For most bloggers, Google AdSense is the first and easiest way to start making money online. But reports of how much money you can actually make with it vary widely across the board. While popular bloggers have had a great deal of success with it, smaller blogs often find AdSense to be frustratingly limited. This discrepancy has been perpetuated to the point that many bloggers now believe that to make money with AdSense, you need to have a lot of traffic.

While that's not exactly wrong — your site's traffic has a great impact on how much you can earn from it — it's not the whole truth either. Most importantly, it should not be viewed as a reason to give up on AdSense, because, as popular bloggers themselves have proven: when it works, it works like a charm!

In order to make money with AdSense, you first need to understand how it works. AdSense is a simple ad-publishing tool that can be incorporated into a variety of online mediums and displays ads based on the keywords within the existing text on the page. Every time a visitor to your site clicks on an ad published in your data, you are paid some money. Hence it is called PPC or Pay-Per-Click Advertising. This is usually a figure in cents or pennies, and the exact figure depends most of all on how competitive and profitable your keywords are.

Types of AdSense

AdSense is available for web content (on blogs and web sites), for search (as when you add a Google search bar to your blog and visitors click on a sponsored search result), for mobile content (for mobile-version web sites and pages), for feeds (so that you can display ads even within your RSS and Atom feeds), and for video, parked domains and mobile applications.

How to Make Money With AdSense

1. Understand how AdSense Works

In order to make good profit from AdSense, it's not enough to just sign up and start publishing ads. First you must know its rules - so that you don't break them - and its payout method - so that you can develop your strategy accordingly. Take a look at Google's AdSense center to begin learning.

2. Choose profitable keywords

Even if you already have an existing web site, in order to make money with AdSense you need to choose the most profitable keywords within your niche. If you want to write your own content (opposite to hiring freelancers or copywriters), it is important that you are aware on the subjects of your keywords and can research and write useful material on them.

3. Create useful, keyword-rich content

Once you have chosen your keywords, you can actively start creating content while keeping those keywords in mind. Don't start keyword-spamming, because users will not find your site useful, and while they might click on an ad just to get away from your page, that's not a profitable or traffic-building strategy. If your content doesn't make sense, you also risk getting banned by Google — not just the AdSense program but the search engine too!

4. Place your ads strategically.

The placement of your ads within your content matters a lot. The optimum placement will of course depend on your design and how your text are placed. You also have the choice between image, text and video-based ads, and how well one works for you will depend on your readership, the type of your content and primarily your existing web design. Many wordpress themes and the like come already enabled for displaying ads, but don't let that stop you from trying different options and deciding for yourself which one has the best ROI.

5. Build traffic

The more traffic your site has, the more users will click on your ads - it's that simple. Traffic building is a whole another blog post, but remember that it goes hand in hand with creating useful, keyword-oriented content!

Making money with AdSense is easy - once you understand the program and follow some simple strategies for maximizing your profits, it's truly a program you can "set and forget"!