Google Adsense is one of the best ways to make money from your site. You might not become a millionaire with your Adsense monetized properties but with some luck, and above all knowledge about what works with Adsense sites and what doesn't, this could become a stable source of income for you.

How Much Can I Make With Google Adsense: This is a question almost everybody asks before jumping on the Adsense wagon. There isn't a universal answer ‐ some Web masters are making a fulltime income from a single Adsense site, while others with 5 or more sites can't even cover their hosting fees.

How much you will make with Google Adsense depends on many factors. Some of them are outside your control - i.e. the overall state of the economy or what advertisers Google has managed to attract. However, there are also many factors within your control. For instance, obviously, if you have one site with 10 pages only you will make thousands of times less than if you have 10 sites with thousands of pages. Basically, all equal, the more content you have, the more you will make.

Choose a Profitable Niche: However, in addition to sheer volume, there is one more very important consideration ‐ what your site is about, or to put it more professionally, which niche your site is in. Different niches aren't equal ‐ there are more and less profitable ones. There are niches, such as health or finance, where high value clicks are common and niches, such as culture or history, where you can make almost nothing with Adsense.

This is why you need to choose a niche where clicks pay well. It is true that good niches are very, very competitive but even in the most competitive niche, there is always place for one more good site. After you choose the niche, you need to find the high volume keywords in it and optimize your site for them. To search for keywords with high search volume, use the AdWords tool.

Place the Ads in Visible Places: Strategic placement of the ad units is vital for your profits. Quite logically, when you place ads where they are visible, this seriously increases the number of clicks you will get. The best places are above the fold (i.e. in the top half of the page) and in the text itself. Basically, the closer the ads to the text are, the better. You can have a look at these AdSense placement tips from Google to see which places are considered good, best, and worst for ad placement.

Optimize the Ads for Higher CTR: Strategic placement is important but there are other aspects you need to take into account when you optimize your pages for high CTR (Click Thru Rate).

Drive Traffic to Your Site: Finally, one really important prerequisite for making money with Adsense is traffic. You might have an incredibly high CTR but if you don't manage to drive traffic to your site, you won't be making money.

The most important free traffic source is search engines. Traffic from search engines is targeted and as a rule it converts well. Our site offers quite a lot of resources about how to make your site rank well with search engines, so take the time to browse it and get familiar with SEO. If you have absolutely no idea about SEO, you might want to start with the 15 Minute SEO guide, or read the SEO tutorial.

Traffic from search engines converts best but you should never allow yourself to be dependent on it. Google Panda update was one of the bitterest lessons for many webmasters, when their sites dropped in rankings and their traffic hit bottom. You shouldn't neglect traffic from other sources, such as social bookmarking sites, Twitter, Facebook, and any other free traffic.

Google Adsense Alternatives: If you do everything properly but you don't see much in your Adsense account, don't get desperate. The reasons for poor Adsense income can be numerous. Try to find them and correct the issues (i.e. wrong niche, bad placement of ads, inadequate ad sizes, types, and colors, etc.) If this doesn't help, consider the numerous Google Adsense alternatives. In general, they bring less revenue than Adsense but who knows, for your site it might be just the opposite. Just keep on trying and sooner or later you will make it!