oogle AdSense is an excellent way to monetize your website. In the past many site publishers had to find ways to earn income, including ugly banner ads, selling links, and sometimes going to far as to recommend affiliate merchants of lesser quality.

With Google AdSense, once you get approved, all you have to do is put a snippet of code on your page and you can immediately begin to earn income, but you can also enhance your visitor's experience on your site. For example:

1. Google will place relevant ads on your page, which will usually match your content, giving your visitor excellent information that ties in with what you're discussing.

2. you can control to a large extent the look and feel of the ads

3. you can block competitive ads from your pages if you want

4. you can get on with the business of enhancing your site, rather than worry about how you're going to pay for hosting and other expenses

Google AdSense really is a dream come true for small business website publishers. But here's the deal. Although it's incredibly easy to insert the code onto your page, there can be a huge difference between how much you earn based on where the ad is placed and what it looks like.

Additionally you want to make sure that your page is properly optimized for the correct keywords, for simple changes can mean the difference between Google placing high value targeted keywords on your page that your visitor will be more likely to click on, or lower value generic versions that get clicked rarely, and even when they are, they yield lesser income per click.

I personally found that by making some simple changes in the way I used Google AdSense, my daily income jumped by a factor of 6, almost overnight! Yes, I was earning 6 times as much as I was previously.

If you're serious about making money with Google AdSense, here are some excellent products that will help you succeed with this fascinating advertising method.

Google AdSense Tracker - if you took this tool away from me, I'd go into withdrawal. This PHP script enables you to track every time someone visits any of your pages that has the AdSense code (and this script) on it, and it also tracks every click on an AdSense ad. That's simple enough, and valuable enough, but the reporting functions are what makes this script so valuable.

Once you have started capturing data, you can analyze the results, and find out when your clicks are happening, where the visitors are coming from, what search terms they used, and (worth the price of gold) what AdSense format was shown including colors of title, text, link, and border.

Don't you think if you found out that having a gray border yielded 23% more clicks than a blue border, that would be nice to know? And don't you think that if you found out that using a large rectangle yielded 235% more clicks than a skyscraper ad, that would be even more valuable? Don't you think this tool would pay it's one time purchase price back very quickly? I thought so to, that's why I bought it, and that's why I recommend it so highly.

By the way, the figures quoted above are just grabbed out of the air, you'll have to do the analysis yourself on your own site because individual results can vary. I mentioned in the introduction above that my personal results were a 6-fold jump in daily income, most of that jump came after installing this software and also purchasing an eBook that the same company publishes about tripling your AdSense CTR. The results were amazing, these two tools paid for themselves in less than a week.

The Definitive Guide to Google AdSemse, by William Charlwood - although the title is a takeoff on a similar book by a different author concerning Google AdWords, it in no means diminishes the value of this eBook or the content contained within. This is a comprehensive guide to the Google AdSense topic, going from what you need to do to make sure your site qualifies to be approved for the program (many aren't, by the way), to how to earn maximum income. At the moment I wrote this, you could get a free chapter of the book just by visiting the site, I recommend you take advantage of it.

Top Paying Keywords - This is a comprehensive database of over 15,000 keywords, how much they're worth on the PPC search engines, and the relative popularity. Since I purchased this database (it comes as a downloadable Excel spreadsheet), I've been able to fine tune my pages so that Google places more valuable ads on my pages, which earn me higher average click prices. If you're serious about maxing out your AdSense earnings, you shouldn't be without this tool. It's admittedly expensive, but well worth the price. I use it myself and wouldn't be without it.