Put Your Site to Work

PPC advertising is the absolute simplest way to monetize your site or blog. There are many PPC companies you can sign up with for free. Here's how PPC works:

People buy advertising with a PPC company, like Google's AdSense. The PPC company then lets webmasters and bloggers sign up for free accounts. The site owners get to choose the format for the PPC ads. The PPC company generates ad code. The site owner places the code on their site and within a short amount of time the ads appear. Any time a visitor clicks on one of the ads, the advertiser pays the PPC company and the PPC then gives the site owner a portion of the profit.

The great thing about PPC advertising is all you need to worry about is having a good quality site and work on generating traffic. If your site is good and has steady traffic, you will make money on autopilot. You can check your PPC account daily to watch your profits grow.

The Good About Adsense:
I first became aware of AdSense while watching a story on Good Morning America about two retirees who were making money by implementing Google's AdSense program on their personal websites.

I have limited website creation knowledge, but I thought to myself, "If they can teach themselves how to build a website and earn income, so can I." So, immediately after seeing the story on Good Morning America I began doing some research online about Google's AdSense program. I discovered that it is a legitimate way to earn money with absolutely no money out of your pocket, aside from web hosting fees. It's hard to be skeptical when talking about a company as trustworthy as Google.

You can start earning money from home with AdSense. The only thing you need is a website. If you have one, great! If not, create one about a topic that interests you. You will also need to find a web host to publish your site. There are many to choose from, Yahoo, Google, and GoDaddy are the most familiar to people who are novices.

After you have a website, go to Google and create an AdSense account. Then read all of Google's tips, helps, and view their demos about how to insert the Google ads into your website. It's just that easy. You will discover that you have to copy and paste some html code into your site, but don't let this discourage you. Be patient, read and reread Google's walkthroughs and it will all start to make sense to you.

You may be wondering what's the catch. That's the beauty of this whole thing. There is no catch! The guys at Google are geniuses. What they do is get business owners to pay them to run ads through the AdSense program. The advertisers pay Google every time their ads work, in other words every time someone clicks on one of their ads. In turn, Google will give you a portion of those profits each time someone clicks on an ad from your site.

The best part about the whole program is that the ads will match the content to your site. For example, if your site is about camping, then the ads that Google will put on your site will be for camping equipment and other related products or services. All you have to do is copy and paste in the html and Google does the rest.

Part of your agreement with Google is that you will not click on your own ads, that you will not encourage others to click your ads, and that you will not have illegal or inappropriate content on your website.

You can check your AdSense account any time you want to see how much money is in it. After it reaches $100, Google will mail you a check! That's it!

Danger, Will Robinson!
Now for the bad and ugly side to Adsense...Google is very quick to disable, without any warning, any account that they feel violates their policies. In fact, my account was disabled after just 3 weeks for unknown reasons. From my own experience, and what I've read in the forums, this happens quite often to innocent victims of spam clicking. Spam clicking is when someone maliciously repeatedly clicks one of your ads in hopes that your account gets banned. This is a real threat, if it happened to me it can happen to anyone.

Per Google's TOS (terms of service) agreement, if you notice any unusual activity you are to report it to Google ASAP. I noticed one day that my page got 124 views and 100 clicks. That is an unusually high click rate. I reported it and never hear back from Google. A week later I got this email from Google:

While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense
account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since
keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage
our advertisers in the future, we've decided to disable your account.

Please understand that we consider this a necessary step to protect the
interests of both our advertisers and our other AdSense publishers. We
realize the inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you in
advance for your understanding and cooperation.

If you have any questions about your account or the actions we've
taken, please do not reply to this email. You can find more information
by visiting
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/
Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Needless to say, I appealed the decision. In less than a day my appeal was declined. So, use AdSense at your own risk. Many people use it successfully, but many also have an experience like mine.

AdSense seems to pay better than other PPC companies. However, they don't pay better per click than the other companies. The reason why AdSense pays better is their ads better match your site's content than any other PPC. AdSense is HUGE. They have more advertisers to choose from than any other PPC company. This means they are more likely to place ads on your site that people will actually want to click.

Most people posting on the internet tend to agree that Google's AdSense program has the best pay out of any of the PPC advertising companies. But, Google has an extensive list of policies and TOS. More and more, the internet is getting flooded with people who say their AdSense accounts were canceled for no known reason. If you have lost your AdSense account, or don't want to deal with their complicated policies, an AdSense alternative may be right for you.

Perhaps one of the best alternatives to AdSense is AdBrite. They offer a variety of ad styles, just as AdSense does, but they also offer inline text ads. With inline text ads, the ad code you place on the site chooses random keywords throughout your site and highlights them. When a user mouses over these highlighted words, a thought bubble pops up with a little blurb about the keyword and the site the word points to. If a user finds the blurb interesting, they click it and get redirected to the advertisers site and you, the site owner gets paid for the click.

There are two great features to inline text ads. First, inline text ads blend in very well with your site. They aren't ugly or obnoxious like banner ads can be. Second, Google's AdSense does not offer inline text ads. This means you can place Google ads on your site while also placing inline text ads by AdBrite and not be breaking your user agreement with Google. This gives you the opportunity to earn even more from your site!




Another popular alternative to AdSense is WidgetBucks. WidgetBucks can also be used along side Google's AdSense without breaking their TOS. WidgetBucks works just like Amazon. You place a widget on your site that sells products that pertain to your site's content and you make commission off of each sale. WidgetBucks gives you a $25 sign up bonus.



What is so interesting about AdBrite and WidgetBucks is that they both have referral programs and you can make a percentage of what your referrals make from their PPC ads. Pair that with the fact that both of these programs can be used WITH AdSense and you have the beginnings to a real money making machine!

There are many options for earning money online for free. You are not limited to just GPTs and Paid Surveys. It just takes time to research all of the money making opportunities and find what will work best for you. I have taken some of that valuable research time out of the equation for you by creating The Simplest Online Money Making Info Ever.