Internet advertising is a multi-million-dollar industry. It may still be considered in its infancy but Internet advertising is fast rising in popularity because this new medium has brought advertising to a whole new level of involvement and interactivity.

Because of the very nature of the Internet, any kind of advertising would also take advantage of the inherent features of the medium. For example, the Internet is the only medium where the possibility of tailor-fitting the kind of advertisements a visitor sees can be made possible because certain information about the visitor can be gleaned. For example, a visitor who frequents console gaming websites, is more likely to buy a game-related product that he sees bannered in the gaming website he visits.

One of the terms that you will encounter when you talk about advertising on the Internet is AdSense. AdSense is a program devised by Google that enables web publishers to display relevant Google ads on their websites in a manner that is both fast and easy. The ads that will be put on a web publisher’s website is related to the kind of content or material that a website visitor is looking for on the site. AdSense allows a web publisher to not only enhance his website but also gives him a great way of earning money off it. AdSense also allows publishers to provide Google web and site search for the visitors in their website. One other money making feature is by allowing Google to display ads on the "Search Results" pages generated from a search string on the website.

Google AdSense is a really powerful way of handling web ads that ensure advertisers’ message are successfully transmitted to website visitors. It has also shown how effective it is in providing a good revenue stream for web publishers. But what if you can actually maximize the effectivity of an ad so that it results in more visitors clicking on it, thus maximizing the possibility of making a sale? This would benefit not only an advertiser in terms of revenues generated by the sales, it would also be beneficial to a web publisher who shall enjoy more profits from the click throughs for the ads. This may sound like a pipe dream but it can happen. All you need to do is be aware of how your ads are constructed.

Believe it or not there is a science in the way an ad should be composed so that it will attract the most number of visitors and thus, get more clicks. The idea is simple and the solution is equally simple – make the ads look less like an ad and more like a part of the content of a web page.

Some people might think that this tactic is not being fair and actually an underhanded tactic to take advantage of the Google AdSense program’s policies in order to bring in extra bucks.

The truth of the matter though is that it is not illegal. You, as a publisher or advertiser, is just trying to address and solve a limitation of the very nature of most web surfers – that is, they most likely suffer from what is called as banner blindness. Most people typically overlook anything that so much as remotely resembles an ad. The reason? They are constantly bombarded by advertising that they have a tendency to shut out any awareness for an ad when they surf even if technically they would be interested with what an ad has to offer. By using AdSense, you can determine that Internet visitors are actually maintaining their interest because the ads that are shown are related to the content placed inside the page. A visitor who clicks on an ad basically signifies her interest in whatever product or service the ad is offering.

The key towards successfully making more money with AdSense is not in hiding the obvious fact that the links you are presenting are ads. Rather, the trick is in putting the ads on the web page in such a manner that they will not be overlooked or ignored by a visitor.

One effective way of ensuring that a website visitor will not ignore your ad is by using the optimal ad format.

Based on surveys, the most popular format used for ads are the 336 x 280 and 300 x 250 ad sizes. The former receives the highest click through rate among all of the available ad sizes with the latter being a close second. All of the other available ad sizes are not clicked as much.

There is a very good reason why the two mentioned formats are more successful in capturing visitors’ attention more than the other formats. And it has everything to do with banner blindness. As previously mentioned, banner blindness is a state when most Internet visitors, who are so used to seeing forms of advertising while they are surfing, would subconsciously ignore anything that would remotely resemble the shape of a piece of web advertising. Based on this, it is quite apparent that ad formats that follow the “traditional” measurements are going to be ignored by a majority of Internet users. The ad format that seems to suffer most from banner blindness is the 468 x 60 banner ad format, so as much as possible avoid using this. The 728 x 90 ad format is not as bad as the 468 x 60 but it still suffers from the banner blindness phenomenon although to a lesser degree.

The so called thin and tall ad formats ( the 120 x 240, 160 x 600 and 120 x 600 ad measurements) also get lower click through rates because of the simple fact that they do not fit well in any other parts of the page except on the right side or left side – which are traditionally used for the navigation section of a website. Considered to be the best place for an ad would be the middle of a web page, so try to get your ads placed in this area to ensure a high click through rate.

