In order for your website make money with Google AdSense, you need to let Google place these ads on your site. Before we get into that though, I just want to mention a couple things upfront. Google is a smart monster, and there’s no need to try and trick it. Before actually creating your AdSense account, I would highly recommend that you read and familiarize yourself with the Google AdSense Terms and Conditions. There are a few things that will get you banned from the AdSense program, including…

• Clicking the ad links on your own website. Never, ever, ever click on the ad links showing up on your website. Advertisers are paying to have their ads listed there and get charged each time one of their ad links are clicked. You might be making some money from it, but it’s unethical, and really now, how much are you going to make by clicking on your own ads? Google will catch on, they have systems in place to detect this, and your account will certainly be banned if you do that. If you see the advertisements being displayed on your site, then they work, there’s no need to even click on them to “test” test them.
• Paying to get visitors to your site (paid links). Another activity that’s against Google’s policies is paid links. If you’re trying to make money with Google AdSense on your website, then don’t participate in any link networks (like BuildMyRank which was recently slapped by Google) which charge a monthly fee. Your links have to come naturally. Don’t create paid ads to get visitors to your site either or you’ll surely get banned once Google catches up with it.

Also, this is not a get-rich-quick scheme. If you’re going to try to make money with Google AdSense, then you need to treat this as a business. Unless you already have a website or blog that’s getting lots of unique visitors daily, then you won’t be earning any real money from this anytime soon. I’m not trying to burst your bubble, but if you have high hopes of putting a website or blog together over the weekend and then throwing some ads on it, you’re not going to see any revenue. Earning money from this requires you to actually put in some work and build it up gradually.

The 3 main steps to building (any) website / blog to monetize it are:

1. Picking out a niche/topic/interest.
2. Building the site/pages around targeted keywords.
3. Getting traffic to the site.

But it’s a lot more complicated and involved than the 3 points above make it seem, and going into all that is another topic in itself that we’ll be talking about later. For now, you want to start out by setting up a Google AdSense account by going to https://www.google.com/adsense/apply.
It's also important to note that you should already have an initial website with a few pages on it before you apply for an AdSense account. You're actually going to be "applying" for an account, and Google will take a look at your site and either approve or reject your application. So make sure you have a site that's been up for a little while already and has some decent content on it first. After you've created your AdSense account you'll now have a publisher ID that will begin with the letters "pub-" followed by approximately a 16 digit number. There are some WordPress templates that are pre-built with ad locations on it and all you need to do is add your publisher ID to the theme's settings. For other sites you'll want to create an ad unit from your AdSense control panel.

When you create an ad unit (see the image below for an example setup screen) you can specify the size of the unit, for example a tall vertical one (a.k.a. Skyscraper), a horizontal banner, a Leaderboard, a square/rectangle one … You can also specify if you want to display text ads, image ads, or both. Depending on the size of the ad unit it may be able to display multiple text ads, but it's usually just 1 image ad if displaying images. You can also customize the colors of it, like the background, border, text, title, etc… so that it can match your sites theme. After you save the ad unit Google will give you the HTML code you need to put on your site where you want the ads to display. 
Google will not let you display more than 3 ad units on a page.  You'll want to experiment with different ad sizes and types, as well as positioning them on your page for best results.

Remember the golden rule above though. As tempting as it may be, try not to click on the ads displaying on your own site. If you see them there then it's working. Also, unless your site already has thousands of visitors a month, you're not going to make money with Google AdSense until that picks up, and don't use paid traffic. So now that you have your website up and running, and are displaying the ads, you need to focus your attention on building up that website, creating more posts, getting people to want to link to your site, bookmark it, build backlinks to it, etc…

If you’re interested in picking up a course on creating AdSense sites, then I highly recommend checking out Michael Ullman and Adam Franklin’s AdSense $100k Blueprint. These are 2 stand-up guys, true blue, and really know what they’re doing. If you can follow their action plans, then you’ll surely make some good money from this. They’re really on the ball with all of Google’s changing algorithms and being profitable in a post-panda world.

Another product I can recommend without reservations is Lisa Irby’s Niche Website Success. She’s been in the internet marketing scene for a very long time. You can also learn a lot about making money from websites just by visiting Lisa’s YouTube channel.

In affiliate marketing, an affiliate is someone who promotes a vendor’s product or service for a commission. So for example, lets say there’s a vendor selling dog collars online and they’ll give you 5% of every sale that you send to their website. As an affiliate marketer you would create an affiliate marketing blog and more or less promote the dog collar product and include links in there where your visitors can go to the vendor’s actual website to make the purchase. The link will be formulated in such a way that the vendor will know the visitor came from your website and you will get a commission if they purchase a product there.

