Assuming you already have quality content and some decent traffic, one of the easiest ways to make money writing online is to add AdSense advertising to your websites.
There are a lot of websites and resources out there that explain the basics of how AdSense works. First, you sign up with Google. Then, you add some code to your website. Finally, you profit. Or something like that.
AdSense Quirks
What is harder to find is information about the many quirks of AdSense. For example, if you load your own website, you won’t see the same ads that new visitors to your website see. Google uses cookies to track users (including you on your own website) and tailors the ads to both content and your browsing history. That is why sometimes a Overstock.com ad will seem to follow you all over the internet displaying items you recently viewed. In order to get a truer idea of what visitors to your site might be seeing, make sure to use Privacy Mode or Google Incognito Mode to cover your cookie tracks.
One of the most maddening quirks of AdSense is the variability in how much money you earn. Some things end up making sense over time. For example, your website may earn more money on weekdays and less on weekends, or vice versa. But some things just don’t ever seem to make much sense.
Your Google AdSense reports offer a lot of information about your ads. Click the Performance Reports tab to get detailed information. A graph at the top charts your earnings. A click or two and you can also chart your PageViews and clicks over time as well. Beneath that, a chart lays out even more data.
Where you’ll find one of the most puzzling AdSense quirks is in the CPC column. CPC stands for cost per click and it represents the average amount each click paid on a given day when a visitor clicked on an ad. It’s no surprise that not all ads pay the same amount. However, over a large enough pool of traffic, you’ll find that your CPC tends to stay around a certain amount, with some moderate variation.
For example, a website might have a CPC of $1.11 one day, and $1.18 the next, and so on. What gets really weird is that one day, your CPC will be $0.71. There will be nothing really obvious in your analytics or in the AdSense reports to say why. I’ve found that these anomalies occur on different days of the week, different days of the month, multiple time per month, or not at all. There really seems to be no rhyme or reason for it.
What other AdSense quirks do you see? How have you tried to figure out what is going on?
The amount you’ll earn also depends largely on the amount of targeted traffic you receive to your own site, how well the ads match your audience’s interests, the placement of the ads on your pages, and of course the amount you receive per click.`