The line of contention between what is cheating Google and what is not is very similar to the law of tax evasion versa tax avoidance.
Whereas one will land you in a very deep pile of mud, the other can build you a palace of gold.
So it is with the mighty Google AdSense.  Love it or hate it, it produced a staggering nine billion dollars last year!
AdSense is without doubt the most successful PPC advertising campaign undertaken in history.  With such huge wealth available, the cheats and frauds are abound, lurking in every corner, devising ways of grabbing a little of the AdSense phenomena themselves.  And they do.  To the tune of around a billion dollars last year.  Some are big operators running sophisticated software across servers with spoofed IP addresses, while further down the chain may be a group of students who get together to make a few extra dollars from their website.
You may have heard of the recent 'most stupid man of the century'.  Who developed this undetectable clicking bot that would trawl away clicking Google ads all day long.  It could have ruined Google if allowed out into the net. Can you imagine thousands, maybe millions of people clicking on adverts at 10cents a time, on your site every day? AdSense and the billions that go with it would have died overnight.
The guy could have kept quite and sat back in the land of luxury for the rest of his life taking out undetectable crumbs from a multi billion dollar cake.  But what does he do?  Offers or threatens Google to buy the programme for a $100k.  When they said no, he tried to sell it on the Internet for $10k a copy.  He lost everything when they arrested him.  Good.

There are many out there even as you read this who are running some kind of PPC scam and thousands more who are dreaming of doing so. For those of you who are, you better be changing tactics on a daily basis, as Google do.  For those thinking about it, let this be a guide to the pitfalls that await you.  Don't do it.
For those thinking of building a successful future income out of AdSense legitimately.  Still read on, this will be an eye opener for you and later, you will learn how to build that golden palace from AdSense.  Or at least a nice little honest earner.


The PPC defence system.
Firstly, the most important weapon in the click fraud arsenal is the IP address.  Everyone in the world connected to the net has one.  Every time you visit a page, you leave a trace route.  This is also the must powerful of marketing tools for PPC companies like Google.  They use it to categorise visitors into geographic locations and can serve local information and adverts of interest.  So it goes without saying that they automatically know the IP address of every single click on an AdSense ad.  Hence, if you accidentally click on one of your own ads from the same IP address as registered with Google when the account was set up, you get flagged at Google.  If it happens again you may get a warning or may even loose your account and all within.

By far the most of the average 10% loss in PPC comes from the smaller click frauds. A student gets lots of mates on different IP addresses to visit his site and click a few ads.  If he is clever and they only click say two ads each time they visit and never twice in a day, the odds of detection are about zero.  Especially if they emulate a real surfer and visit a few pages of the advertisers site.  But that's not much at 10cents a click is it?  These guys and gals are clever though.  They use a well established site with high keyword value content.  Like Loans for example.  Some of these AdSense clicks are worth not 10cents but 10 DOLLARS each!  There are some that hypothetically are worth $50 a click.  But, irrespective of what Google may be charging the advertiser, they have a publisher cut off at around $15 maximum per single ad click.  Now say there are twenty students all pals with each other and the site is a page rank 5 student site with $10 ads, then forty clicks each day is $400!!  Now $20 day each is not a fortune, but to a student its real useful.  Now just imagine they all have their own websites and all run AdSense or other PPC campaigns.  There making a fortune??
Yes.  For a little while anyway.  But there is a huge flaw in their master PPC click fraud plan.  As they are all buddies, they no doubt live in the same locality or general region.  Suddenly there are these sites which according to Google's massive database, have no local geographic interest, yet getting tons of visitors from the same region.  Google knows this as the main service provider, who every one ultimately channels through, has its own IP address on the net.
So yes the click fraud system works on a small level though will hardly make you rich from just a couple of clicks a day on your mates site.
Other reasons and a myth or two, that will catch out all but the most clever of the larger click cheats are.

Cookies:
There are rumours of Google using cookies on their AdSense PPC ads.  As many have cookies set to off and others across the various browsers have there own settings, cookies would be a logistical nightmare that could provide very little accurate information.  If I automatically know your exact IP and with that, your geographically physical address, why the heck would I need to use cookies to gather that info?  And don't forget, they probably know not just the IP address,  but MAC address of the modem and router at that IP.  However, the advertiser the PPC link points to may use an identifier cookie and will soon know about you, if you keep clicking the link every five minutes.

