Google Adsense

I first added Google Adsense targeted ads to my website in July of 2003, shortly after they opened the program to the public community of webmasters.

The terms of the program prohibit me from discussng specific details regarding payments and conversion rates, but I can say that Adsense revenue has made it possible for me to continue to homeschool my children as a single mother.

Adsense is different from a regular ad banner program because the ads are targeted to the content of the page on which they are displayed. If you've written an article about skiing in the Oregon Cascades, the ads displayed will be related to skiing. They may be for equipment, or hotels in the area, but they'll be contextually related to your content.

This doesn't work perfectly. Sometimes the ads don't match. Some topics do not generate well-targeted ads. One of my websites related to parenting issues. I do run Adsense on most of the articles, because the ads were just plain silly. That's because Adsense can only match your content if they have inventory that matches and pretty much no one is advertising in the filed of non-coercive parenting.

Adsense works best if the content of your article is a commodity, in one form or another, a product or a service that someone would like to buy.

Naturally, there are people trying to game the system, hunting out the words that generate high-paying ads and continually playing with and tweaking their content. That's not a game I'm interested in playing.

I like Adsense because I have exactly the kind of sites they created the program for to begin with...highly-targeted niches with relatively low traffic.

If you are interested in trying out Adsense, simply click the button to the left and sign up. Be sure to read the Terms of Service when you do so as to avoid any grievous mistakes that might get you kicked out of the program (such as clicking your own ads).