Thursday, July 9, 2009
Google AdWords
Google AdWords are the small text ads that are displayed on the side of the search results in Google. These ads are contextual of course – in this case the context is the search terms you entered. The ads will be served based on what you’re looking for. So, if you do a search on “printing services” you will get ads for printing services along with your search results!
How does this generate money for Google and the advertisers?
Google AdWords works on a model known as pay-per-click. When someone clicks on an AdWords ad, the advertiser of that ad has to pay Google a certain amount. It’s easy to track and fully automated.
We say “certain amount” because that amount is different all the time and is subject to market forces – in this case, bidding. Something has to determine the placement of those ads, and what determines it is how much the advertiser offers to pay per click. When you submit this kind of ad to Google, you submit it with a bid – which is compared to other bids for similar keywords. It’s an auction style process.
The position of the AdWords ads is based on the bidding amount of keywords of an ad. Obviously, the higher the bid, the higher the position the bid buys you. For instance, if the highest bid for the keywords “Internet marketing” is 80 cents per click, you can get top position by bidding 90 cents. Then every time someone clicks on your ad, Google would charge you 90 cents, and you would retain the top position until someone else bids more for the same search word placement.
Google AdSense, as stated earlier, is an extension of Google AdWords. It takes the AdWords concept and moves it off of Google’s search page and onto thousands of other web pages. The ads that are displayed on the websites are Google AdWords ads.
It’s good for the advertiser, who gets more and broader displays, for Google, who charge more for this program, for you, who will make money from the clickthroughs on your pages, and also for the consumer, who will see cool ads for stuff they are probably interested in!
So how exactly are you making money from all this? You earn a share of the pay-per-click amount, every time a visitor clicks on the ad. So you just need to get ads on your site…
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Getting Started With Blogger.com...
Want to get up and running with AdSense really fast? One way is to open an account at Blogger.com. Blogger is like those old free websites that you could set up in a flash but which looked like they’d been cobbled together from bits of left-over graphics that no one else wanted. Except that the blog you create at Blogger.com is the real McCoy. It’s professional, it looks great… and it takes just seconds to put together. All you have to do is choose a name and title for your blog, take your pick of the good range of templates available and get writing. You don’t have to worry about coding or design work or images or anything else. If you change your mind about the way your blog looks, you can just pick a different template. All that’s left for you to do is write… and add AdSense. Even that’s been made easy for you.
Blogger.com lets you apply for AdSense directly from its site. It even gives you a preview of where your ads will appear and how they will look. While you’re waiting for your approval, you can play with fonts and colors so that you’re all set up and ready to start earning. Of course, once you’ve done that, there are all sorts of ways to play with the layout and content. You can easily move the ads into the sidebar by clicking the Template tab and looking for the line that says:
