What is Google AdSense?

If you are already familiar with AdSense and already have an account and a website, you can probably skip this section. However, if you’ve heard about this “Google AdSense thing” and aren’t sure exactly how it works or how to make money with it, then this section is for you.

Let me start with a little history lesson. Don’t worry, it’s not too boring. :) Before Google developed the AdSense program, a person or business that owned a website had four basic ways they could make money with the site:

1. They could sell their own products on the site.

2. They could sell other people’s products on the site.

3. They could sell banner ads to other companies.

4. They could show banner ads from one of the advertising networks.

The first method made the most money, and is still a very common way of making money online. But it was (and is) the most difficult way to make money on the web. You had to create a good product that people will want to buy, and you had to support that product either via email or on the phone

(or both).

You had to be able to handle refunds and affiliates (salespeople). You can’t make everybody happy all of the time, either, so you had to grow a thick skin and not get angry when you read the occasional “this guy and his product sucks!” post on a forum somewhere. You had to advertise your product and compete with other people who have similar products. It’s doable (I know because I do it), and the rewards are great, but it takes a lot of time and a lot of work.

Number two was easier than number one because you were just an affiliate, or salesperson. You sold the product but you didn’t handle the refunds, you didn’t do the support, and you didn’t have to worry about what people said about you (because who complains about the salesperson?). There was still

a lot of work involved though, because you had to pre-sell your visitors and learn to write convincing “why you should buy this product” articles. And you never knew if all of that work would flop because the product just didn’t sell well, or worse–the company who created the product went out of business (it happens)!

Number three, selling banner ads on your site, required almost as much work as number one, because you had to seek out advertisers and handle their needs and setup scripts to track views and clicks and reporting and it was just a big hassle.

Number four was the easiest, because all you had to do was drop some code

from the advertising network onto your website and the network would

select ads to show and pay you for showing them. It was easy, but the pay

just stunk unless you had a huge volume of traffic.