, most AdSense businesses crash down before they can really take off. The number of impressions and low click-through rate often changes what seemed to be an excellent business idea into nothing - unless you call earning $1 a day a profitable business venture.



What is AdSense?

90% of problems with AdSense businesses is caused by the fact that AdSense businessmen-to-be don't know much about what AdSense is and how it really works. While you definitely don't have to know all the technical details, it is an imperative that you understand all the basics.

AdSense is an advertising program run by Google. Webmasters who decide to take part in it add a special Java script to their websites that allows AdSense to display ads on the webpage it is installed in. The ads come from advertisers who have subscribed to the AdWords program and placed there their own ads. Then AdSense program places them at the AdSense websites that seem to be the most appropriate.

The advertisers pay either per each click on their ad or per thousand impressions (thousand people who have opened your website with the ad on it). A fraction of the price they pay goes to you - the website owner. Google acts only as an intermediary and editor, it is neither the source nor the real provider of any ads.

How Google knows what adverts to display on your site? Everything begins within the AdWords program. When advertisers create their ads, they also choose key phrases that are relevant to their ads. For example, if one creates an advert of a snowboarding website, he will probably choose such key phrases as "snowboard", "snowboarding", "snowboard styles", "snowboard course" etc. When a website is signed to the AdSense program, a special robot (=internet program) called Metabot "reads" your website in search for keywords (=words used in the content). Then it sends a signal to AdSense to send you the adverts that are triggered by the key phrases you have used in your website.

Starting an AdSense website

Build a site: while you can put AdSense ads on virtually any website, in 99% of cases you won't make any real money out of it. In order to start a real AdSense website that will become a steady income stream, you have to remember about:

*popularity - check what people look for on the Internet and build your site around one of the most popular topics. Use Wordtracker or Nichebot and take a look at the most often searched keywords to get some ideas.

*relevant content - AdSense is not an artificial intelligence and certainly not a mind reader. You have to put a lot of content that speaks about the website's topic AND USE THE KEY PHRASES! Otherwise you risk that some ads may miss your website and you get others that are irrelevant to your website. This may greatly decrease the click-through ratio. A tip: do not use the content you can find on the Internet, even if it is marked "public domain" - Google loves fresh unpublished articles.

*proper ad placement - most people who browse the website look at the upper left corner of screen first, then at the mid-upper part and lower left and only lastly at the lower right part of screen. Make sure that you can place your ads where people look first - this increases the chance they click on them.

Registration process: registration process is very simple and, what's even more important, free. Go to www.google.com/adsense and complete the registration form. Just remember that you have to add the provided script to your website before you get any ads displayed!

Get the traffic: now, when you have a decent website and relevant ads all you need is people who will visit your site and click on the ads. If your website attracts 1000 visitors a day, you can count on it to bring you a healthy profit. There are dozens of methods you can use. Among the most popular are: adding links to web directories, writing articles to article directories and getting links from other, relevant sites. It is probably the most difficult part of all AdSense business, broad enough to be discussed in another article.

Warning: angry Google = no income

During all the process there is one thing that you have to remember about: don't do anything that is prohibited or unadvised by Google. First, most of such practices won't give you any real profit. Second, if you make Google angry, they will simply ban your site from from their search engine, wasting all the hard work you've made and forcing you to start everything all over again. Trespassing Google regulations - clicking on your own ads or installing any robots who can do that for you - will always be swiftly punished. No courts, no lawsuits, no nothing - your website will be immediately and irreversibly banned, people cease to visit it and your income drops to zero in a matter of days. A few dollars more are just not worth wasting months of your work.