You can earn a nice passive income stream through your blog or website with Google adsense. One of the reasons it is so popular with webmasters is that it is easy to set up, and it is basically a ’set and forget’ income stream,

You should not apply for an adsense account until your site has some reasonable content. Google is quite particular about the sorts of sites it accepts, especially with all the ‘made For Adsense’ sites. These sites are set up to force users to click on the ads, even if they’re not really interested in them, by not providing a navigational system so that they can go elsewhere. Google hates these types of sites as they do not provide good quality (ie interested) visitors to their advertisers.

Your site should also have other means of making money, to distinguish it from these sites. This can include affiliate links of your own products. But don’t overdo the affiliate links. Google also dislikes ‘thin affiliate’ sites, which are sites without a lot of content.

There are several types of Adsense campaigns you can choose to set up. You can set up a search function that will be displayed on your website, as well as a referral program. For our purposes, we will discuss Adsense For Content. When you set up this type of program, Google will search the content you have on your page and display ads that relate to that specific content.

Setting up google adsense is as simple as following the wizard they provide and choosing things like the background color of your ads, the type of ads, and such like. Generally, it helps to have the ads blend into the content, although you can also try to have subtle colored backgrounds for effect as well. As a rule, having the same colored background as the page the ads go on is the best converter.

You can choose for your ads to be displayed in a box, known as an ad unit. You can also have them displayed as links, known as a link unit. You can choose the colors, layout size and shape.

Once you have chosen the design and layout of your Adsense campaign, you can create channels. This will allow you to get advanced tracking reports. If you are new to Adsense, you don’t have to worry about setting them up right away.

After you have selected all of your criteria, Adsense will give you a bit of Javascript that you can cut and paste onto your webpage or blog. If you use Blogger, which is owned by Google, they have a very easy integration tool that you can use. You won’t have to cut and paste anything, and you can create your Adsense campaign’s colors and style directly from Blogger.

This is only a basic guide. There are a lot of good ebooks out there that will take you through optimizing your ad placement, and other google-friendly ways to increase click-through rates. I have found this one to be the best. The videos are very clear, and the instruction is broken up into manageable portions. The techniques discussed were also effective for me.