I have been asked this question so many times in the past few weeks that I thought I should write something on the topic. It seems increasingly bloggers want to try to cover their hosting and ISP costs with some revenue from their blog – and increasingly they’re doing it and are able to make a few (or quite a lot) dollars on the side. Many are turning to Google’s Adsense program.

Covering costs of my Digital Photography Blog is why I originally signed up with Google Adsense – blogging can get expensive when you have high levels of traffic and a lot of pages.

Whilst the agreement you sign with Google stresses that you are not allowed to give specific information about your earnings from the program I can say that I’m glad I’ve signed up because its well and truly covered my costs – and then some. In fact I think its quite feasible to expect that Adsense coupled with other strategies for making money from Blogging could quite easily generate a decent living. It takes time and hard work, but I think its very doable. (Update: Since writing this series I’ve revealed that I am now looking at making over a six figure income this year in 2005 from blogging).

So how do I make money from Google Adsense? Let me share some AdSense Tips that heve helped me.

This will be the first in a series of posts on this topic. Let me say up front I’m no expert – there are a lot of people out there making a lot more money than I am using Adsense – however most of them are not telling their secrets – well not for free anyway. I’ve got no secrets to hide and am willing to share what I’ve learnt since I signed up for the program 8 months ago. If you want a REAL expert’s opinion on Adsense I’d recommend buying Joel Comm’s What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense E-Book. Joel earns $15,000 per month from Adsense and has some good things to share.

I know some bloggers are put off or offended by the idea of making money from blogging so I’ll try not to let these posts dominate my blog – however if you are not interested in the topic, simply skip over these posts.

I am going to assume a few things in this series to cut down the amount of introductory comments I have to make. Here is what I am assuming:

• You have a blog. Whilst most of the following tips will apply to other types of websites I run Adsense on blogs and will speak from that experience.
• You have (or will) read a basic overview of Adsense and have some understanding of what it is.
• You have(or will) read the program policies as outlined by Google. These give details of site eligibility, ad placements and other requirements for using the system.

Adsense is a program designed by Google to help publishers monetize their websites using high contextually-accurate ads. Adwords is the other side of the coin which allows any person to create an account with Google and bid on keywords or key phrases to have their ads appear in either the search results ad placements, or in content sites that display Adsense ads.
Over the past few months I’ve identified a group of authors, writers, and publishers that I call: “Adsense Authors.”
My definition of an Adsense Author:

Any author that uses article marketing as a strategy to drive traffic to their website in order to drive their adsense ad revenue sales.

These “Adsense Authors” really understand how to fully leverage article marketing as a strategy like no other group of authors.
Here are the commonly shared traits of these authors:

1. Their articles are short, between 200-600 words.
2. The quantity of articles they produce are typically from 25-300; around a tightly focused niche topic.

3. The TITLE of their articles are very keyword rich: the first two, three, or four words are the most important in rank. You won’t find these authors wasting the first 4 words of their title with non-keyword-rich words (such as “a” “how to” “top” “the” “of” etc).
4. The BODY of their articles has high keyword density for the terms they are targeting.
5. The KEYWORDS they use when submitting their articles are intelligently selected based on the overture or other keyword research tools; they are not haphazardly selected.
6. They do not load up and bloat the guts of the BODY of their articles with links back to their sites; they know this slows down the acceptance of their articles for reprint by other publishers.
7. Their articles are fun, fast, and easy to read. Often they will use bullets, numbered lists, and quick sub-heads to make the article easy to visually digest.
8. Lastly, their RESOURCE BOX is brief with only one or two links in them: one link to their full website URL, and one anchored text link to a keyword of importance to their niche. They know that big, ego driven resource boxes slow down the viral nature of article marketing strategy.

Adsense Authors have discovered the secrets behind fully unlocking the power of article marketing to drive enormous storms of organic traffic to their websites. They accomplish this with dozens to hundreds of tightly-focused niche articles, all reflecting high keyword value and research intelligence.

You won’t find any 3,000+ word articles or ego driven article content from an Adsense Author. They have only one purpose in mind: To drive massive amounts of traffic to their Adsense-based business model using article marketing as a key strategy.

Even if your goal in life has nothing to do with Adsense, you can definitely learn from today’s Adsense Authors on how to take Article Marketing to the next level of possibilities.