Google’s latest advertising program, AdSense, has been making waves in the online marketing industry. What is it really and how do we make effective use of it? When you have AdSense on your website, you are displaying ads from Google. And when a viewer of yours decides to click and view those ads, you will make money. That’s the gist of it.

AdSense is very tempting and looks easy to do. It means that your website starts generating money on it’s own. You just let the ads be and cash will be piling up for you. However, don’t get excited yet. More and more people are saying that they hardly get anything at all while there are lucky ones who generate an income of thousands of dollars a month from AdSense. So what’s the big secret? How did they do it?

The Big Secret: The secret to AdSense is that there is no real secret – these people just have a keener sense of how AdSense works. Let’s break it down to basics – AdSense works on keywords. Some keywords are worth only one cent while other keywords can bring in nearly twenty dollars per click. High-end keywords would be those that are used the most often in search engines, like travel, diet or credit repair. Naturally, the more high-paying keywords you have in your website, the more money you’ll make, correct?

Technically, yes. But remember that you only get paid if people click on the ads. If your website is just stuffed with keywords and the content makes no sense, then people are not going to click on your ads either. That means that you’re not going to make any money at all. So you need to make sure your content is relevant to these high-paying AdSense keywords as well. For instance, ‘attorney’ is a popular keyword that can bring in a lot of money. To make AdSense work best for you, you need to provide good content on attorney information that will encourage the reader to click on the ads.

Content and writing for AdSense keywords for your own site can be quite time-consuming. So you can either hire someone to write it for you, or post copyrighted content collected from other resources.

I get very frustrated with all the products that get released promising to help you make million of Dollars but don’t mention the most important aspect of any site. How to generate traffic.

I don’t care how great a product is if it doesn’t show you how to generate good quality traffic then it’s almost worthless. If I was starting out again I wouldn’t spend money on any tools or e-books until I had mastered the art of traffic generation, and it really is an art of getting traffic to a site.

You can have the best looking site in the world, with the perfect keywords but if you don’t know how to firstly attract the search engine spiders and then real human visitors then the site is going to have no value. Try selling a website and the first thing you will be asked is “What is the Income & what’s the traffic” The income is not particularly important. If I am buying a site I actually want the income to be as low as possible as it will be cheaper for me. Given a choice of a site with an income of $100 a month and 1000 visitors or a site with $10 per month and 2000 Visitors I’ll always go for the visitors.

If you concentrate on learning how to generate traffic to your sites you’ll be able to launch sites in the certain knowledge of being able to make them profitable. I run a membership site and was creating some traffic videos only yesterday. I tried something I’d never done before and discovered that it got my site indexed in Google in 18 hours.

Using that method was completely new to me and although it impressed me it might have been a lucky one-off. I used it on another new domain this morning and found that it only took 3 hours before my site was referenced in Google. 3 Hours! Now that is very impressive.

The method I used has not been mentioned in any of the traffic generation products I’ve read. However this is not too surprising as traffic generation is constantly evolving. Google change their algorithms and sites fall out of favor or become favored. It was only a few months ago that Squidoo was the best place to start your link building. Now it’s fallen out of favor.

One great method of seeing what services and sites are worth putting your links on is by looking at Internet marketing niches. Internet marketers have never been slow in finding the best ways of getting indexed. Look at what sites are ranking for various search terms. If you find a web 2.0 site or a blog site test it on your sites and see how it performs. If it gives you results add it to your list of traffic generators.

By planning your traffic generation using the tools you discover you can quickly start to dominate search engine listings. By careful manipulation of your linking strategies it is often possible to grab many of the top 10 listings.