Whether you're just starting out with AdSense or whether you've been using it for years, the success of your ads will depend on knowing five absolutely essential pieces of information about AdSense:

1. AdSense Can Make You A Huge Heap Of Cash Lots of people make the mistake of believing that AdSense is only good for bringing a site a few extra pennies a month. Wrong! AdSense can fund your lifestyle - if you get it right.

2. Junk Sites Get Junk Income
But just because it's possible for a site to make a lot of money with AdSense, it doesn't mean that any site can make a lot of money with AdSense. Your site must have good content that can attract users on its own merit. There are a lot of different strategies available for producing good content for your site. You'll need to use them if you want to create the sort of site that makes real money.

3. Your Choice Of Ads Matter
One of the first things that you'll have to do when you join AdSense is to pick the types of ads you want to display. Success relies on following certain principles that encourage users to click and persuades them that they've got a reason to do so. You'll need to know those principles.

4. You Can Influence The Ads You Receive!
Here's a little known AdSense secret: you do have some control over the ads that get served on your site. That control isn't unlimited - but it is worth exercising. It's also a little complicated but it's got a lot do with keyword hotspots located in each Web page. (I explain it all in my book, Google AdSense Secrets.) That's definitely something you need to know!

5. Your Stats Are Your Best Friend
The stats you get with your AdSense account might look complicated and well, a bit dull... but they're packed with useful information that can have a massive effect on your revenues. To make real money with AdSense, you need to know what your stats are telling, what they're not telling you and where you can find out more.

There's a lot you need to know to make serious money with AdSense. If you're missing that information, you're just throwing money away.

For more Google AdSense tips, visit http://www.adsense-secrets.com

Making huge sums of money with AdSense isn't brain surgery. You simply have to know what you're doing. If you know which types of ads to choose, where to place them on the page and how to use Google's options to design them so that they get the maximum number of click-throughs, you should find your site earning heaps of money very quickly.

But things can go wrong. Revenues can be disappointing, clicks non-existent and pages designed to put off users instead of encourage them to check out your advertisers. You know when one of the worst things possible has gone wrong when, instead of seeing ads on your page, you get public service ads. These turn up when Google doesn't recognize your keywords or can't find a suitable ad to put on your Web page. Instead of showing a blank box, it puts up ads for all sorts of charities, none of which you choose - and none of which earn you revenue.

You might like the idea of your site working for charity. But you might like it better if your site worked for you and you decided how much of that revenue to give to the charities you choose. That's why smart AdSense subscribers - the ones who understand how AdSense works and make giant revenues from it - make sure that they have alternatives set up to stop their sites being used to advertise Google's favorite charities.

There are lots of different ways you can do that. For example, you could create your own pseudo-AdSense ads and use those as alternate URLs to promote your other sites. Or you could use one of the several companies that will use that space to give you targeted paying ads.

There's nothing mean about using these strategies. The fact that Google makes it possible to use them shows that they understand that your space is for you not for them - and that you should earn from it.

With a little bit of reading, you'll find that it's easy to create a website that always serves high-paying AdSense ads. But even the smartest AdSense users make sure that they've got insurance should something go wrong. It's easy to do and your revenues deserve it.

There are two ways to think about AdSense: you can think of it as a way to use your website to make money; and you can think of it as a way to make money with a website.

What's the difference?

The difference is in the content. In the first case, you already have a website and you simply put AdSense on the page to turn it into cash. You might change the content a little to influence the ads and you could make sure that you include the best keywords to bring you the highest revenues. You should certainly play with the way the ads look on the page to make them attractive and unobtrusive - and there's a huge range of different strategies you can use to do that.

Ultimately though, the content is there already. You're just using AdSense to turn the content you're going to create anyway into money - and you're going to use AdSense secrets to make those revenues as high as possible.

But lots of people also want to build a website from scratch for the sole purpose of cashing in on all the money available through AdSense. There's nothing wrong with that - provided the content is high quality.

This is crucial. Google doesn't take kindly to sites packed with keywords and all sorts of other garbage just to provide a space to put up an AdSense unit. There's a good chance they won't approve the site, and little chance, even if they did, that you'd get any click-throughs.

But that doesn't mean you have to really bust a gut to create the sort of website that brings you a small fortune in AdSense revenues. In my book, Google AdSense Secrets, I discuss in detail a number of different methods that you can use to create great content quickly and easily. Some of these methods cost a little money; some are completely free and still give you outstanding content. Whichever method you use though the important to remember is that your site has to have real content that people will genuinely enjoy reading. There's no point in trying to cut corners in creating content - and absolutely no revenue to gain.

AdSense delivers great click-throughs and high revenues for one reason: the ads are targeted to what the user wants. Google's robot picks out keywords on your page, gets a grip on what your website is about and delivers links that take users to sites that interest them.

That's great news... up to a point. As much as you want your users to click on ads that look interesting, you might not want to trust to a robot to pick those ads - and you might prefer to have ads on your page that pay the highest amount possible for each click.

But you don't get the choice. You can do lots of things to improve your AdSense revenue, from selecting the layout of your ad unit to choosing the color and size of the font, but one thing you can't do is slip into Google's database and choose the ads. If you could do that, no one would ever choose the low-paying ads.

That doesn't mean you can't do anything at all though. The fact is, some smart publishers have been noticing all sorts of interesting results after playing with their HTML code and changing some of the text on their Web page. And some of those results have been very surprising indeed.

