The best way to learn something is to start doing it. This is a guide to get your up and standing on your own feet and making money with Adsense in a relatively short space of time. There's a lot to take in here but don't be put off by the foreign sounding nature of it all. If you persist everything will come together.

The fundamental fact is that Adsense is the easiest way to start making money online. With a very basic website and just a few people coming to it you will start to earn money. As you develop the site and bring more traffic to it an average Adsense monetized website will make between $500 and $1,000 each and every month with little work needed.

Desipte this, most webmasters struggle and the reason is that they are trying to make a massive amount of money very fast and are consequently not breaking each aspect of the process down to its basics. The reality is that from a standing start it is not possible to make $XX,XXX from Adsense in a very short space of time..

People who make a lot of money with Adsense have done one of two things:

1. They have Integrated Adsense into a website that already has high traffic (About.com is the extreme example of this), or

2. They have built a large network of niche websites each of which generates $500 - $1,000 a month. If you build 50 (which over the space of a year or two is completely feasible if you take my above example), you can earn up to about $50,000 a month which equals out to $600,000 a year - pretty good for a network of what are fundamentally very basic websites. This is Adsense Empire Building territory.

Creating one very high traffic website or a large number of small niche websites requires a whole host of skills which you will not yet have. You only get these skills by learning, implementing what you've learnt and reflecting on what your implementation has told you.

As a beginner you have to start at the beginning - that's the rule of any game. As you learn and do more, building effective websites that make more and more money will get easier and easier. Don't be one of the many that are making marketeers rich by buying into their rhetoric of making big money quickly and without any effort. These people end up stopping before they even started.

So How Do You Get Started?

To make money with Adsense you need two things:

1. A website, and

2. Traffic to that website

The Adsense ads are integrated into number one (your website) and are clicked on by number two (your visitors). Without these two things you cannot make money from Adsense. Below is a simple step by step guide of what you need to do and when.

Adsense works best on websites that provide information. Understanding Adsense provides information about how to make money with Adsense - if I placed Adsense on this website then the advertisements would relate to adsense in some way. The Adsense ads are related to this topic and so are more likely to get clicked on. A golfing website provides information on how to improve different aspects of your golf game, and Adsense ads on that website might advertise instructional DVD's or discount golf equimpent. Another website may review a particular product or type of product, advertising would then be matched to suit each product reviewed.

The easiest way to start is to build a website around a topic that you know something about. Don't look at this as the website that is going to make you rich but as a testing ground to learn all the skills you need to know to build succesful websites in different markets that will make you rich. Money comes after learning and doing. If you chase the money you'll learn and do nothing.

First things first - don't buy an Adsense Ready or Turnkey website. If you don't know, these are content websites that have been built and optimized for Adsense. The seller packages together a few hundred articles around a particular market, eg health and then sells this package to a thousand people like you and me. Adsense Ready Websites will give you the first thing you need to make money with Adsense - a website, but you'll find it hard to get the second - traffic - as the search engines penailze duplicate content and without traffic Adsense is useless.

The other problem is that they isolate you from the most important aspect of making money online - and that is building a website.

To us as internet marketeers, all a website is is a vehicle for converting traffic into money. A good website is one that does this effectively. If you don't learn how to build one yourself you are trying to row a boat without an oar.

The good thing is is that you no longer need to learn html code to build your website. Programmers have come to our rescue and over the past few years better and better website creation tools have become available.

The one I recommend is XSitePro. It's made the process of building a website so easy and is streaks ahead of all the other tools on the market. Within two to three hours you will have worked your way through the tutorial and will be in the position to build your own successful money vehicle. It really is the internet marketeers dream come true and on my Golf website I mention above I will have paid the cost back within 7 days. It's literally built to facilitate what this website is talking about and even has an insertion facility for Adsense. It'is one of the few products I sincerely recommend. You can pick up yours here

Now you've decided the theme of your website and have bought your website creation tool you need to buy a domain name and a hosting package. I use and recommend Bluehost. They've got a $6.95/month special deal on at the moment where if you set up a hosting account you get a free domain name. This will save you the cost and hassle of going to a domain registrar to register a name. They also allow you to host unlimited websites with them (although you have to pay for additional domain names) - as your business grows your hosting costs stay low.

There are two ways of getting content - by writing it yourself or by obtaining it from a third party. The options open to you will really depend on the theme of your website. For a first website I generally recommend that you write it yourself. You can learn how to manipulate other people's information later once you've grasped the basics of website building, Adsense and traffic.

This is simple - once you have built your website follow this link, click on the "Click Here to Apply" button, fill in your details and wait for your approval email.

For the complete newbie to Adsense, UnderstandingAdsense.com has it's limitations as it doesn't go into the very basic stuff of how to get the code, how you change the variables etc. The site focuses on what actually makes money with Adsense and this is down to building the right websites, integrating Adsense correctly and bringing traffic to that website. Therefore your'e going to need another source so that you can get to grips with the basics. There are two that I would recommend:

(i) The Google Adsense Help Center - From the people who made the program this is a good tour de force of Adsense and how to use it. They also have some good "heat maps" which give you ad placement ideas depending on the type of website you are building.

(ii) Adsense Forums - Digital Point and Webmaster World both have good Adsense forums if you're the type that can happily sit and sift through thousands of posts.

Now comes the fun part. You've got your content, you've built your website, you understand the fundamentals of Adsense. Integration and optimization now become crtical and these articles explore how best to do that:

An Adsense Ad is More Than an Ad
Adsense Psychology
The Perfect Page
Ad Format
Ad Placement
Ad Colors
Number of Units
Adlinks
Ad Relevancy
Monitoring

The more relevant people who come to your website the more Adsense clicks your website will generate. The other half of succeeding with Adsense is getting more and more relevant traffic. These articles explore what you need to do and how you do it.

More Traffic = More $
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