The Google Empire strikes back:
With the ultimate power of Google Search, Google Desktop, Google Toolbar, GMail, Google Earth, Google Talk, Google Sitemaps,  Blogger and so on and so on,,,,,.  Google can identify the majority of users across the entire world and somewhere in those colossal databases humming away in air cooled oil, they know every single click from all those people.  Every second of the day.  Its the CIA's dream.  So unless you can spoof IP's on a vast scale or somehow make it appear that millions of clicks are originating from unique IP's from geographically different locations.  Your busted.
The only systems that have been successful in this area are, infection of computers with a Trojan virus that sits quietly in the background automatically clicking a set of PPC ads served up by some software on a server or group of them.
Then there's the far east clickers.  They will happily sit and blindly click on anything all day long for a dollar.
The sweat shops of China have been taken over by the clicking sweat shops.   Sometimes hundreds of people on computers in one poorly ventilated room, all puffing away on cigarettes and spilling rice over the keyboard.
They click on PPC ads to order or play online community games gathering gold and selling it for hard cash in the real world.

At a dollar a day workers, there are fortunes to be made on the net by unscrupulous sweat shop bosses.  From writing articles to adding page content, are some of the slightly more respectable ones.  But any type of PPC opens an obvious channel for huge profiting.  Banning IP's from certain locations effectively removed many of these click frauds.  Though now there are new sweat shops springing up all over the place, not in the far east, but in Europe and even illegal immigrants in London working for £10 per day with only four hours sleep.  Maybe a lot more than a dollar a day, but the market is an immense multi billion dollar one that is going to just keep on doubling and the rewards for underworld operations are increasing proportionally.

Then of course there are footprints or patterns of someone visiting your site.  Why do they only visit the same home page and within a few seconds, click on all the PPC ads, then quickly exit the site.  But they don't click ads on other sites they visit?  That's a pretty easy to identify footprint. Lets see, this IP address has clicked on dozens of AdSense ads on one site belonging to one publisher.  With a click through rate (CTR) rate approaching 100%.  And don't forget, it is not only Google who will be looking at the clicks from your site, the advertiser has full access to all that info and excellent analysis software.  That way they can effectively measure the cost effectiveness of their AdSense campaign.  If they see hundreds of clicks each day from the same IP address and zero conversion to a sale, they will be shouting at Google, quite loudly if those clicks cost them dollars.  Who will politely pull your plug. Forever!

I mentioned CTR above.  This is something that so many click frauds ignore to their cost and downfall.
CTR is a simple calculation that divides the number of page impressions from your visitors by the number of Google ads that they click on.
If a site is very specific and vertical targeted, it may be quite normal to see unusually high clicks on Google ads.  Say a site about Fender guitars has AdSense ads, then they will contain advertisers related to that sector and possibly 20% of visitors may click an ad. Google knows the specific nature of the site because its serving targeted PPC ads, targeted at those visitors.  Therefore, rather than flag the site for possible click fraud due to abnormally high CTR, they do just the opposite, they serve higher value AdSense ads to that site because of the high CTR and vertical content. As a result, the site owner has possibly built a nice little extra income or even a golden palace from the AdSense revenue. But this is not the norm and most sites have a CTR of more like 3%.
So if your site about something of not too greater importance to the world wide web, ranked somewhere in the middle of millions of other pages and not even indexed by Google yet, has no back links and has a CTR of 50%, it will be immediately flagged and unless there's good reason, the jolly old plug is pulled again.
An average CTR of between 1% to 7% is normal and would not set off any warning bells.  But if your mates are about the only ones visiting your site and each one clicks an ad each time, that's a 100% CTR!!  You are nabbed and your plug is well and truly pulled.

So that just leaves the hard core of the more clever, but small time click frauds who consistently milk the system.  They are virtually undetectable and extremely difficult to differentiate from genuine AdSense clicks.  This forms the main 10% bulk and just like other industries, providing losses can be maintained at an acceptable 10%, everyone is happy.  Credit cards are at around 12% and most traders use a 10%-15% loss adjustment these days.  So despite all the hype you may have read about the death of PPC ads due to click fraud, plain business logistics say that beneath a certain value, the cost of further improvement is non conducive to the bottom line - profit.
Overall, advertisers are content with what they see as an acceptable loss in a tremendous growth area, brimming with benefits and profit.  Due to Google's immense size and powerful analytic tools they are constantly developing, advertisers feel safe from big time click fraud and know they are entering a very profitable marketplace with Google AdSense and to a lesser degree, other PPC campaigns.

