by Ben Shaffer, 7/21/2007
The internet is abuzz over Google's Adsense program. Fortunes are being made by those savvy enough to understand how to use it to their fullest advantage. Everyone is looking for the best ways to exploit this massive advertising program, and there are literally hundreds of Adsense "experts" willing to sell you tips and hints on how to earn a healthy income with the program.
For those unfamiliar with Adsense, a brief overview may be in order. Google allows advertisers to place bids on keywords of their choice as part of what is termed the Adwords program. The amount paid for advertising related to each keyword is determined by this bidding process and can get relatively high for fairly competitive keywords. Very competitive terms can cost a great deal of money. The advertisements appear on the top of Google search engine searches (you have probably noticed them in shaded areas and along the right side of your own search results). These advertisements are also inserted into the web pages of those who participate in Google Adsense. Every time someone clicks on the advertisement, the advertiser is charged for the click. The proceeds are then split between Google and the Adsense participant.
Basically, Google is willing to pay those with content-rich websites to host these advertisements. The site operator, known as the publisher, merely needs to insert some simple and customizable HTML code on their site and ads will "automatically appear." To make matters easier, the ads are contextual in nature. Google "reads" the publisher's page and serves up advertisements related to the subject matter of the page.
Adsense was immediately seen as a way webmasters could earn some extra money from their content-rich pages that were not otherwise producing tangible financial benefits. Any subject matter for which ads exist (and ads are available on almost every keyword) could conceivably generate some profit that otherwise would not exist.
It didn't take long for people to realize that this approach merely scratched the surface of Google Adsense's potential bounty. Soon, webmasters determined that sites rich in content directly related to the highest paying keywords could generate significant profits with each and every click. With the high cost of competitive keywords, it was possible to earn several hundred dollars from a single Adsense-carrying page from only a handful of clicks.
Other publishers determined that finding underserved keywords that still generated significant per click revenue could also produce amazing results. A quality high paying "niche" Adsense site could be a significant source of revenue.