Adsense is one of the easiest ways to monetize a website or blog. Making enough money to quit your day job with adsense is another story... actually the subject of many, many internet marketing books.
But if you are just starting in internet marketing I do recommend adsense, because it's so simple, and free. It's an easy entry into making some money back from your effort. After that you can work on optimizing to earn more from adsense or try something else, but it's a good entry to IM.
Good advice from diegoid - best to have lots of websites covering a variety of niches if adsense is going to be a major part of your income. Don't worry too much if this is your first time though - just get it up and running on one site and then try to optimize it for better results.
So how do you start?
1. Make sure you have good, original content on your site. Content that is useful to people in your targeted niche.
2. Go to the Google Adsense website and sign up. Read the instructions for publishers and put the code on your website. (see post by ldcdc above). If you site is a Wordpress blog there is a great plugin called 'Adsense Deluxe' that you should get and use. Makes it so much easier.
3. Look at the Google heat maps and try to place ads in the 'hot spots' on your site.
4. Generate traffic to your site - otherwise the rest will be pointless.
5. Sign up for a free account at
Crazy Egg. Place the code on your home page and 3 other pages that get a lot of traffic. Wait a week and then go look at the heat maps that crazy egg creates to see which of your adsense blocks get the most clicks - and just as importantly which get few to no clicks. You could wait another week and see what the results are. Then ditch the ad blocks that get little to no clicks and, now that you have freed up some of your adblock allocation try something different. Different locations and/or different ad formats. Keep a journal of dates, changes you made and the results.
Now you want to work at continually optimizing these 3 things:
1. The ad formats and ad placement positions. You want to get the
most clicks per visitor as you can, obviously because that's what makes you money. Be sure you read the Adsense TOS and adhere to it - don't do anything that violates the TOS or you risk having your account banned. Whatever traffic you have, optimizing your click through rates will earn you more money per visitor.
2. You want to work at getting more targeted traffic to your site (i.e. more visitors of the sort that are actually interested in your topic). Whatever your conversion rate is (the percentage of clicks you get per page view), the more visitors you have the more money you should make in theory.
3. Keywords - work to optimize your ad relevance, so the Adsense ads on your site are 'on topic' and visitors are more likely to be interested in the ad offers and therefore click on the ads. Optimize the niche (topic) of your site and the keywords you use in your articles - looking for high paying keywords. The more Google gets every time an ad is clicked - the more they pass on to you.
These are the things that will make you money with adsense and increase your earnings. Any one of these on it's own will increase your earnings (assuming you already have some traffic to your site), but optimizing for all 3 will give assure you are earning the most you can from each site.
Use Google's Adsense channels to help you see what ad formats and locations are getting the best click through rate. Use Crazy Egg to see where people are clicking. If something works, do more of that. Always try to beat your best performing ads.
I just got an email for this
WSO for free high paying keywords - check it out. If your niche is in one of these areas try using some of these keywords as a basis for new articles and see how well the related ads earn. I've not checked it out this offer myself so I can't vouch for the accuracy or value of it.