Click fraud is the equivalent of tax evasion in AdSense and you deserve to lose your account.  However, there are other honest ways of picking up anywhere from a few crumbs to a nice slice of the AdSense cake.  While the hardened old timers may call some of it a 'grey area', it is a legal and acceptable method of achieving great success.  A little like the tax avoidance instead of evasion scenario.  Instead of cheating the system, you work with it and explore its many 'grey' areas.
In this world the biggest rewards (and risks) are closer to that fine dividing line of correctness or legality. Accountants exploit it and global companies use it to amass great wealth.  Take the classic case of Microsoft.  There was poor Bill and his buddy all those years ago, sweating under the pressure of a contract with IBM using software they didn't have!  If it had gone wrong and the miracle had not materialised, they would have been doing time for defrauding IBM.  Ouch!  But at the last hour they found a genius who had developed this magic DOS programme.  They bought it for a poultry sum which not only saved their bacon, but made Bill the richest man in the world!  Now that is what I call a close call though, look at the rewards.  Shame it was the only Microsoft software that ever worked with stability, still its the only software they didn't write. LOL.

If you want to make real and honest money from AdSense or any PPC campaign, I hope the chapters to follow will be useful
Looking at the AdSense industry Guru's who make monthly AdSense cheques for thousands of dollars to the ones making a tiny few dollars, is the first thing to do.  Knowing where they succeed or fail is the second.  Putting that knowledge together with some good SEO work can give anyone a site sitting at the top of Google, ahead of millions of other pages.
Once there, all one has to do is duplicate the success with another site and so on.  Within a year and an average amount of work and providing you are committed to making it work, you could be getting a steady income from AdSense of anywhere between $1000 to $10,000 dollars per month.  The knock on effect of which is that apart from Google AdSense, you should by then be running promotions or other affiliate ad campaigns on those sites, which should produce ten times that of AdSense, if your audience is vertical enough.  While AdSense may be an important part of your revenue, affiliate ads produce far greater single sale values.  But watch out, wont be long before Google builds in house affiliate advertising of their own to compliment AdSense or, they will buy out someone like Commission Junction for example.

Within an industry that could hit outer space year after year, Internet advertising is about to be the biggest earner in the world and worth hundreds of billions each year, with no ceiling.  The beauty about the whole concept of the Internet and thanks in most to the two brain child's behind Google, is that anyone can be what they want to be.  There is no global Goliath versus little David.  With some good input, David's site can rank higher, look better and be more appealing than Goliath's and invariably does.  That means anyone who desires, can have a slice of this enormous cake, all it takes is common sense, a willingness to learn and a wish to make a serious income from the net.  You may have to know programmes like Dreamweaver and PHP, but there is no rocket science involved.

Continuation of the 'PPC Book' can be found at the authors .com site KeywordAccess.  Along with articles about PPC, white black and grey sites, keywords and other interesting stuff and of course, free access to over 15 million keywords and phrases to help you build that profitable site.

The simple answer is because you can make money from it!

Wouldn’t it be good to spend maybe a few days setting up enough pages to run enough adsense ads to be able to then sit back and do nothing while our adsense campaign is out there working for us 24/7, in all counties and earning enough from that, to not have to work anymore?

Or, if it were to take you a few weeks or even months to do this, wouldn’t it still be worthwhile?

Ok, so how do we do this? First we need to consider how we can make web pages.

We can make each one manually and or use some kind of webpage building software.

If we choose to manually construct our web pages we also need to include enough content to make people want to go there in the first place so they can click on the adsense ad. But if the content is good enough to attract them in the first place then maybe they won’t want to go somewhere else anyway, so that really defeats the purpose.

So this brings us to another point of consideration. For our adsense ads to work best we need to have people landing on them who are looking for information about a specific subject. So our adsense page has to have lots of information about one specific subject, but not so much that they stay there.

