If you’re reading this article, it’s more than likely because you’re looking for a way to make money on the internet. In previous posts, I showed you how to build a website, how to pick a host, how to install WordPress and a few other tips to get you moving in that direction. Now it’s time to actually do something toward making some money. It’s called Google AdSense.
Google AdSense is an advertising system where you get paid for simply placing a small piece of code on your website so that Google can display targeted ads based on the content of your site. You can pick from text, image, video, or a combination of ads to have displayed on your site. The ads can be completely customized to match the rest of your website with very minimum effort and you can get paid by a couple of different methods.
The first method of making money from Google AdSense is the Per-Impression method. This means that you will make money for having X number of people simply view your website. They don’t have to purchase anything or even visit the sites of the ads. All they have to do is come to your site and you get paid. This doesn’t pay a whole lot at first. But, it can definitely start adding up as traffic increases to your site. Besides, how cool is that? You get paid without anyone doing anything more than visiting your site.
The next method of making money from Google AdSense is the Per-Click method. With this method, you make money for every time a visitor to your website clicks one of the ads displayed on your website. This pays a little more than the Per-Impression method, but is a little less possible of occurring.
Now, I’m sure you’re thinking to yourself, “if I can get paid for people clicking my ads, why don’t I just click my own ads?” Well, trust me when I say that you should definitely not do this. It is against the Google AdSense terms of service (TOS) and can get you banned from Google AdSense altogether. In fact, a few years back I had friend that knew a guy who was trying to get his feet wet in the internet marketing world and swore that he had a sure fire way of generating traffic to a site. I spoke with the guy several times, but he never would share his actual secret with me in fear that I would take his idea and use it for myself. So, I thought I’d give him a shot and see what the guy could do. After a couple of days of using his “technique”, I saw the number of unique visitors to my site increasing by about 10 fold every day. I was very impressed with this guy. He seemed to know what he was doing. One day during lunch, he told me that he also had a sure fire way of profiting from Google AdSense and asked that I give him a go at that for a small fee. Well, this is where things turned bad.
After a couple of days, I noticed that my Google AdSense account was increasing pretty nicely. Unfortunately, toward the end of the first week, I got a nasty email from Google claiming that I had violated their TOS and that my account had been disabled pending fraud. I quickly called my friend and he informed me that the guy I was paying to promote my site had confessed to him at one point that he was knowingly violating Google‘s TOS, but wasn’t going to stop since I was paying him to do so. Wait? What? I wasn’t paying him to violate anything. It turned out that he & his friends were clicking the Google AdSense links on my site themselves all day every day. He had even written some kind of system that could do it for them. Needless to say, I was pissed! Not only did I lose all of the money that was already in my Google AdSense account, I had also been banned from the Google AdSense network. The damage had been done. It took me several years to prove that I was not directly responsible for the misuse of the ads being displayed on my website and swear by the hand of God himself that I will not make the mistake of trusting anyone else to “help” with my websites again. Besides, I already had to deal with a similar situation before where I had purchased a website that was banned from the Google AdSense network before I purchased it. It took forever to prove to Google that I was not responsible for that site being banned which made it even more difficult this time around. But, in the end, I was not the bad guy and finally proved that to Google.
Anyways, if you want to make some money with your website and can follow the rules, Google AdSense is an awesome choice. To get started, you need to have a good website with a decent amount of content on it. Don’t throw together a website with the intentions of placing a bunch of ads on it and getting rich. Google will see that and will reject your AdSense application. Which I forgot to mention; you must apply for a Google AdSense account and not all websites are accepted. To ensure that your website is accepted, be sure to follow all of the rules and guidelines provided on the Google AdSense page. They do a good job of explaining everything your website needs before being accepted.
In my next article, I will show you how to add the Google AdSense code to your WordPress website.
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