I think the title of this article gives the best definition that can be found for the AdSense program of Google.
Through its AdSense program Google let you earn without the need for you to sell anything at all to anyone anywhere.
Many persons, including who is writing this article right now, are making money and receiving checks from Google month after month.
And there are many internet entrepreneurs that are generating higher incomes from participating in the AdSense program than from the direct sales of their own products or services.
All right, you are thinking that I told you something that simply has no meaning as earning money without selling.How can it work
The answer is simple, you are paid per click and not per sale.
The AdSense program of Google is a service that let you, and anyone else that provides some kind of content online, to become a publisher for the Pay Per Click advertising program they run.
You can see it as a triangle, where three different subjects are involved:
- Advertisers
- Google
- Publishers
The advertisers join Google PPC service (named AdWords) in order to promote their services or products to the huge audience that this giant search engine has each day.
They bid on specific keywords that are relevant to the services or products they sell and have their ads displayed on Google when searches are made for the chosen keywords.They pay to Google for every visit to their sites that comes from this promotion, so they pay for each click.
Google then opened another service called AdSense that is an addition to AdWords. It is a service for online publishers, and let you display on your web pages ads of the AdWords advertisers targeted to the keywords of your web pages.It is all done automatically when you add the simple code that AdSense gives you once you are approved for their service.
Once a visitor of your sites clicks on one link of the AdSense ads that your site displays the AdWords advertiser is charged by Google for the click, or visitor that is delivered to his site, and you are credited by Google a share of that money in your AdSense account.
So you are paid for selling nothing at all, but just for the click that the AdSense ad received in one of your web pages.
Of course the Google AdWords advertisers are very interested in selling the products and services they promote paying for every visitor sent to their site, and I sincerely hope that the clicks that increase my AdSense income benefit the advertisers that pay me through Google, but this anyway is not my concern or something I have to worry when I create my sites and add the AdSense code to them.
I am more interested in creating web pages that are interesting for my visitors and provide them useful content.I worry to provide them with explanations and links of good resources if I dont have directly the opportunity to offer them a product or a service, and the ads displayed by Google are an addition that can be interesting and useful for them and can increase my income.
I think it seems all very simple from the above explanations.One thing that is very important to know is that the Google AdWords program is extremely crowded and there are really a lot of keywords and key phrases with big competition and very high bids. This means that advertisers pay a lot of money for every single click for those keywords.
Of course also AdSense publishers can earn a lot of money if they have sites related to those keywords that receive many visitors and many clicks to the Google ads.
Gian L. Ruggeri and Michael Crownley teamed up to run a sitededicated to Earn With Google. You will find useful info andresources related to AdSense, AdWords and SEO.
Paid advertising such as Google AdWords is a lucrative way to bring targeted traffic to your website fast. You just need to set up an account with a small activation fee of $5 and you can start bidding on keywords and gain ranking in the SERPs on the right side of the organic search engine listings instantly. Everytime someone clicks on your ad, you pay Google a few cents or dollars depending how much you are willing to pay as maximum cost per click(cpc) for your different keywords.
While its easy to start advertising on Google AdWords, its not easy as just creating an ad, get clicks and sales start pouring in. Always remember this so that you dont get deceived. Below are 6 strategies for you to get the most out of Google AdWords advertising.
(1) Getting Clicks
Ive experienced it before and the problem most people are confronted with is to get sufficient amount of clicks that can convert into a sale for instance. The key to get clicks is to give people a compelling reason to check out your offer. You dont have enough room to write a long ad so your primary objective is to get people to click on your offer among all the rest. Some people might not even know you are selling something until they click and get to your site and they dont need to know that because your sales page is going to do the rest if it has attractive and powerful sales copy.
(2) Higher Bids
Next important thing is you need to bid high enough so that your ad appears among the top. Ive found that you can still get a decent number of clicks even though you are on the second or third page of the search engine results for highly competitive terms. For less competitive, more targeted and cheaper keywords, you can appear on the first page, usually the most recommended. Its very important to test which keywords are most profitable for you in terms of clicks and conversions. If a keyword isnt getting clicks at all and you have bid high enough, most probably, your ad is not attractive in generating clicks. On the other hand, if you are getting many clicks and no conversion, your sales letter might not be doing its job properly. Perhaps, you need to tweak it. A sale for every 50 or 100 visitors is generally considered good on the Internet. Thats a 2% conversion for every 50 visitors and a 1% conversion for every 100 visitors. Everything above that is very good.
(3) Creating Different AdGroups
To get the most out of Google AdWords, you need to create different AdGroups for each keyword and ensure that your keyword is highly targeted, hence improving your conversion. Its much work than just slapping one AdGroup, one ad and one maximum cost per click(cpc) for say 100 keywords. With different AdGroups, you can have different ads, different maximum cost per click(cpc). One of the main reason to create different AdGroups, is that you can add your targeted keyword phrase in your ad, be it the title or the description. It has been proven that people are most inclined to click on ads that contain the exact keywords they are looking for, so this is a good reason for you to create keyword-rich ads.
