Monetizing Your Website with Google Adsense
Poker webmasters always ask me what different ways they can monetize their websites. Often times my initial thought is to add content, get backlinks, and focus on haing the best site for your target market. Well and of course I always tell poker webmasters to "think outside the box" or pick a specific niche. Up until a few months ago I would see Google Adsense on websites and think they were just a waste of time. However after speaking with some of my colleagues who have incorporated Adsense into their poker sites, I was sold. Of course you don't want the Google Ads to look out of place or be annoying. But if incorporated properly into your sites, you can certainly make a few extra bucks every month.
Now Adsense is certainly not for every site. For example you will never see Adsense on the homepage of PAW or in our forums. Although we certainly would make money that way, we don't want to take away anything from the community. Likewise with all the return visitors we get there would be a great deal of banner blindness anyways. But it is for sites that you get a fair amount of traffic to or even better sites that visitors are coming to in search of information. Perhaps even some of those sites that drive traffic but you don't spend a lot of time updating or adding content. I'm not going to go into a huge article about what Google Adsense is but to keep it simple, there are two types. There's Adsense for Search and Adsense for content. If used properly and blended into your site in the right places, they can produce a nice form of extra revenue for you. Here is an example of Adsense for Search:
Adsense For Search
You can see this form of incorporating Google Adsense is pretty simple. The beauty is that even if your visitor doesn't follow one of your poker links and sign up at a poker room, there is a chance they will click on an Ad or use the search feature as shown above. Any time a visitor follows a sponsored ad, you make money. Unless your driving 1000's of hits per day, Google Adsense is not going to make you rich, it will however supplement your income just like when you add a new poker room to your mix. I do however know people that are making thousands every month off of well optimized sites that receive target search engine traffic. If you build your pages right and have Adsense incorporated so that it doesn't stand out like a sore thumb and scream I AM AN ADVERTISEMENT! you can supplement your income very well. In closing you really have nothing to lose by including Adsense on a few of your pages. If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me a PM in our Poker Affiliate Forums
Jeremy
Poker Affiliate World