A great way to promote the dog collar on your own affiliate marketing blog site is to write several blog posts reviewing the product and talking about it. You don’t really want to “sell” them the product either, because most times the vendor’s site will already have a sales pitch. The visitor is already looking to buy dog collars, so you really just want to encourage them to go purchase the collars at the vendor site you’re promoting (through your links of course). A good way to do that is by writing about your own actual experience with the product. You want to be honest and truthful too. With the affiliate marketing blogs I create I always get the product first, use it, then give my honest “two-cents” worth.

Affiliate marketing blogs are a great way to earn some money from blogging. There are tons of products out there you can promote, and a very popular place where it’s really easy for you to create an account and start promoting products is through Clickbank.com. They have TONS of digital and “e-book” products. The first course I ever tried to help me get started with promoting products through Clickbank was George Brown’s Google Sniper system. I bought this system a while back and George is really thorough. He pretty much takes you by the hand and shows you how to create a blog site and sell Clickbank (and other) products quickly and easily. Although Google Sniper (and now there’s GSniper2 out) worked pretty well at the time (it accounted for all of my early sales), I’m not so sure it’s such a good product in this post Google Panda world.

I hope you found this post interesting and helpful. I’ll be back to talk more about earning money from blogging and creating affiliate marketing blogs, so stick around!

So what is a blog site? Well, starting with the name, “Blog” is a short name for “Weblog”. A blog can be a website in itself, or sometimes just a part of a website. It’s usually maintained by an individual who makes regular entries. The entries the person writes are typically displayed in reverse chronological order, so the newest entry is usually displayed at the top. That person could be writing about anything that interests him. It could be just commentaries on his favorite subject, a review of a product or service, or it could simply be an online diary that he writes to. Anything and everything that you want to write about can be made into a blog entry. When you post an entry to your blog, you can include text (of course), images, links to other blogs or websites, videos, audio files, and other media. A great feature about blogs is that you can allow your visitors to leave comments on your posts if you want. It can start a discussion, and you can get other people’s thoughts and ideas on the topic.

Now you’re probably wondering how a blog is different than a typical website though. (Keep in mind that a blog actually is a website.) A blog is something that’s meant to be updated on a regular basis, with new posts from the author on his thoughts, comments, ideas, experiences, etc… A website, in the typical sense, is pretty much something that’s there for informational purposes and not necessarily updated on a regular basis. For example, a company website might describe the products it makes or the services it offers, have some company background information, a page for some contact and location information, etc…, but that information doesn’t change on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis. A blog is somewhat of a living, breathing thing (so to speak) and new entries can be added to it regularly and people can leave their comments and thoughts on it.

Whether you’re building a blog site or a typical website, you still need a place to host it (I’ll probably get more into this in another post), but another difference is that blogs can be much more easy to setup. There are ready made blog programs that can be easily installed on your host and you can be up and posting entries in no time. A favorite of mine is WordPress. You can get a copy of WordPress here. It’s FREE! I’ll definitely be talking more about WordPress in future posts. There are also many free places that you can start blogging at that don’t require you to pay for a host if you don’t want to. I’m talking about places like Blogger.com from Google, or WordpPress.com, or even Blog.com. However, if you’re looking for more control over your website and prefer to use your own domain name, then I would recommend checking out Host Gator. They’re really inexpensive (I would stay away from free hosts except what I noted above as you always get what you pay for). And if you use coupon code HTEMBGator you can even get 25% off the package price. With a typical website, if you don’t know HTML or how to put a web page together (like building your own headers and footers, navigation links, contact forms, etc…), then you’ll probably have to hire someone to do it, which could cost you quite a bit.

This site is in fact a blog site created with WordPress. I’ll go over exactly how to use WordPress soon, and then we’ll get into the good stuff of how to actually make a profit from your blog sites and turn them into cash machines. If you’re really interested in learning more about blogs and their history, you can always check out the wikipedia article on it. I’ll be back with more information for you, so check back again soon!

I’ve done my fair share of buying programs thinking ‘This is the ONE’, and dishing out plenty of money in the process, only to find myself struggling and disappointed. Some were great, and others were just a waste of time and money. It’s not as simple as everyone would lead you to believe, but it can be done.

So I’ve been through it, and I’m still going through it. I’ve been making a little bit of money now by blogging, and I thought I would share some of my experiences with you and some of the programs, tips and tricks that worked for me. No, I’m not a multi-million dollar blogger. I’m not even a million dollar blogger. In fact, I’ve only been blogging for money for several months now, and although I’m still not ready to leave my full-time job, I’m just starting to make out pretty well with my blogs.

In the days, weeks and months ahead I’ll be trying to keep this site alive with tips and tricks, my experiences, reviews of programs I’ve tried, tools and resources for making money while blogging, etc… So stick around and lets get busy blogging for money!