Google AdSense and other Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisements can be a great way to make money from blogs. With PPC advertisements, you get paid anywhere from a few pennies to a few dollars every time someone clicks on an ad. Even if PPC advertising is working well on your blog or Web site, often a little "tuning" can easily increase income by a factor of four or more!

There are several choices including the extremely popular Google AdSense, Kanoodle BrightAds, Chitika and the Yahoo! Publisher Network. Signing up is fast and easy and you can run them on most blogs, but check their terms of service well. For more details www.atoz-about-rss.com You simply cut and paste the advertisements to your blog, or in some cases you can simply use a plugin. They perform very well for some blogs but not well on others -- you need to experiment. We'll talk specifically about Google AdSense here, although the concepts are similar with all PPC advertising.

You want the ads "above the fold," which means the area of the blog visible without scrolling. In one long term test I performed I was getting about one click per 1500 page views for ads that were far down in the side bar, which is simply atrocious. When I moved the ads up so they were above the fold, clicks, and income, increased over 20 times! Of course, there are a lot of variables involved, but ads or anything you want people to click on or even see need to be in prime blog locations, preferably above the fold.

No one likes advertisements, so you want to configure the ads to blend in with your blog, i.e. the same background color, text color, link colors, etc. For AdSense this specifically means getting rid of the borders, so the ads do not specifically look like ads. In one experiment, just getting rid of the borders doubled clicks! Again you need to experiment. Every blog and Web site will be different.

With Google AdSense you have a choice of different sizes and types of ads, as well as choices of where to put them on your blog. You can setup different "channels" for different ads and ad types. For example, on one blog my self-describing channels were called leftsidebar, rightsidebarhigh, rightsidebarlow, incontent, and top linkbar. On this particular blog, rightsidebarhigh and incontent were the top performers by far. For more details www.your-own-blog.com The others received very few clicks so I removed them. Interestingly, although leftsidebar didn't work well for AdSense, that was a great and profitable location to display affiliate programs.

Google AdSense and other PPC advertising may work well on your blog. You can't tell whether they will work until you try them and spend some time tweaking them. Traffic levels are very important as well; you're not going to make six figures a year if you only have 25 readers a day.

We've given some general guidelines; your mileage may vary. What is most important is experimentation to find what works best on your blog.