by Peejaydee

Created on: February 18, 2007   Last Updated: April 14, 2007

Firstly, someone needs to be honest about Adsense. Yes, it's a great theory, yes you can earn money and yes, you could earn a lot of money. Where a modicum of truth and sense needs to enter the equation is in people's expectations of the scheme and what they could earn from it.

Adsense is a means of carrying content-related advertisements that will earn you money when someone clicks on them. The quality and type of ads you get is therefore entirely dependent upon the content of the web page they're on. Equally important to remember; the relevance of the ads is highly dependent upon the quality of the written content of your page.

The smarter ones among you will have realised already that I'm talking about written content. Yes, Adsense can be used with picture based sites, but this is much less effective. In keeping with the drive of the major search engines to encourage high quality, informative written content, Google's Adsense works best with keyword dense, high quality written content pages. This partly explains the massive boom in article based websites, almost all carrying Google Adsense.

Back to people's expectations... Many believe that they can simply create a website with any old content on it and then start cashing four-figure Google cheques every month into their Swiss account. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Success in Adsense requires an ability to write and create good quality, solid page content combined with a sound knowledge of search engine optimisation (SEO), because, and again the smarties among you will have twigged, your earnings are entirely dependent upon your web page traffic.

Not any old traffic will do though: it has to be relevant, targeted traffic - people who are actively looking for the info that you are providing.
Google are very strict about their Adsense system. Targeted traffic is a must. Many beginners believe they can just sign up with a traffic exchange system and hey presto - book the flight to Zurich to check the account!

Traffic exchanges don't provide quality, targeted traffic - and they could get you banned from the Adsense scheme.
This only leaves clicking your own ads to earn money. Better cancel the flight again, Google will spot it and that'll get you black-balled as well, only this time even faster. Click fraud is a big issue for Google and a zero tolerance approach is seen to be taken.
Earning from Adsense is hard work, takes specialist knowledge and a long time. Not just anyone will be able to do it. And that's the truth.

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