| Adsense - Pay per Click
We've all seen the little text advertisements and some of the coloured banner advertisements labelled 'Ads by Google' that appear on many webpages when we enter them. Businesses pay for these adverts to appear. You can too (and we'll talk about that in 'Traffic') but for now we're interested in the fact that you can earn an income from them. Other companies have similar schemes, but Adsense is the best known. Sign up here.
Here's how they work. Businesses lodge an advert with Google and tell Google the maximum they are prepared to spend to have the advert appear - from a few pennies to several pounds or dollars, depending on the keywords they choose.The great thing for the advertiser is that their adverts appear on pages sought out by people most likely to buy their products, if they get their keywords right.
You sign up with Google to host the adverts. When someone enters your site, Google holds an electronic auction to see who's prepared to pay the most for their advert. The winners appear on you webpage. The auction is almost instantaneous and the adverts appear to be part of the page. If the viewer clicks on an advert, the advertiser has to pay Google, and Google pays you. Hense pay-per-click (PPC).
As with other internet marketing, niches play a large part. The more desirable the keywords, the more the advertiser has to pay, and the more you get paid. But, as we have seen, you will be aiming at niche markets, so your payout per click will usually be a few pennies. But the point is that if you have many thousands of visitors, those pennies will add up.
It stands to reason that PPC works best for those who are able to drive very large volumes of traffic to their site. Many entrepreneurs claim to make thousands a month in this way. Others argue that the revenues are usually way below that, and that anyway we should not be encouraging visitors to click out of our sites. Learn all about it from Google's Asense pages.
It's probably fair to say that for most of us PPC is not going to be a consistent major earner. But it is worth having in your money-making arsenal and should give you a small bur steady return. And who knows, you may just get the right formula that rakes in the thousands for you!
Page Position
This is a good time to talk about page position, that is, where on your webpage do you place your ads to get the greatest number of clicks on them. Yes, it really does matter. It's all about where people's eye's naturally come to rest when they view a page. This is true for whatever adverts we place on our pages, not just Adsense.
The best 'hot spot' is more or less the centre of your page, with good spots just above and also to the left. Google gives this and more free advice here. Make sure you learn and adapt these factors. But you must also ensure that your ads match the type of page you have created.
If you have a bright lively page where people have come to buy, a centrally placed ad for your best selling product, and an ad designed to hit you in the eye, will work. If people have come primarily for information, this approach may put them off, so you ads should be more subtly placed and designed to blend in. You may have to experiment to get the design right. | 
