Since its introduction in 2003, the Google Adsense program has greatly help bloggers defray hosting charges and other costs related to running blogs. Blogging can be very expensive especially when you have high levels of traffic and numerous pages. Many are turning to Google Adsense to generate some revenue from their blogs and what's more, earn some extra on the side.

What Google Adsense Is

Adsense is an advertising program run by Internet giant Google? Google Adsense allows you (blog owner) to sell advertising space on your blog. The program enables you to display relevant text and banner ads on your blogs content pages. Banner ads are the most common form of online advertising displayed at the top of many blog pages. Google pays you a fee when the visitor clicks on the ad.

Once you are accepted, all you need is a bit of javascript code to incorporate the advertisements into the accepted blog site. Google does the rest like providing appropriate ad links from its inventory of clients to your blog. Targeted ads will start showing up on your blog.

How It Works

Impression is the number of times a specific ad has been displayed. A blog publisher is reimbursed at a fixed rate per thousand impressions. If a page isn't significant enough, a blog publisher doesn't get paid as much. There is no charge for the blog publisher to join Adsense. All costs are covered by the advertiser who participates in Adwords.

How Much Money It Makes

The amount of money you (blog publisher) can expect from Google Adsense depends upon several factors. If your blog draws tons of traffic and you focus on a particular niche, Google will serve ads that appeal to visitors of your site. For instance, if you maintain a popular blog devoted to portable media player, you can make a windfall because of the high level of competition for related keywords. Rates for competitive keywords can exceed $1 which impacts your blog's earning potential. Conversely, if you are in a less competitive niche, you get occasional traffic only, thus less visitors click on your ads which equates to less money earned.

How much each advertisement pays per generated click is also another important factor. Each Adsense ad is not worth the same. An ad may give you ten cents while another may give you $1 per click. It depends on the demand for that kind of ad. If a number of advertisers are bidding for the same advertising space, the advertiser offering the most per click will get their ad displayed first.

Ad formats and placements influence revenue. Placing ads on the right part of the blog page is significant so that visitors looking at your page will see the ad, at the same time it will be not be overly intrusive to put visitors off.

Fundamentally though, it is all about content. To make money from Adsense, you have to know what your visitors are looking for. It may be information on a topic, a product they want to buy or a service they want to avail of and entertainment. Offering visitors good content will generate highly relevant ads which in turn will draw more clicks on the ads displayed. To optimize content, the same basic rules for search engine optimization apply.

Google doesn't publish the percentage it takes as a commission and only displays what the blog owner receives in member reports. However, you can make a rough estimate. The average click through rate (CTR) for online advertising is generally around 0.5 to 1%. CTR is the rate at which visitors click an advertisement usually calculated as a percentage of ad impressions (number of times a specific ad has been displayed). What each click pays is dependent on the content and keywords that are generating the ads being served.

Although Google doesn't release the amount it pays for keywords, you can sign up as an advertiser on top of being a participant in the Adsense program for $5 and see for yourself how much advertisers are paying Google for various click through. For example, a thousand page views with Google ads on them per day, at 1% click through rate and 25 cents per click will yield $2.50 per day. Not a lot but it can cover hosting fees or service fees.

Google Adsense is not a get rich quick program. But there are documented cases of bloggers earning as much as $5,000 a month and more. In fact, Jason Calacanis sold his blog network, Weblogs Inc. for a whopping $25 - $40 million on Google Adsense revenues of $1 million yearly. There isn't any sense why a blogger can't earn much from Google Adsense program. Definitely, there are thousands of dollars worth of reasons to make money from Google Adsense.