To do this we can consider using software to make a directory of information pages, on these pages we have links to other sites that are providing the detailed information that our visitors are looking for. On our directory page we have a description of the sites that are listed there. And many of these sites have provided a “Reciprocal link” to our sites, home page! (This will be covered below) so we will now have a page with lots of great content (all the site descriptions) and this is where people come looking for specific information, so we place our adsense ads here!

They are targeted pages, and visitors arrive looking for something to click on! So it makes adsense to do this.

Setting up an adsense account:

This can be a little bewildering due to the fact that you need to create your first ad as part of the signup process.  https://www.google.com/adsense 

If you go here you’ll find that Google has taken care of everything by providing a step by step guide that tells you everything you need know.

Designing your adsense display:

Once you have your adsense account set up you’ll be able to choose the type of add you want and Taylor it to suit your site. Some things to consider when doing this are, do you want it to appear as a part of the page? Or do you want it to jump out as something different? It’s difficult to say which is best, because that depends on a range of variables, such as your target market, your overall objectives and promotional plan. 

To track your adsense ads performance you can use the “channels” option while creating your ad boxes, this will help you to determine which ads in which pages are doing the best and that, in turn, will enable you to decide on the best possible style and position for displaying your ads.

Placing an Ad display on your page: 

First, this all depends on your skill and knowledge of html, if you’re new to web page building and html, you may find this a challenging task.

If you are experienced you can skip to the notes in this section, these notes may save you a lot of time and worry

Many html composers will allow us to edit the page in the “view” that we would see in if it was a live page. So all we have to do is place XXX in the page were we want the ad to appear, and then switch to “html view” (or whatever your composer calls the page that you edit html code on). In the html view we find the XXX, then simply delete the XXX and paste the adsense ad code in its place. EASY!

NOTES: 

Some composers won’t run the script in any view after you paste it, ARGH! This may make you think it didn’t work. In addition when you load it to your server and run it live, you may still not see your ad display! It sometimes takes a little while for everything to propagate on the page. So, as long as the code is there in html view, don’t waste your time trying to figure out why it isn’t showing, just come back every hour or so to check it.

Also you will notice at first, the ads may not be targeted or may only display partially, just be patient, I have had to wait up to 3 days for some of my ad displays to appear!

Markus Frind, the creator of Plentyoffish.com is a success story worth noting, as he has managed to take a niche formerly ruled by giant corporations and give it his own brand of marketing savvy. A case of David vs. Goliath, where the little guy comes out on top in the end. Markus is the top "individual" adsense publisher in terms of pageviews. Lets find out what some of his secrets are as he shares some advice with our readers. Feel free to comment!

Markus, what is your experience in computer programming and how did it prepare you for becoming a webmaster?

The average pageviews a day is around 14 million for the last week. I'm getting another 80 million pageviews a day from users polling the site to see if they have new messages. Really intensive bandwidth wise!

When I go to your website, I notice that the ads are targeted to my region, yet I have not even registered- can you explain to our readers how you accomplish this feat?

I'm just using ip2location.com- Basically i take your IP, look it up in the database and it tells me what your city is. I then bring up a list of users in your city, nothing magical about it at all.

Are most of your visitors coming primarily from search engines (SERPS), or are you finding that they come from other avenues? Do you actively advertise in the media?

Search engines account for something like 2% of my traffic. The vast majority of my traffic, like any other site with over 5 million pageviews a day comes from word of mouth, and repeat visitors.


The services on your site seem to be offered at no cost to the registrants. Is there some advantage you have over your competitors that allows you to do this?

I've developed new algorithms that allow me to create a mega site for next to no cost. Several years ago I created algorithm that was thousands of times faster then the algorithm used in the 1990's to find a string of 22 prime numbers. At the time a professor used several super computers and hundreds of regular computers over the course of several years to find a record. I did the same thing on 1 computer in 2 weeks.

Fascinating! Are there any other sites you currently maintain, or is plentyoffish.com the only one?

Its the only site at the moment. I've got a few other sites I registered for friends so they could learn to do marketing/affiliate stuff. At this point i think 1 site is enough.

Any tips for those looking to create a profitable endeavor on the internet?

IF someone else thinks what you are doing is a cool idea I'd say it isn't... Find something no one else thinks is important and build up a site with big traffic in that area. Also keep in mind, sites that have low monetization today but have traffic may be the gold mines of tomorrow. In the internet world anything and everything will be monetized at some point and traffic is king.