For example, some publishers have found that placing keywords in certain positions on the page can have an immediate effect on the ads served. The owner of a site about recreation vehicles then would be able to do a little research online to find the highest paying keywords in his area and then - if he knew where those hotspots were - he could place those keywords in the right areas on the page. In addition to the usual ads about camper vans and RV's that his site would receive, the publisher could be certain that at least one of the ads was the highest paying possible. That's the sort of knowledge that's worth money in your pocket.

Why some areas of a Web page should be more important than others is a mystery well kept by Google's programmers. But some of Google's ad secrets are leaking out - and they're being snapped up by smart publishers who understand that knowledge and strategy are the key to massive AdSense revenues.

When Google first launched AdSense, there was some skepticism from publishers. As much as most people were blown away by the idea of ads that were targeted to the content of a Web page there was the question of whether users, used to banners and skyscrapers, would click on something that looked so different.

Boy, were those doubters wrong! AdSense has more than proved its worth to advertisers, users and publishers.

A similar sense of skepticism greeted Google's launch of AdLink units. With nothing more than a list of links (which then lead to the ads), these units contain even less information than a traditional AdSense unit. And the user has to click twice before the publisher gets paid. That makes them sound about as welcoming as a winter barbeque in Siberia.

It took a while for publishers to discover that actually AdLink units weren't as bad as they looked, and that with a smart bit of positioning they could actually take advantage of the way some pages are laid out. In fact, for some designs, they were able to reach parts that other AdSense units just couldn't reach!

And best of all, publishers quickly discovered that once someone clicked on an AdLink unit, they would almost always click on the ad that followed. That did their revenues the world of good and removed the two-click doubt.

The old AdLink units then were effective, but fairly limited. They were great if you knew the one or two places on the page to use them but not so good if you didn't. Recently though, Google has launched horizontal AdLink units that have taken these ads into a whole new realm. Because they fit neatly across a page they're useful for a much broader range of page designs and are much more flexible. On the other hand though, they're now competing for space directly with the traditional ad units, making it even harder for publishers to figure out which ads to place where.

Is all this good news for publishers or bad news?

It's great news for savvy publishers who have more tools to maximize their AdSense revenues (and know what to do with those tools) but it's bad news for people who don't make the effort to learn how use AdSense - and now have more ways to miss out.

It's very easy to make a lot of money with AdSense. I know it's easy because in a short space of time, I've managed to turn the sort of AdSense revenues that wouldn't keep me in candy into the kind of income that pays the mortgage on a large suburban house, makes the payments on a family car and does a whole lot more besides.

But that doesn't mean there aren't any number of mistakes that you can make when trying to increase your AdSense income - and any one of those mistakes can keep you earning candy money instead of earning the sort of cash that can pay for your home.

There is one mistake though that will totally destroy your chances of earning a decent AdSense income before you've even started.

That mistake is making your ad look like an ad.

No one wants to click on an ad. Your users don't come to your site looking for advertisements. They come looking for content and their first instinct is to ignore everything else. And they've grown better and better at doing just that. Today's Internet users know exactly what a banner ad looks like. They know what it means, where to expect it - and they know exactly how to ignore it. In fact most Internet users don't even see the banners at the top of the Web pages they're reading or the skyscrapers running up the side.

But when you first open an AdSense account, the format and layout of the ads you receive will have been designed to look just like ads. That's the default setting for AdSense - and that's the setting that you have to work hard to change.

That's where AdSense gets interesting. There are dozens of different strategies that smart AdSense account holders can use to stop their ads looking like ads - and make them look attractive to users. They include choosing the right formats for your ad, placing them in the most effective spots on the page, putting together the best combination of ad units, enhancing your site with the best keywords, selecting the most ideal colors for the font and the background, and a whole lot more besides.

The biggest AdSense mistake you can make is leaving your AdSense units looking like ads.

The second biggest mistake you can make is to not know the best strategies to change them.

One of the best things about making money on AdSense is that anyone can do it - and with just about any type of website. You don't have to own a mini-Amazon or build a budding Ebay to make big stacks of cash on the Internet; you just have to have a site that attracts users.

AdSense For Owners Of Commercial Sites
A lot of people who have built a website specifically to make money worry about putting ads on their sites. They're concerned that people might be put off buying if their browsing is interrupted by intrusive ads.

That's absolutely right. If your ads are intrusive, then you are going to annoy your users. But if you've used all the strategies I recommend in my book Google AdSense Secrets to blend your ads into the site, then not only will you keep your users sweet, you'll also increase the number of your click-throughs.

Not everyone who reaches your site will buy. In fact, most won't. You've paid for those users; shouldn't you profit from them? Put AdSense ads on the right pages and in the right way and you'll make even more money from your site. And that's the point, right?

AdSense For Owners Of Information Sites
Information sites are probably the most obvious places to put AdSense. If you've created a site that's designed to teach other people about your favorite topic - whether it's video games, mahjong or raising guppies - then AdSense is ideal for bringing your site money. Again, you'll still need to be smart about the way you use those ads (just put them on the site any old how and you'll barely make enough money to pay for the server.) Do it properly and use all the proven AdSense revenue-generating techniques and you'll be able to turn your hobby into cash.

AdSense For Owners Of Blogs
Blogs are intended to simply let people know what their writers think - and do no more than that. But a lot of bloggers have recently discovered that with the help of AdSense, their blogs can quickly become cash cows! Because they're updated regularly, Google loves blogs and because they have regular visitors so do advertisers.

The techniques used to get blog readers to click on ads are a bit special but once you've read up and know what you're doing, you should be able to turn your writing into a very nice income indeed.