In this post, I have discussed why Google Adsense is the best way to make money online. This is based on my usage of different PPC over several of my blogs.

Any blogger or webmaster wishing to monetize and want to earn from their website / blog know Adsense basics. However there are few who never thought to monetizing their blog or newbie in blogging should explore further to understand the immense potential with Google Adsense.

There are many if and buts with many website owner and many criticize of not earning enough with Adsense in spite of reasonable traffic. However I admit Adsense as the best and easy way to make money if it is done properly. You should know how to put Adsense and where to place? How is not difficult to understand because you get small code readily available from your control panel which need to placed wherever you want advertisement to appear. Since you get all relevant ad based on your theme and page content, you are least bothered about the type of advertisement which should appear and you can be more focused on content development.

Why I admit Google Adsense as the best way to make money online is not because there are many webmasters are are earning huge 6 figure income from this alone, On the contrary there are many webmasters who are finding it hard to make living on Adsense. And there are many who are not able to make even hundred because they lack in traffic and content. So that’s a different issue. I am talking about websites which are having traffic and not able to take advantage of Adsense program.

If you are not able to extract the real money from this, you should carefully look into following:

• Theme used by your domain
• Keywords of your domain
• Keyword for specific page
• Adsense positioning
• Format used
• Color used

Broadly the first 3 points determine the kind of advertisement which are likely to appear. If your page is talking about Car Insurance but your keyword is not Car and Insurance, the served advertisement might be irrelevant and will result in no click. So you need to take it very seriously.

The Last 3 points are something which you need to keep experimenting with. In general top left position where links are placed are considered to be most prominent place for ad positioning, it might be different in your case. Similarly large Adsense block (336 X 250 or 300 X 250) works good in general but your website layout might not suit this big block. Also as seen most of the times, banner advertisement are often ignored by the visitor so try to use Text Ad in prominant place as far as possible.

Most of time people use the maximum limit of 3 block ad and 3 link unit ad (even I do) but if you want only high paid advertisement to appear, you should strict yourself from using 1-2 blocks maximum. The lesser number of ad appears in your blog/website, the highest bid advt will appear.

In general, it is said that advertisement color should be blended with the text color and that achieves highest CTR but sometime even contrast color ad works. So keep testing before making it final.

So you need to think of all parameters well if you really want to real the benefit of contextual advertisement of Google Adsense and I am firm to admit that Google Adsense is the best way to make money online from your blog or website. So be ready to put time and effort to experiment the all possible combination in terms of positioning, format and color to taste the real worth of it.

I am sure most of you would have realized the potential of having an website. This may help you to earn an income, what you can not have from your regular job. There are many people who would have said you this and finally they would have tried to sell you something of this sort. They would have tried to convince you that with the help of their product, you will start earning six figure online income. Hold on!!! I am not a sales guy and don’t want to sale you any product like others. I am saying you what I believe and what I have found true after spending couple of years here.

Having said that, I never meant you just make a website and money will start pouring in. No way! if this would be the case, no one would have struggled to make extra source of income. Making money online requires disciplined and focused approach. Of course your hard work too… At the same time, you should also know all the basic facts related with making money online. Once you start practicing the basic tactics, you will discover your own way to make it more advanced tactics day by day.

So the question is what all it requires to earn a living online from your website. As discussed in my other article, you have to have a good content and marketing strategy to get traffic. “Good content in a website” is like a “Blood in a body”, without which it can not survive and traffic is something without which content will be worthless. To appreciate the good content, you need to have visitors and this will also help you to make more and more earning. Your earning is directly proportionate to traffic. Once you are ready with your website, you need to work on monetization carefully. Different types of website requires different strategy and you have to clearly understand the psychology of your website visitor before you go ahead with your monetization plan. You also need to understand what sort of advertisement you need to select to appear in your website. For example, if your website focus on health, it does not make any sense to put a advertisement of “Dating” website.

What all you could include in your website, which will help you to earn? Believe me there are 101 ways and I will pick up few among these to start up with and will keep on adding in the coming days.

(1) Advertisement: Advertising can be in different forms like Banner ad, Text Link ads, Descriptive ads etc. There is a myth among newcomers that how it is possible to get an advertising from any company, if they have just started a website or if their website has very less traffic. Although it is true that you may not get offer directly from the company due to stated reason but you can always use the resources of intermediary (known as ‘Advertising Network’). There are hundereds of advertising network services available and signing up does not require much hassles. Once it is over, you are ready to display thousands of advertisement in your website. Most of these providers have almost all type of companies with them and you get a fair chance to pick up advertisement matching your website theme.

(2) Referral Programs: There are large number of websites who runs referral programs, wherein you get paid if your website visitor perform certain action by clicking on your affiliate banner. You just need to register with a company who has affiliate programs and you need to place banner in your website provided by them. There are some companies who have specific criteria to become affiliate of them like ‘number of hits per day’ or ‘how old your website is’ etc. Also Each company has different crieteria to make you eligible for the payment. Broadly they are:

(a) Pay per click: Here you get paid based on how many of your website visitor click on your affiliate links.
(b) Pay per sales: In this case you will get paid flat commission say $50 on per sale
(c) Percentage earning per sales: You will get paid certain percentage of transaction value, it varies between 10% to 75% depending on programs.
(d) Pay per leads: these programs pay their affiliates based on the number of visitors they refer who sign up as leads. This simply means the visitor fills out some requested information at the merchant site, which the merchant site may use as a sales lead or sell to another company as a sales lead.

Many affiliate programs also pays you in slabs. For example, if you have done 100 sales in a month, you will get paid 40% of the transaction value, for 100-149 sales in a month the commission will be 50%, while for 150-199 sales the commission will be 60%.

However you should always be careful in selecting referral programs. Make sure the company is genuine and paying to its members. Also you should promote only those programs, which relates your website theme. If your website deals in ‘Home Furnishing’, you should not promote ‘Dating Websites’ in that page.

(3) Contextual Ad: This is one of the most popular ways with least effort from your side. The most popular in this segment is ‘Google Adsense’, however there are many others like ‘Bidvertiser’, ‘adbrite’ etc. The main advantage of using contextual ad is you don’t have to put any effort towards selection of the advertisements. You just need to paste the system generated code and advertisement appears in that space based on your web page theme automatically.

We will discuss some other monetization options like Paid content, Endorsement advertisement etc separately