(4) Keyword Status
With Google AdWords, you no longer have disabled status keywords, on hold status keywords, trial status keywords and normal status keywords. You just have active or inactive keywords now. For inactive keywords, usually you will see a message like this 1 keyword(s) are currently inactive. These keywords are marked in the status column below. Improve their quality through optimization, delete them, or raise the keywords maximum CPCs to the minimum bids indicated. (Raising the bids will activate the keywords.)
Next to the inactive keyword, you will see something like Inactive Increase quality or bid $1.00 to activate or Inactive Increase quality or bid $5.00 to activate but it can also be other bid values. Usually, I just leave it inactive if it costs too much to activate and I delete it. This new method of keyword bidding evaluation is much more interesting than the previous method because most of the keywords are active and showing now, hence better advertising.
(5) Keyword Matching Options
If you are selling specific products, use exact match and phrase match for your keywords. With exact match, you just need to put square brackets between your keywords for eg [sports cars], hence your ad will only appear to people searching for that exact keyword phrase. Phrase match is a bit the same as exact match but double quotes are used instead of square brackets, for eg sports cars. This keyword phrase with double quotes will only appear to people searching for that exact keyword phrase plus any other keyword combined with sports cars at the beginning for eg red sports cars but not sports cars red. You also have negative keywords where you just put a minus sign in front of the keyword that you dont want your ad to appear for eg -free. All people who type the word free in their searches wont trigger your ads. The negative keywords applies mostly to phrase match and broad match which we are going to discuss.
The last one, the broad match, using keywords with nothing around it, is usually not recommended if you are selling specific products because you might not get very targeted visitors. For eg, if you use the keyword phrase sports cars as broad match, your ad might appear for people searching for sports or cars.
(6) Google Search and Content Network
You can also use Google search network such as AOL, Ask Jeeves, Netscape, Earthlink, Compuserve amongst others to get your ads appear on them too as well as Google content network, which represents all the sites that have Google AdSense on them.(You can read more about adsense at http://www.zineguru.com/article54.htm and open an account at http://www.google.com/adsense.) To enable these options, you just need to put a tick in the checkbox next to your campaign number and click on edit settings at the top of the campaign list. Then you can put a tick in the checkboxes for search and content network.
In fact, all the AdWords publishers that have allowed their ads to be syndicated in the content network, will appear in the form of adsense ads on other webmasters sites. If your ad is related to a specific topic, it can appear on some of them. If people click on the adsense ads, you pay Google according to your maximum cost per click(cpc), generally a bit less and Google pays a percentage to the webmaster. This is how it works. Generally, if you let your ads syndicated on the content network and if your ad is good and your bid, high enough, you can get interesting clicks. You might even be the only ad in the adsense space of the related site just because with the new Google AdSense rules, sometimes the highest paying ad can be the only one displayed even in a block usually comprised of 4 ads. Hence, it will fill the entire unit giving your ad more space and exposure. Less competing ads means more clicks for you.
How To Get Started With Google AdWords
If you want to get started with Google AdWords, sign up an account with them at http://www.google.com/adwords and conduct an extensive keyword research related to your business and start bidding on your keywords with your different AdGroups. You can use Yahoo! Search Marketing keyword research tool previously known as Overture at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion.
Due to the fact that your ad is new, you will have to start generating clicks and increasing its value because Google looks also at the click through rate(ctr) to help determine your positions. Your maximum cost per click(cpc) might not be the highest but if your ad is getting more clicks than your competitors, your position will shoot up. So a bit smart marketing if you want. You might try to put a higher bid initially and generate clicks and after awhile, lower your bids to a reasonable amount because your ad might still be in a decent position due to the click through rate(ctr). In addition, I advise you to have a daily budget above the recommended one to ensure that your ads are displayed everytime. If Google recommends say $5 daily budget, put it $10 or even $20. This does necessarily mean that you will spend that amount of money daily although you can. Its just a precaution to make sure that your ads are delivered well. You might not even meet the initial $5 if you are not getting clicks.
Conclusion
Google AdWords is a lot about testing and tracking which campaigns, AdGroups and keywords are working better for you and in the end, if you have a working campaign, stick to it and monitor it. Patience is important in pay per click advertising like AdWords. You might not see instant results but dont give up until you see some results be it a sale or an ad producing clicks. But be prepared to blow a few bucks because this is how you are going to learn ie by testing and tracking. Google AdWords is an additional source of valuable traffic and cant be ignored.
Good luck and happy advertising.
This article can be freely published on a website as long asits not modified in any way including the author bylines,plus the hyperlink must be made active just like below.
Jean Lam is the webmaster of which provides autoresponder review,article and courses to boost your marketing efforts.