It’s one thing to hear about all the great advantages Google AdSense offers, including how it can make money for you in your sleep. But it’s another thing to hear comments from real, live people. Here are a few comments I found interesting :-

• “We’re seeing this impressive new revenue stream without incurring any cost. We’re maximizing our previously unsold inventory, and our revenue per page figure continues to grow.” - Scott Zucker, Executive VP and COO, Intelligent Content Corp, PetPlace.com

• “It took no time at all to copy and post the code on individual pages, and it fits well with our content management system and with the look and feel of all our pages.” - Steve Larson, Founder, Our-Hometown.com

• “Instead of spending money to hire an additional sales rep to sell ad banners, Google ads have become a virtual sales tool for us. Now we’re able to reap thousands of dollars in additional advertising revenue each month that we would very likely have missed without Google AdSense.” - Robert Hoskins, Editor and Group Publisher, Broadband Wireless Exchange

• “Google shows targeted ads reflecting the sorts of information and services SeatGuru visitors want. For a small business like mine, this is the best approach to advertising. You set it up easily, it automatically serves relevant ads, and it takes very little of my time.” - Matt Daimler, Founder, SeatGuru.com

• “At the beginning I was very concerned that I might lose traffic to competitors. I only used AdSense on a limited number of the site’s pages, and I watched the stats very carefully. If the traffic, pages per visitor, or conversion rates dropped I knew I could easily pull the ads...Since implementing AdSense, our ad revenue has increased more than tenfold, and 100 percent of my available inventory is now sold through AdSense.” - Vik Kachoria, Entrepreneur, Real Adventure.

Yeah, size matters, but so does
placement.....particularly as far as Google AdSense ads are concerned. Remember how I said to use the skyscraper format for ads, putting them in the margins as opposed to banner ads across the top or bottom?
Well, guess how much difference that can make. Go on, guess. OK, I’ll tell you. Poorly placed ads, such as banner ads down at the very bottom of the page, might have a click-through rate of about 2.3% on a good day.
But well-placed ads, such as a nice skyscraper ad in that critical upper-left quadrant we talked about, can have a click-through rate as high as 40%.
And that’s for the same ad. Yes, the very same ad can have a click-through rate of an abysmal 2.3% or an awesome 40%. It has nothing to do with the ad itself and everything to do with where you put it.
Another neat trick to maximize click-through is to massage the colors of the ads so that they fit in with the colors of your site. Ads that are seen as “fitting in” get more clicks than ads that clash.

Here’s an example of some ads that look like part of the site:

You've probably heard of SEO, since its very hot right now. It stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a site by designing the site content so that the site ranks high in the search results of a search engine.
The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that a user will visit that site. Lets face it, most people are lazy. Theyre not going to spend time clicking and scanning tons of pages of search results. Therefore, where a site ranks in a web search is absolutely critical for directing more traffic toward the site. SEO helps to make sure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine.
To understand how this works, you need to know a little bit about how search engines work. Typically, a search engine sends out a spider to fetch as many documents as it can. Then another program, called an indexer, reads these documents and makes an index based on the words each document contains. Each search engine uses a unique proprietary algorithm to create indexes so that hopefully only meaningful results are returned for each query.
These indexers compute the keyword density.
Keyword density refers to the how often a certain word appears in a given document. Its given as a percentage. Lets say you have a site about running shoes. A keyword density of 7% on running on that web page means that out of 1000 words, 70 of them are "running."
Unfortunately, the quick-buck con artists have figured this out, and they will put up a site that has a front page that is totally littered with keywords. To give you an idea, a normal key word density for the main key words is about 3 to 7%. What these people will do is have something insane like a 25% keyword density on their front page. Then that page ranks #1 in search engine results when users search for that word. Once the user is on the entry page, theyre likely to enter the site.
Pornographers do this by putting up sites that have content like:
Sex, sex, sex. Sex is here. You want sex. We have sex. Pix of sex, lots of sex.
See how annoying that gets?
Search engines used to use meta-tags to search for web sites. This was nice, since the meta-tag was a hidden area of your page where you could put all the relevant keywords and not have to worry about making your content sound awkward by overusing certain words.