If you surf the internet and if you’re reading this, then you must do, you will see on the majority of websites, blocks of text with links or pictures or movie clips with the legend “Ads by Google”. These are advertisements from the Google AdSense program.

I remember when I first saw Google ads, I occasionally clicked on one that interested me, but it never occurred to me to wonder why webmasters would put them on their websites. However, when I learnt through the MPAM 20 Steps program how to monetise a website (i.e. make it make money for you), it became clear why one would want to put Adsense on one’s website??. the advertisers pay you when someone clicks on their advertisement. The amount you are paid varies depending on how much the advertiser has bid for the relevant keyword - it can be cents or it can run into tens of dollars for a single click. It’s also very dependent on the content of your site and the keywords you have used, both in your meta tags and in your text because Google use that information to provide ads which are targeted to your site. Likewise, if you decide to feature a Google search box on your site, the Adsense which appears on the search results page are also targeted to your site content.

So how do you get AdSense on your website? First you need to apply for an account. This is a simple process which involves you providing the url of your website and your personal contact details. You will also need to select whether you sign up for AdSense for Content and/or AdSense for Search - I recommend that you choose both. You will need to wait a short while for your application to be approved, but this shouldn’t be a problem as long as your website meets Google’s terms of service and has plenty of keyword-rich content. You need to have at least half a dozen pages fully populated with relevant text otherwise Google’s spiders won’t have enough to look at.

Once your application has been approved, you need to log into your AdSense account and take a look around. I recommend that you sign up for the AdSense Team emails as they contain lots of useful information about terms of service, new features and so on.

I also recommend that you check out the Optimisation Tips. These will show you the best places on your page to place your AdSense blocks. The best will be “above the fold”, in other words, in a position on your page which doesn’t involve your visitor in scrolling down. Ads which are integrated with your text will also attract more clicks than those which are placed quite separately on the page. However, you will need to test what works best for you. To help you do this, AdSense provide what they call Channels, which give you the facility to track which of your ad blocks are doing best. For example if one of your websites sells toys and another sells gifts, you could have Channels called toysright and giftstopleft signifying the site and the position on the page of the adverts. When you run reports, you will be able to see whereabouts on your page the ads attract the most clicks. Having said that, you can have three ad blocks per page plus one lot of text ads, so there’s plenty of scope.

To set up your ad code, just select AdSense Setup, then you must choose the format of your ad block; you can change the background, border, text and link colours to match your site then select your Channel and the code will be there for you to paste into your web page.

Next time, I’ll go into a little more detail about how Google provide the ads and how to place them on your pages.

Liz Canham
As well as a love of Asian Food and Cookery, Liz seeks to help newcomers to the world of internet marketing with tools, tips and training from her Liz-e-Biz.com website.

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Anyone with a business presence online wants and needs to attract visitors to their website and not just any old visitors at that. We need quality, targeted, visitors, people who are genuinely interested in what we have to offer, not just tyre-kickers. The problem is, how do we attract these quality, niche focused people in any numbers?

There are a number of methods; some of the Traffic Exchanges let surfers not only choose the category into which their website fits, but also to choose the categories that they wish to visit; online directories give the opportunity to list your website in the appropriate category which makes it easier for potential visitors to find you; meta tags in your web page code will tell search engines how to categorise your page so that people who use those search terms will be directed to your site. That only works of course if the search engine happens to index your site and there’s the rub. By far the greatest amount of traffic will come to you through the search engines but how do you make sure that your site is indexed?

Well, we’ve all heard of Search Engine Optimisation, in other words, making your website search engine friendly. Search engines send out “spiders” or “bots” to crawl websites and they are hungry for original content. If you have content on your site that doesn’t appear elsewhere, you will make the spiders very happy and they will be more likely to index your site. If your pages contain nothing but content identical to that found on other websites, they may not be indexed, in fact the spiders may not even bother to crawl them.

The way to provide those hungry spiders with original content is to write articles which are closely related to the topic of your site, your “niche”. Use keywords within your articles which reflect what you think are common search terms, which will help the spiders too. However, don’t forget that your ultimate aim is to attract human visitors so don’t overdo the keyword usage or your readers will become bored and leave your site for pastures new. Make sure, too, that the keywords you do use are relevant to the topic of your article. There’s nothing more irritating than searching for “wild flowers” and finding yourself on a web page relating to interior design.

Your articles should be a minimum of 500 words and should be informative and authoritative. In this way, your visitors will learn to respect your views or the information you provide and will be inclined to return. If you sound like you know what you’re talking about, they will also be more likely to take notice of your product recommendations and earn you some affiliate commissions.

This is just scratching the surface of the benefits of writing original content to publish on your website or in article directories, so look out for future articles which will look at planning and researching your articles, the importance of spelling and grammar and how to make the search engines notice your website.

If you would like detailed tips about the dos and don’ts of article writing, visit my Liz-e-Biz website and download my ebook.

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There are many reasons why you may want to write articles but in terms of publishing for profit, there are really only two.

The first is for direct and immediate profit. In other words, you write the article and someone pays you for it. At this point, you lose all rights to what you have written, so don’t imagine that you can regurgitate even one sentence and re-use it. Of course, you still have the knowledge and are free to continue writing and publishing on the same subject. Just make sure that the content isn’t recognisable and that you don’t inadvertently use an identical complex sentence to one which was in the article that you sold.

The second reason for writing articles is to attract visitors to your website and/or to purchase your product for longer term profit. In this instance, you can’t sell your article because to need it to carry your name and your business details and web address, not somebody else’s. You retain the rights and can do what you like with your masterpiece, but you will probably choose one or several of the following.

- Publish on your own website but use your blog or newsletter to tell people where to find your article. If you “ping” your blog, certain search engines will be updated and others will detect of their own accord that your site has new, original content and will send their spiders along to index it.

- Publish in an ezine. Many ezine owners are looking for content and may agree to a swap, otherwise you may have to pay for your article to appear. However, if you choose the ezine carefully, it can be well worth the expenditure.

- Publish in an article directory. This may well lead to other websites using your work for content or distribution via RSS feeds. Each time your article appears, so will your link, attracting even more visitors to your site or product.

If you join MPAM and follow the 20 Steps course, you will learn about all of the above. The course lays out a detailed plan for the successful creation and population of a content-rich, search engine friendly website.

Whatever your reasons for writing articles and wherever they end up, before you start to scribble or tap away at the keyboard, there are a few basic things that you will need to know.

A good standard of English grammar and spelling is required. Without that, your articles will remain unread and other than on your own website, where you can do what you like, unpublished. The major article directories check spelling and grammar quite carefully and will reject out of hand, articles which are not of a sufficiently high quality.

Original, informative content is a must. It’s worth doing some research to find out what the internet population are interested in before you even start.

A well-structured, cohesive piece of writing is necessary. There’s nothing more likely to lose your readers’ attention than muddled or contradictory ramblings.

If you would like detailed tips about the dos and don’ts of article writing, visit my Liz-e-Biz website and download my ebook.

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It is said that the business which invented “pay for performance” or “pay per click” as it’s now known, was Overture, subsequently taken over by Yahoo.