Posted on April 05, 2005 by Harold Johnson

If you’ve been thinking about incorporating advertising into your blog or podcast site but just haven’t figured out the best way to go about it, one way to begin familiarizing yourself with ad programs is by tricking out your site with Google Ads. The popular search engine’s advertising programs are easy to use and you don’t have to worry about the content being inappropriate nor obtrusive. Yet do they really make you any money?

After experimenting with Google’s AdWords program some time ago, a service for which you pay to have your own text ads displayed on other websites, I recently decided to test their companion service, AdSense. Unlike AdWords, AdSense is intended to bring you direct revenue rather than visitors. By simply inserting a few lines of code into your blog template, Google will automatically present targeted text ads on your site–ads based on your own content and therefore appropriate and perhaps even enticing to your readers.

So how, exactly, does this work? After signing up for the program–which is free–inserting the code into your blog, and then publishing your content, Google sends its search bots to “sniff” your site, reading its content to determine what type of ads would make the most sense to your readers. Then it displays the ad(s) on your site; should a reader decided to explore the ad, you will be credited for the click through and some money will be deposited into your Google Advertising account.

The system relies on the level of traffic you have moving through your site, so if you have a few hundred visitors each day, you may find yourself making only a few cents, depending on how often your visitors click through Google’s ads. I recently began a blog which provides information on audioblogs, and though the number of visitors to the site is increasing steadily each week, the AdSense ads still garnered a mere $10 total after a month of service. And though I am tempted to refer to Google’s service as AdCents, I remain hopeful; the site is still young and I have a ton of content to add.