Adsense Insider Part 4

Today we are going to deal with the process of implementing AdSense into your site.

Of course, you first of all need to get accepted into the AdSense program.

Assuming your site has made the grade, you will get an email from Google with the title Welcome to AdSense.

This will include a link to a page on Google where you enter your username and password.

Make your password non-obvious because when you log on to your account, you say where the money goes and you don't want someone else redirecting it do you?

Included in your AdSense control panel is a form where you specify what shape of ads you want to display and when you make your selection, some JavaScript code appears in a box below. All you need to do is cut and paste this code into your site.

But there are some decisions you need to make first.

There are three steps.

1. Decide which pages you want to place AdSense ads on.

2. Decide what format ads you want on each page.

3. Paste the code in the site

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Where to place your ads
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Do you want AdSense ads on your home page?

This depends on what your site is about. Remember, unless you are writing a site specifically to get AdSense revenues, the main aim of your site is not going to be getting clicks that TAKE PEOPLE AWAY from your pages!

The best place to put ads is on content-rich pages that you already have but which are not producing any revenues for you already.

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AdSense formats
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Google offers lots of formats for your ads. We can't show them in this email but you can find out more about them at http://www.factsaboutadsense.com/adsenseformattingguide.htm

You should pick the one that fits in best with your existing page structure unless during the review process you decide to undertake a major re-vamp!

Google allows multiple formats across your site but until recently only allowed you to place one block of ads on each page. This has now increased to 3 blocks on the same page.

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Color schemes
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Google lets you specify what colors the ads will appear in and there are two schools of thought about what is best.

You can design ads so that they fit well with your existing web design.

Or you can make the ads stand out strongly by choosing a marketedly different color palette.

You can now get sufficiently high resolution statistics from Google to find out which ads work best on your site.

I cover this in detail in my book The Definitive Guide to Google AdSense.

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Pasting code
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This is either easy for you or difficult! If you routinely look at the HTML in your web pages, the
process is straightforward: just locate where in the page you want the ads to go and paste the code in.

If HTML is a foreign language you'll need some help to begin with.

Practically, the best way forward is to experiment a bit. Put the code in, have a look at the page (and Google will immediately start posting ads on the page although they may not be context-targeted to begin with - more on this later.) If you like what you see, stick with it. If not, move it around, use a different format (go back to your AdSense control panel) and do it again.

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What happens next
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As soon as your new page is viewed (even if you preview it in FrontPage), Google gets alerted to
its existence and sends out some ads.

Now if Google doesn't know anything about the page you will see so-called Public Service ads which are about charities and so on.

However, in around 15 minutes (it's that fast) you will start to see ads that are context-targeted.
They will be more relevant to your page.

But this will only happen if Google can work out what your page is about, so check that the copy makes it clear and that the page title, headings and meta tags are consistent and valid.

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Rejected by Google?
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If you can't get into the AdSense program, don't despair! There are things you can probably do to improve your chances and you can re-submit your site.

Look carefully at the criteria for acceptance again on Google own site.

Make sure you have relatively clean content, with lots of text (Google can't "read" the content of a picture and it doesn't deal well with Flash animations) and focus your copy on the theme of the web page.

You will also need to ensure that your site is big enough so that it isn't regarded as too trivial.

Some people say you should go for at least 20 pages but in our experience you don't need that much - you just need good content.

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Quite a short day today.

Tomorrow, we'll cover some tricks for getting accepted even on small sites and how to interpret the earning statistics.

I'll also give you a link that currently at least shows you what sort of earnings you should expect.

Google forbids people from releasing this info - but I've found an independent source on the internet that I'll share with you.