Let’s consider Adsense and the what, when and why you should, or indeed, why sometimes you should not use it until the time is right!!

Adsense - What is it?

Anyone involved in blogging or web site development will have heard of Adsense and it usually comes into play when you’ve got somewhere with your site and are looking for a means of monetising your efforts.  Adsense is an advertisement program run by Google, and website / blog owners can register for an account with Google to display text, image, and video on their websites.  When visitors to your sites click on these advertisements,  they generate revenue for you on a ‘per-click‘ or ‘per-impression‘ basis.  Lets look at this in more detail.

The key thing is the advertisements are administered by Google, you don’t have to do anything once it’s set up.  When you sign up with Google Adsense, you can select the type of advertisement  you want to display and then you are given a piece of HTML code, which you need to place onto your website where you want the advertisements to appear.  We can cover how to do this separately, but for now all we need to know is that it is ONE way of monetising your website. Most other programs like affiliate marketing, work in exactly the same way, you register for the service and place the advertisements as HTML code on your websites.

Yahoo are also keen to get into this billion dollar market and have launched their Yahoo Publisher Program,  which we will be looking at in another article.

Adsense - When Should You Use it?

Now, there is much debate about whether you should use Google Adsense or any other advertising in the early days of getting your blog or website up and running.  Indeed, in a recent discussion on Blogcatalog on what people disliked the most when they visited sites, the over-splattering of Adsense and banners was seen as a major put off when visiting sites.  I’ve visited a lot of sites myself as part of promoting technicalarticles and this has been my personal viewpoint too.  Adverts that are misplaced can deter you from getting to the information you seek, and consequently reluctant to re-visit.

So, too much is bad.  Let’s accept that, because it’s more or less common sense.

When you start off your blog or website, your primary objective is to gain some sort of decent ranking with Google so that your site gains in popularity.  The key to this is developing returning visitors.  Through your site promotion efforts, you want to attract enough people to come and visit your website for the first time, your unique visitors, but your real aim is to get them to come back again and again to develop sufficient readership to win in the popularity stakes.  Anything, you do that puts people off, will hurt your promotion efforts.  So the advise often is, build up your blog or website, with decent original content and then introduce adsense when your readership has built up.  But, some people also suggest, that the introduction of adsense to an established readership can also be damaging, as people have got used to your site without the adverts.

In my own case, I started off with Google Adsense and affiliate banners, and even played around with Amazon’s slideshow widget showing off books on blogging.  The funny thing is I got an email last week from Amazon saying how I had n’t earned anything from their affiliate program asking me to look at their help pages for affiliates.  Thanks Amazon!!!  When you look at it deeply, few people click on adverts unless it is directly related to the subject they are researching at that time.  Also, because you have no control over what Google Adsense is putting there, other than through targeting your content to selective adwords, it is very hit and miss.  That is my experience so far.

Adsense - Why you Should use it or not?

In the end, if your objective is to make some money from your website, then I find the use of text based Google Adsense is tolerated by most people, as long as it does n’t blatantly take over your site.  I’ve included some Adsense in my sidebar and at the end of each post, which I think is ok, but again, please let me know what you think.  Where would you find it most acceptable?  What’s your experience on your own sites?  Leave me some comments, as this is an important subject for all of us, important enough to get right.

Early introduction of Google Adsense or later, maybe a matter of choice in the end.  I know some people never make anything out of it, others enough to cover their costs and some, make enough to want to have their pictures taken showing off their Adsense cheques (read article on this here).

The professional bloggers are at the other end of the spectrum, they have established readerships of thousands and to a large extent move away from Adsense and sell Advertising space on their web sites as their main source of income.  But most of us don’t have that luxury.

The choice of using Adsense or not, is yours to make and will be governed by what your own original  objective for creating your website or blog was.

Conclusions

As with most things in Life, there are no simple answers.  When it comes to Google Adsense, what’s right for one person may not work for another.  Try things out, you have nothing to lose.  If something works, then good, use it.  If it does n’t move on.

On this subject, what is your thoughts on the banner advert that I have at the top of my page.  Have you ever clicked on it, or any other banner ads placed at the top of pages.  The reason I’m asking is because I’m seriously thinking of removing it, and some feedback on this would be useful.

My own Adsense efforts have dried up a little at $31.28 and I think I’ll seriously have to look at targeting high paying Adwords in my articles and see if that makes a difference.  I will devote some more to time this in another article because most people use Adsense for monetisation, and if we can crack it, it’ll be worth doing.

Daniel Hunt

Postscript:  Since writing this article, the banners have been removed and the whole site has had a major facelift to remove clutter and make it easy on the eyes!!!  Read about the reasons for the changes here:

A new dawn for Technicalarticles.co.uk

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