What is Google's Adsense (Google Ads?)
One of the really cool things about Google's Adsense program is that it's really easy to implement on your sites. The only hard part is getting an account. I'm not sure if you can do it if your only pages are Hubs. Anyone care to comment on that?
So you'll need a website, but for that you can put up a blogger.com blog with some halfway decent content and you'll be good. Fast and easy, that.
Optimizing the Google Ads (Adsense) on your pages is pretty trivial, but let me do some background stuff first, then I'll talk about the ads.
Adsense comes from Google's Adwords program. Do a search on google for just about anything and yoiu'll see those ads along the right side of the page, and probably a few at the top. Yahoo, MSN, and othes have very similar programs.
These are Google's Adwords. The advertiser makes an account, makes an ad, defines the page that the ad points to, and defines how much she's willing to pay everytime someone clicks that ad.
So if you want put up an Adwords ad to your Rottwelier Leash Training page you'll have to figure out how much each visitor is worth and base your ad pricing accordingly.
So the price isn't based on how many times your ad appears. If no one ever clicks your ad you'll pay nothing. Only when your ad is clicked does your credit card feel it.
Now, if you want your ad to appear at the top of the list you have to pay more money than the other guy, per click, and/or you have to create an ad that gets more clicks. Google rewards good ads with better placement.
So a hot adwriter will get her ads placed much higher on the page, for a lower cost, than the average Joe will be able to manage,
Now that Adsense does is pull from that pool of Adwords. You log into your Adsense account, fill in a few blanks, grab a code, and stick it on your page.
Google will scan your page, take a best guess as to the theme of that page, and pull from the Adwords ad pool and put matching ads on your page. This is why most of the adsense you see on most pages is a pretty tight match for the content of that page.
So how do we get paid?
Google does a revenue share with it's Adsense partners. If you put up a page on dog training and put the adsense code there then you'll see dog training related ads. If Joe is paying 50 cents a click for his dog training ads then you will get some portion of that 50 cents when someone click the ad on your page.
How much of the 50 cents? It's not a straight percentage. There are a lot of factors that go into that calculation, including the quality of traffic, If your page sends better traffic to Joe's site then your get paid more for those adsense clicks. This is an incentive to write high quality pages around your adsense ads.
Once upon a time there was qutie the little market for software which woiuld put up junk pages, many junk pages, stuffed with keywords, for the sole intention of getting the adsense clicks.These programs could spin out thousands of pages, none of which had value to the user. You land on that page and your choice was to hit the back button or click an ad.
They worked very well for awhile, but Google has pretty much stomped them out. They're not dead, but it takes a lot more work these days to make money with that type of site these days.
Put up a quality site/page and the percentage revenue share you get from the clicks will be higher than that from the junk pages.
Adsense Videos
Michael Cheney's Adsense Videos: I bought this product a long time back and it's great for the beginning to intermediate adsense player. It's a series of videos which will take you from step one and explain the whole process. Click through, sign up for his list, and I think you'll like what you get.
Adsense is Simple to Optimize
Adsense really is simple to optimize. That's one of it's most appealing features. It's easy to use. Heck, if you have an adsense account and all you do is write Hubs you don't have to do a thing. Optimized adsense ads will appear on your Hub automatically. Just make sure you enter your adsense code into your use profile, of the Hubdudes will get all the money.
That said, there are some things that you can do.
Google can't read images. If your page is nothing but pictures, the G will be unable to accurately target your ads. You have to have some text there.
Google can read filenames and page titles, though.
So if someone looks at your page, with all images turned off and just the filenames showing, and they can immediately define the topic of the page, then Google will have no problems doing the same.
Add your keywords. If you're doing a page on Rottwelier Leash Training then that phrase shold be in your page title and also in your page, along with as many related terms as will easily fit into your page content.
The Google Ads that appear will then be tightly targeted to your page content.
Ad placement: Assuming you can control where you place your ads (and you can't on your Hubs) you want to place them where people's eyes will naturally track. Westerners, reading from top left to bottom right, will track a web page in a similar manner. If your ads follow this pattern then they'll be seen more and be clicked more.
People's who read from the top right will be better served with a different pattern. Google actually provides a "recommended ad placement" guide in its Adsens FAQ's.
Thing to Look Out For
If you take a look at your typical Hub you'll see a lot of stuff on the page that isn't yours. Google's adsense scanner reads it anyway and if the Hubstuff doesn't match your stuff then the ads might be off.
How to fix it? Put good titles on yoiur modules and put enough content into your page or your Hub to dominate over any surrounding text.
So I'll guess that the ads surrounding this hub will be tightly related to Adsense and Adwords, just because I'm writing enough to dominate over the surrounding page template.
What if your ads just aren't showing?
Google's system might take awhile to hit your page, depending on a variety of factors. Ads on a Hub will typically appear quickly, since Google sends a lot of scans to Hubpages.com. For a new site, which G doesn't know about yet, it may take a few days for good ads to reliably appear.
You can speed up the process by getting good links iinto youir pages. How to do that? Well, that's another Hub, but one way is to write Hubs and link back to your pages.
Your Google Ads Should be Good Now
Huh. Your Adsense-Fu is good!
or...
The Adsense is strong with this one!
The above covers the basics of adsence optimization. If you have complete control over your pages, meaning you can place ads anywhere you like, then you can play with things like ad colors, size of the ad blocks, exact placement, and so on.
If you don't have that control, such as on your Hubs or Lenses, then make sure you put a lot of good keywords on the page so that the Google's system know which ads to place.