So you have a website and you have some people coming to your website and what you would like is for these people to somehow give you some money. For you, Adsense is going to be a dream come true - if you add it to some of your pages today you will be making money by tommorrow - guaranteed!

The key to getting the most out of Adsense on a website that is already up and running revolves around three things:

1. Integrating it properly into the structure of your pages,

2. Optimizing the ads for your current traffic through testing and monitoring,

3. Bringing more traffic to your now optimized webpages.

How you integrate Adsense into your website is the single largest determiner of it's eventual performance. With that in mind, monetizers often fall into one of two traps.

1. They chase clicks and forget about the purpose their website actually serves. Pushing ads at every visitor might force a higher click through rate for a time but if you undermine your websites value it will eventually fall from grace.

2. If they've built a website around a topic that they are genuinely interested in, then as I was with my first site, they will be rather proud of it and therefore quite possessive over it - and consequently Ads are viewed as a bit of an intrusion. Plus as they relate to the people using their site they are often reluctant to "push" (as it feels) ads in front of them. These people therefore under utilize Adsense and are only earning a fraction of what they should be from their traffic.

Therefore, your biggest barrier to having Adsense perform at its optimum on your website will be that you either follow Adsense to closely, concentrating on clicks rather than your website which will eventually hail it's demise or your attachment to your site prevents you from fully integrating Adsense and limits your earnings.

Going back a couple of years, the first website I integrated Adsense into was a custom motorcycle resource center. It was making no money but was receiving between 700 and 1000 people every day from a combination of search engine queries, reciprocal links and repeat visitors. I have not touched that website for over 9 months but everyday it does an average of $70 to $80 with Adsense.

The process I went through on that website is the exact same one that everyone who seeks to monetize their website traffic with Adsense goes through.

A good place to start is these two articles:

An Adsense Ad is More Than an Ad
Adsense Psychology

and then move on to the Best Practices.