It's very easy to make a lot of money with AdSense. I know it's easy because in a short space of time, I've managed to turn the sort of AdSense revenues that wouldn't keep me in candy into the kind of income that pays the mortgage on a large suburban house, makes the payments on a family car and does a whole lot more besides.
But that doesn't mean there aren't any number of mistakes that you can make when trying to increase your AdSense income - and any one of those mistakes can keep you earning candy money instead of earning the sort of cash that can pay for your home.
There is one mistake though that will totally destroy your chances of earning a decent AdSense income before you've even started.
That mistake is making your ad look like an ad.
No one wants to click on an ad. Your users don't come to your site looking for advertisements. They come looking for content and their first instinct is to ignore everything else. And they've grown better and better at doing just that. Today's Internet users know exactly what a banner ad looks like. They know what it means, where to expect it - and they know exactly how to ignore it. In fact most Internet users don't even see the banners at the top of the Web pages they're reading or the skyscrapers running up the side.
But when you first open an AdSense account, the format and layout of the ads you receive will have been designed to look just like ads. That's the default setting for AdSense - and that's the setting that you have to work hard to change.
That's where AdSense gets interesting. There are dozens of different strategies that smart AdSense account holders can use to stop their ads looking like ads - and make them look attractive to users. They include choosing the right formats for your ad, placing them in the most effective spots on the page, putting together the best combination of ad units, enhancing your site with the best keywords, selecting the most ideal colors for the font and the background, and a whole lot more besides.
The biggest AdSense mistake you can make is leaving your AdSense units looking like ads.
1. You can’t cheat Google
Every once in while, someone will comes out with ingenious idea of how to get more money from AdSense in less than honorable ways. He will announce to the whole world, posting in every forum and tell people how smart he is. His idea is always untraceable by Google, it is always original, and it always gives easy money.What he doesn’t know is, few months after that, he will get caught by Google, always. And his AdSense account will be disabled. Always. And he is banned from ever applying for AdSense account again. Always.Google is a giant, with 2005 revenue of almost US$ 10 billions, and profits of more than US$ 1 billion. A large chunk of this comes from Adwords / AdSense advertisements.More click fraud means less trust, less advertisers and less money, to the extent that if unsolved it will bring collapse to pay-per-click advertisement business. Now. Do you think Google will let you jeopardize their billion dollar business model?They have money and ability to bring together many of the the smartest and brightest engineers and scientists on earth, has been doing that and will continue to do so. How smart do you think you are that you can outsmart collaborative effort of the brightest brains?You might be able to pull through for two or three months, but eventually the fraud detection algorithm will catch up and you are caught. And you get banned from Google AdSense, among other things.
2. Cheating = stealing
No matter how you want to justify, face it, cheating is stealing. You are not only stealing from Google, but also from Adwords publishers. Majority of these are are not big companies, but small webmasters depending on Internet to make a living.Moreover, even if your morality (or lack thereof) permits stealing from your own fellow, bear in mind that stealing is illegal. Regardless of whether it is done offline or online, a crime is a crime. You might get jailed for that.In fact, Google has started to bring AdSense fraudsters to court a few months ago. Some were jailed, and some others were fined heavily.
3. It is just too easy to earn more, legally
Let’s say you managed to cheat AdSense undetected. You don’t use clickbot or proxy or click-ring or paid clickers. You managed to somehow get the clicks from distributed IP. You don’t use pop-ups, spyware, adware. You are careful that your CTR does not exceed 10%. Still, your earning is limited. There is a cap you can’t cross, else you will invite unwanted attention to your account.With so much effort to cover your traces, actually you will get better result if you concentrate your effort to improve the website.Write more contents, submit articles, improve on your search engine optimisation, improve adsense placement, and you can get the same earning or even more. Sure it will take some time, but this is legitimate.