Make Sense of Google AdSense to make money!

As a successful web publisher looking to get to the next level, you are probably thinking about trying a number of different approaches to increasing revenue – especially your passive revenue, the money that just "shows up" from time to time while you focus on other things. You may be considering various forms of internet advertising. And you should.

Internet advertising has exceeded all expectations. The technology keeps advancing, and the popularity and ubiquity of the medium is incredible. Most companies can benefit from the Internet because it allows the chance to reach a global audience at never-before-possible speeds, with many kinds of filters to make sure the right audience sees the right message, and costs that are often surprisingly low. But many businesses make money online in ways that have very little to do with their own actual business, but with systems that connect various companies and offerings together.

You may be wondering how to make money easily with online advertising, and you have come to the right place!

the secret is that taking ads is a much more profitable strategy then placing ads for most websites.

And the best way to make money with this right now is "hiding in plain sight" from the world’s most popular search engine company.

What is Google AdSense?

Google AdSense is an ad-serving program that places ads that "make sense" – specifically, that make sense based on relevant content, and assumptions about who might be interested in that content. AdSense is an application of the broader concept of Contextual Marketing.Contextual Marketing is just what it sounds like. On a website about custom cars, you might have an ad for fancy wheels or car care kits. On a website about off-roading, you might have an ad for durable truck tires or spotlight rigs. A hockey site might advertise hockey sticks…and a tennis site, tennis shoes.

Contextual Marketing just means aligning the ad serving with the context/nature of the website and its audience, the same way like items are grouped in a store. And the "context" can be cut much finer than website level, it can be page level, article level, and so on, so the ads always match the material they are appearing near, and thus, appeal to the interest of the reader/buyer at any given moment.

So what’s in it for you – the website publisher/owner? That’s easy.Every time a visitor to your site clicks one of these ads, you make money. The better the ads are targeted, the more clicks you get, the more money you make. AdSense displays easy-to-read, text-based, relevant ads that don’t overshadow the content of your website or annoy visitors. Actually, you have seen hundreds of these ads yourself, as you’ll realize in a moment.

Today there are probably only a few places in your website that can directly make you money, if any. The magic of Google AdSense is this: It allows you to earn money through every page of your website.On top of that, with algorithms used to align ad content with page content Google automatically selects and displays ads for your website that are likely to generate the highest revenue for you.AdSense is an application of AdWords beyond Google.comMaking "sense" of AdSense means understanding that it is really an offshoot of the older Google model, AdWords. But they are not the same thing.If you have ever searched on Google, you have seen AdWords.

Google AdWords are the small text ads that are displayed on the side of the search results in Google. These ads are contextual of course – in this case the context is the search terms you entered. The ads will be served based on what you’re looking for. So, if you do a search on "printing services" you will get ads for printing services along with your search results!How does this generate money for Google and the advertisers?Google AdWords works on a model known as pay-per-click. When someone clicks on an AdWords ad, the advertiser of that ad has to pay Google a certain amount. It’s easy to track and fully automated.We say "certain amount" because that amount is different all the time and is subject to market forces – in this case, bidding. Something has to determine the placement of those ads, and what determines it is how much the advertiser offers to pay per click. When you submit this kind of ad to Google, you submit it with a bid – which is compared to other bids for similar keywords. It’s an auction style process.

The position of the AdWords ads is based on the bidding amount of keywords of an ad. Obviously, the higher the bid, the higher the position the bid buys you. For instance, if the highest bid for the keywords "Internet marketing" is 80 cents per click, you can get top position by bidding 90 cents.

Then every time someone clicks on your ad, Google would charge you 90 cents, and you would retain the top position until someone else bids more for the same search word placement.Google AdSense, as stated earlier, is an extension of Google AdWords. It takes the AdWords concept and moves it off of Google’s search page and onto thousands of other web pages. The ads that are displayed on the websites are Google AdWords ads.It’s good for the advertiser, who gets more and broader displays, for Google, who charge more for this program, for you, who will make money from the clickthroughs on your pages, and also for the consumer, who will see cool ads for stuff they are probably interested in!

So how exactly are you making money from all this? You earn a share of the pay-per-click amount, every time a visitor clicks on the ad. So you just need to get ads on your site…

How the Ads Get On Your Site

Once you join the AdSense program – and Google approves your site or sites, which we’ll cover in detail shortly – the actual process of displaying ads on your website is extremely simple. You are provided with a small HTML script, which you can paste anywhere on your webpage.

You may paste this code any number of times and on multiple pages, and watch the ads get served! Google automatically places AdWords ads that are most relevant, from its extensive advertiser base. Google employs various sophisticated algorithms to determine the relevancy of the ads to your content.Before we get into how Google assesses sites, and whether a few or many placements of that magic script will deliver optimum results, let’s review the advantages of AdSense.

Advantages of the Google AdSense systemGoogle AdSense is simple to use and manage. Once approved, displaying ads on your webpage does not take time and requires minimal technical knowledge.Google AdSense is very smart about ad selection. The ads that are displayed are only those that are relevant to your content, and Google has strict quality control on the general quality of the ads.

Custom CSS Signatures in Mail

The default interface for Mail signatures allows you to do rich text signatures using the fonts and colors palette। You can even drag an image into the compose signature window and it will be included in every email as an attachment। This is fine for most people, but attachments should be just that, an attachment of a file I am sending, not an image in my signature। So here’s an easy guide on how to do CSS signatures referencing images on an outside server and not as an attachment.

STEP 1: Create a new Mail signature
Launch Mail, located in the Applications folder। From Mail’s top menu, select ‘ Mail > Preferences ‘ and go to the Signature pane. From the Signatures pane, click the plus icon underneath the middle column to create a new Signature. In this example I cleared all my previous signatures for the purpose of clarity but this is not required. Once your signature is created, quit Mail by selecting ‘ Mail > Quit Mail ‘ from the top menu.
Using a text editor application, create your signature using html and css।

Step 2: Create your new signature in a text editor
TextEdit can be used for this, just make sure save as HTML and not rich text. If you want to use my signature style, just download my html sample file and use it as a starting point.
UPDATE: After publishing this, some of you have discovered that GMail will not display any of the CSS unless it’s inline. So here’s a new revised sample file that has all the CSS inline including the image as an img file instead of a a background css attribute. When using this method, GMail will show a link giving the user the option of showing the embedded images.
If you are starting one from scratch check out A List Apart’s article on CSS in emails। In summary, do not use html, head or body tags, use divs instead. Use embedded CSS not extarnal. Do not use classes that start with a dot, but u can do #div .class instead. The same goes to the a: tag.

Step 3: Create Web Archive from signature
Open the signature html file you just created in Safari। You can do this by dragging the actual file icon into the Safari icon in your dock. This should look exactly as you want your signature to look like.
To save this as a web archive, from Safari’s top menu select ‘ File > Save As… ‘ and save the signature as a Web Archive by selecting ‘Web Archive’ on the Format pulldown menu। Saving to the Desktop makes it easy to find for the next step.

Step 4: Replace old signature with the new one
From the finder, navigate to ‘ your home folder > Library > Mail > Signatures ‘। Since I only have one signature in Mail, there’s only one ‘.webarchive’ file in this folder. If you have more than one signature, you need to find the one we created on step 1. Open the web archives in Safari to find the one we created in step one. Copy the file name of the archive file and paste the name in the new archive file on the desktop to rename it. Now drag the new signature archive from the desktop into the Signatures folder. It should prompt you asking if you want to replace the file, which you do.

Step 5: Activating the new signature
Launch Mail and select ‘ Mail > Preferences ‘ from the top menu then go to the Signatures tab। You can rename the signature name here by double clicking it’s name and renaming it. Notice that Mail will not properly render the html in this Signature window but it will render it properly in the compose window.
Now drag the signature to the mail accounts you want it available for।
Then select the account from the left column and select the new signature from the ‘Choose Signature’ pulldown menu। This will make it the default signature for that account.

Step 6: Testing our new CSS signature
To test our new signature, compose a new email and send it to yourself। You should be able to see the signature in the compose window.
Click the send and receive button to receive you new email. You should get a new email with your spanking new fancy signature that contains no image attachments. What a concept!