An Introduction to Google Adwords and Adsense

In Internet Marketing - Posted on Aug 2, 2010

August 2, 2010 · 24 comments

in Internet Marketing

Buffer

Introducting The Google Advertising Platform

Whether you are a business looking to increase your traffic or a blogger looking to increase your income, the Google advertising platform is a powerful force in today’s market.

Google Adwords is their popular pay-per-click solution that lets an advertiser chose their own keywords to target, write their own text ads, and pay only when someone clicks their link. Many of these ads are displayed along Google Search results, a site which sees more than 200 million views per day.

A large percentage of Google Adwords are also displayed on the sites of web publishers and bloggers that want to generate revenue while still being able to write as they see fit and have thus subscribed to the Google Adsense program.

As you can see these two programs fit together hand-in-glove with the Adwords advertisers essentially paying the Adsense site-owners to display their ads.

A few months ago I set up my Google Adwords account, at the advice of a wordpress SEO expert Shannon Steffen – @SKSDesigns – who spoke at Wordcamp Chicago 2010 on SEO tactics. While she did not cover it from stage, I had the pleasure of sharing a breakfast table with her and trust me I made the most of picking up any information I could!

In a nutshell, Shannon said that setting up Google Adwords with a mere $30 investment in advertising per month, is a strong way to rapidly generate some backlink and exposure. She suggested not going wild with the advertising but using this little bit to help put more focus on a site. So, heeding her advice, I dutifully registered my account and awaited approval… and then forgot all about it…

I had never had an interest in Google Adsense because I had ZERO interest in displaying their ads on my site.

Simply put, I personally find them cluttery, relationship interfering, and often opposite to what I may be promoting or cautioning people against in my post. (Yes filtering exists but you have to catch them first.) There is zero ability to control congruency with what I’m writing and because they sit near the content they look as though I personally recommend them – not!

However, I recently started running into several Google Adsense Revenue Sharing communities. These are sites that when you contribute content (via article submission or guest blogging) give you a portion of the adsense revenue they generate off of what you submit. It’s essentially free money.

Look at a site such as Ezine Articles (here’s a post you can look at by my friend Steve) and you see the HUGE amount of Google advertising going on around the page. If you click any of that advertising, Steve isn’t going to make a DIME!

This is different than sites such as Hubpages, ShoutMeLoud & BlogEngage which all have revenue sharing programs in place to give back to their authors. On those sites, if you click on an ad on a page that contains a single authors contributed content, and they have set up their account details, they’re going to make at least a portion of the click-through payment. It may not be much, but it helps!

So, a couple days ago I submitted my application to get my Google Adsense account. It wasn’t hard but they’re serious when they say it’s not immediate approval. Now that I’ve been approved I can set up the rest of the account and start using my Adsense ID on these revenue sharing sites and I suggest you do the same!

Not only that, I stumbled across my long-forgotten AdWords information… and saw that Google had emailed me a coupon good for $100 in free AdWords advertising. (Probably because they were afraid I’d forgotten them, which I had!) Woot!

So now I have $100 in free advertising I can use to build some SEO juice… and also the potential for some extra revenue coming in whenever I submit articles and guests posts that I need to do to generate SEO anyways! My SEO wins, my wallet wins and I win. Gotta love it!

One word of caution though: Don’t jump into Google PPC advertising without some high-quality training and preferably practicing on sites such as Yahoo. The Google learning curve is steep and expensive. It has a very high “novice tax” which is to say its easy to do it wrong and lose a ton of money. Also, as Matthew points out, the changes in advertiser behavior are decreasing the value of Google PPC and will likely do so until Google shakes things up again.

Have you taken a look at what AdWords and AdSense can do for your marketing? Have you considered using Google AdSense to help you offset the cost of running your site? Have you taken any PPC trainging that you loved? Or found PPC training that you’d love to take?

Do sites with revenue sharing programs impact your choice of where you submit your articles to? Have you taken part in any revenu sharing program and how did you like it? Know of any friendly sites with great revenue sharing programs that I may have missed?

Lets share our thoughts below!

Kimberly

PS: If you enjoyed this post I would really appreciate if you would bookmark, share, tweet, and syndicate it. Hopefully it will help others know what is available to them!

Subscribe To My Newsletter