This article gives three easy steps to start showing Google ads on your site. Although most sites won’t make a fortune from ad revenue, if you even has a small amount of traffic you could easily pay for your hosting and domain fees. If you have a site with higher traffic and content related to high paying keywords (simply meaning topics more advertisers are willing to pay to be placed beside) … you might could make A LOT. It’s really simple to add Google ads to your site:
- Sign up for a Google AdSense account (yes, even if you already have a Google account for other services like gMail). It is a pretty short form, only takes a moment, and if you decide it isn’t for you … your under no obligation to use the service. Apply Here
- Wait for site approval. When you signed up for an account, they asked for the URL of the website you are thinking about placing the ad words on. People at Google will check it out and ensure it is in line with their program policies. They will let you know if you are accepted by sending a follow-up email within a week (in my experience it was less than 24 hours, but it can vary based on the volume of applications they are processing at the time).
- Paste the HTML snippet into your site. After you are approved, you can sign into your account and get the HTML code snippet that will display ads on your webpages. Just paste it into your site, and that’s it … your site will start displaying targeted ads based on its content.
Here is an example of what the HTML snippet will look like:
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-xxxxxxxxxx";
google_alternate_color = "ffffff";
google_ad_width = 160;
google_ad_height = 600;
google_ad_format = "160x600_as";
google_ad_channel ="xxxxxxxxxx";
google_ad_type = "text_image";
google_color_border = "FFFFFF";
google_color_bg = "FFFFFF";
google_color_link = "0000FF";
google_color_url = "666666";
google_color_text = "333333";
//--></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"></script>
You can customize the various settings in the snippet (like “google_color_bg” which controls the background color of the ad area) so the appearance of your ads complements the look and feel of your site.
Another Way To Earn Revenue With The “AdSense for Search” Search Box
In addition to showing ads on your site, you can also earn revenue by adding an AdSense search box to your site. This allows users to perform searches and the results are displayed in a frame within your site. You can limit the search results to just your own site, or a collection or subset of sites. Relevant ads will appear with the results like you typically see on Google searches, but since they are being displayed on your site … you will earn revenue from them. You can customize the look and feel of the search results to complement your site.