In This Chapter

• Taking a closer look at AdSense
• Where to incorporate AdSense on your site
• How to block ads from competitors
• Some additional thoughts about AdSense

Most of my recommendations for growing your business have involved spending money or time with the intent of driving new customers to your site and closing the sale. This is a traditional method of generating revenue and expanding a business, of course, but there's another way to attain your target revenue.

Instead of paying to advertise on other sites or paying for people to help optimize your website for maximal findability, Google will pay you to include advertisements from other companies on your web pages.

Can you generate thousands of dollars a week from your website? Probably not. But if you'd like to have your website break even rather than be an expenditure each month, or you'd like to add a new area to your site that helps you monetize the incoming traffic, then Google AdSense could be an excellent fit.

Even if you don't think you want to add advertising to your website -- and there are a number of reasons not to, as we'll discuss shortly -- this chapter is still worth reading because you can always create a second site that's filled with reference materials and pays for itself through advertising.

Tip: Advertising on your site has pros and cons. Read through this entire chapter and think about the implications of moving from a writer to a publisher carefully before you decide to jump into AdSense.

The best feature of AdSense isn't that it lets you easily include advertising on your site, but that the entire system is managed by Google and once you've included a few simple lines of HTML code (or, better, gotten your IT person to add it) all the advertising shows up without further intervention and you're paid each month as long as you earn at least $100 in that pay period.