ADSENSE — MAKING THE MONEY!

So creating your website can be pretty simple — and even the complicated stuff isn’t difficult. But you’ll also need to sign up for AdSense. If you’re using Blogger or a sitebuilder like Moonfruit, you’ll actually be able to join AdSense from within those programs. Choose to insert an AdSense unit and you’ll be asked to sign in to your AdSense account to fetch your code. If you don’t have an account, you’ll be offered a link to sign up.

Alternatively, you can join AdSense directly from Google itself by surfing to Google.com and clicking the “Advertising Programs” link below the search buttons. You’ll be offered a choice of AdWords — for publishers who want create an ad — or AdSense — for publishers who want to receive them.

Here’s how you sign up

Signing Up Made Easy

The sign-up page asks for a relatively small amount of information, not all of which is as obvious as you might like.

First, you’ll have to tell Google the “primary” site on which you want to place your ads. If you have more than one site, just pick the one that has the most traffic. You’ll also need to tell Google the language of your website so that they can assign the site to the right person for review.

You’ll then be offered two checkboxes. One of them requires you to state that you won’t be placing the ads on sites that contain pornographic content. The other indicates that you agree not to “place ads on sites that include incentives to click on ads.”

At the bottom of the page, you’ll also have to agree not to “click on the Google ads I’m serving through AdSense.”

Both of those are important and they’re themes that will run throughout your time as an AdSense publisher.

If you click on one of your own ads — even to see which companies are advertising on your pages or to make sure that the system is working — you’ll cost your advertisers money. They’ll have to pay for that click. Google can track suspicious clicks, and while it will take a few “mistakes” into account, deducting those clicks from payments, it can be pretty unforgiving towards publishers who try to make money by clicking their own ads, or encouraging their users to do so for them.

Many publishers have found that they’ve been permanently banned from AdSense for those sorts of practices, a very costly mistake. You can — and should — encourage people to click on affiliate ads because they only pay if someone actually buys. But you can never encourage people to click pay-per-click ads, like AdSense.Once you’ve completed your website information, you’ll need to provide contact information. The only tricky question here is whether you want an “individual” account or a “company” account — whether you’re a company with more than twenty employees or practically a one-man show that’s just you and up to nineteen others. That’s important for just one reason: it tells Google where to send the money. Take a business account and the payments will be made in the name of your company; take an individual account, and they’ll be paid directly to you.

Once, you’ve completed the basic details, you’ll be asked to confirm them. (Do check that the address is correct. Google likes to send out checks, so if you’ve put the wrong address, your neighbor will be receiving your AdSense payments instead of you. I like being nice to my neighbors… but not that nice!) And you’ll be asked to log in using a Google Account such as your Gmail username and password, or to create a username and password if you don’t have one.

Google will then send you an email with a link to confirm that your details are correct. Click the link and someone will review your website to make sure that it’s appropriate for AdSense.

That process can take two or three days, although often it’s a lot faster, but it does mean that for those first two or three days, you won’t have any ads. Use that time to create more content so that you’ll have plenty of space to put your ads once the site has been approved.