Traffic is King- very wise advice, Markus. One last question- How do you find the time to maintain such a large commodity on the internet? Surely you must have some other interests in life besides programming and website monitoring?

It only takes a hour a day on average, but its very tiring work. I spend the other couple of hours reading and seeing what is going on.

These are proven techniques for making Google AdSense, which will work on most blogs and websites. There is no secret system, you just have to think smart and put the time and effort into making things happen. Don't start out on the Google AdSense path and think you are instantly going to be making 1000's of dollars a week. It isn't going to happen.
The most important step to making money from Google AdSense is to increase the volume of traffic to your blog or website. Simple ways of doing this is by distributing your articles to ezine lists, article announcement lists, blog carnivals, social bookmarks sites and yahoo groups. For this to work you need to write at least one new article a day, which needs to be of a good quality and interesting.

Create the ad units so that they blend in with your blog. You will need to go into your Google AdSense control panel and enter the hex colour codes from your website or blog. Make sure the text colour; background colour, and link colours all match your blog.

Don't use borders around the ad unit boxes. Again, you want the boxes to blend, you will have to colour code the borders to match the background so that they become invisible.

Find profitable niche markets, it is important not to choose markets where the cost per click is too low to make it worth your while. I suggest that you do some keyword research and find out roughly what the cost per click is in Ad Words. Usually this will be a good indication as to whether this will be successful.

Keywords are of great importance, you have to make sure that your content is not overstuffed with particular keywords to the point of destroying readability and value. What you need to do is master the art of making sure your articles make liberal use of on-topic keywords, which are likely to generate the most relevant ads. Experts maintain that using keywords with your titles and H1 tags is any excellent way to assist in getting the most relevant possible adds

They are calling him the million dollar man. Jason Calacanis recently revealed in his blog that he is on track to earn a million dollars from AdSense over the year ahead.

And if that number doesn’t wake you up and have you sitting on the edge of your seat, consider for a moment that he reached this level in less than a year. His company only started using AdSense in September 2004.

Calacanis runs Weblogs Inc., a network dedicated to creating trade weblogs across niche industries. And he’s quickly proven that AdSense is a credible advertising partner.

As their network has grown, so has their AdSense revenue. In January 2005 they earned an average of $580 per day. In March it was $737. In May it was $1,585. One day in July, just before he made the blog entry referred to above, they earned $2,335. Remember that is just for one day.  If they can take that daily average to $2,740 they’ll be earning a rate of $1 million for a year. And Calacanis predicts that reaching daily earnings of $3,000 or even $5,000 is quite achievable.

That’s quite an achievement. Keep in mind that Calacanis has 103 bloggers on the payroll and nine staffers. Even so, many webmasters would give an arm or a leg to have even a third of that.

Google’s AdSense has been revolutionary. It has become firmly established as the darling of the online advertising industry. Although rumors are heard of major competitors launching a similar service, AdSense’s premier position seems secure for now.

In essence, AdSense has made it possible for almost anyone with a web site or blog to earn some revenue from advertising, without having to employ sales people or spend precious time searching for advertisers.

AdSense works like this. Webmasters sign up for an account in just a few minutes. They receive a small snippet of code to include on their web pages. Google will then automatically serve advertisements that are relevant to the content on the webmaster's pages. When someone visits the webmaster's site and clicks on one of Google's AdSense advertisements, the webmaster earns a fee. Advertisers can pay anywhere from five cents to a hundred dollars per click, and the webmaster receives a percentage of that fee.

Many webmasters are content with earning five to ten dollars from AdSense to cover the cost of web hosting. But many, unsurprising, have higher ambitions. At a popular WebmasterWorld forum, participants share tips and encouragement on reaching a goal of $300 per day from AdSense. So it is no wonder that Calacanis created quite a buzz when he made his million dollar blog entry.

Google have proven once again that they excel at designing innovative Internet services. If you are in the web industry and have not yet used AdSense, then perhaps you should try it out. Or if you are already using it, perhaps Calacanis’ impressive results will encourage you to track the performance of your AdSense units more closely, fine tune their positions and formats, and take your earnings to a new level.