Publisher Tools

	Improve your site's visibility with Webmaster Tools Your one-stop shop for comprehensive details about how Google crawls and indexes your website.
	Make your business searchable on maps with Local Business Center Create or edit a Google Maps business listing. Add hours of operation, photos, and other details.
	Post it on Base. Find it on Google with Google Base: Product Search and more Describe your products for sale, real estate listings, events, jobs, and more to make them easier for people to find.
	Grow your audience-reach more users with Submit Your Content See all opportunities to share your content for free across Google including gadgets, product search, maps, and YouTube.
	Recognize traffic trends with Google Analytics Get easy access to intuitive graphs that show exactly what's happening on your site. You can pinpoint exactly which links and pages on your site are popular with your readership and which aren't. Or see exactly where your readers are coming from - which website, country, state and city.
	Drive traffic to your site with Google AdWords With Google AdWords you create your own ads, choose keywords to help us match your ads to your audience and pay only when someone clicks on them. That is, you only pay when your advertising works.
	Harness the power of Google search to create a free Custom Search Engine Create a highly specialized search engine that reflects your knowledge and interests. Place it on your website, and using our AdSense for Search TM program, make money from the resulting traffic.
	Keep your readers up-to-date on your content with the Add to Google button Google's personalized homepage, iGoogle, has millions of users. With the 'Add to Google' button your readers can easily add your feed or gadget to their iGoogle page, reminding them to come back to your site every time they visit iGoogle. Simply fill out some basic information, insert a small snippet of HTML into your site, and you're ready to go.
	Help people discover more of your web pages with Google Webmaster Tools Google's free webmaster tools provide you with an easy way to make your site more Google-friendly. They can show you Google's view of your site, help you diagnose problems, and let you share info with us to help improve your site's visibility in our search results.

	Enrich your site with Google Video Explore Google Video and you'll find a wide selection of content that can be displayed on your site, for free. It's fast and easy to upload a video or embed videos on your site to instantly share them with your users.
	Engage your readers with Blogger Use a blog to easily update your readers with your news, photos and videos and encourage feedback and interaction through user comments. Choose from a range of designer templates to get started in minutes.
	Integrate Google's interactive maps into your site's data using Google Maps API Integrate your site's data into Google's interactive maps and embed them in your web pages with JavaScript. You can plot points and lines and display information windows with the Google Maps look and feel. The Google Maps API is a free (beta) service, available for use on any website that is free to consumers.
	Get your organization working together more effectively with Google Apps With Google Apps, you and your colleagues can use Google's innovative communication and collaboration applications to save on IT costs and become more productive. Google Apps includes private label Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Talk, the Start Page and more, all customizable with your own branding and content. What's more, it's all hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software to install or maintain. Interested in learning more? Take a product tour, or compare editions of Google Apps.
	Share documents and spreadsheets online with Google Docs You and your colleagues can collaborate in real time, even from different locations, and everyone will always see the most current version. AdSense publishers can use Google Docs & Spreadsheets to create and share site content, edit webpage mockups in HTML or text, or manage marketing plans, contracts, proposals, and budgets.
	Collaborate with your users with Google Groups Create a customizable group to co-author pages with your users, upload and share files (including photos), form email lists and start discussions.

Blogtimize - Optimize the ads on your blog

When working with a blog, you're facing some interesting ad implementation challenges: a predetermined page format, highly targeted content, and regular visitors, among other things. To make the most of your readership and content, here are a few suggestions:

Blend ads into your blog

To increase the likelihood that your readers will see and click on your ads, blend your ad units into the background of your blog. Choose a bold color for the ad title to help draw attention to your ads, then make sure that the background and borders of your ads are the same color as the background of the area where the ad is placed.

Experiment with multiple ad formats and locations

In general, wider ad formats tend to be more reader-friendly. Placing an ad unit after the first post will likely catch your readers' attention. Take a look at our sample implementations to get some ideas. Also, consider placing a Skyscraper (120x600) or vertical link unit on the right side of your blog. If you're using Blogger, you can find instructions on placing AdSense code in your blog's sidebar.

Offer readers more options with search

To make sure you're earning the most revenue possible with AdSense, go beyond just ads to use AdSense for search. You can increase your earnings, provide readers with valuable information, and take advantage of flexible formats.

Improve ad targeting

With section targeting, you can target an ad unit to a specific section of your blog, as well as block out irrelevant sections like navigational links. We recommend that only those familiar with HTML attempt to implement section targeting.

Adsense - 7 keys to empire?

There's a lot of buzz around about how you can make a quick and easy fortune using this AdSense course or that tool or this book.

And they show you their incomes from AdSense too (though not necessarily THIS month). Now, is it just me or is something a little odd in all this?

Say, I'm making $5000 - no make that $15,276 a month from AdSense on my sites. And now I'm going to sell all my secrets on how to do that for $67 or $97 or whatever.

So what happened, did I get all bored with my filthy riches and decide to become a philanthropist and sell stuff that makes me 15K a month for a pittance? Or is it something else?

Am I saying it's impossible? Certainly not. I know people who make that more.

But a little reality. Those people don't have 5 or 6 or 50 sites. They have maybe 500 or 3000 or more. Few sites make 20 or more a day. Very few. Average income is probably less than a dollar a day. So with 500 sites at a dollar a day, you've got your 15K a month.

Now the domain names cost you maybe $3500 to $4500. Then you need hosting and somehow you've got to build the sites and get traffic to them. There are excellent tools but the ones that will let you do this kind of thing in a reasonably short time are also very (very) expensive.

And you are continually dealing with sites that don't get indexed or get de-indexed or even get banned. Traffic today, gone tomorrow. Plus, if you're not real careful with those tools you may get an unpleasant letter from Google about a DMCA copyright infringement which could cost you your AdSense account.

You can make money, you can build an empire. But it isn't easy or quick no matter what you hear. And it really isn't a business. It's not a long run proposition, it's not stable. You need to keep creating more sites as older ones fail - or you need to be smart and use those AdSense revenues to build an enduring business.

You put up with this down to here, so here are the real 7 "secret" keys to AdSense.

1. The best performing AdSense type is the large rectangle. This has been tested over and over.

2. The best colors are blue for the link - surfers know that blue means click me. And darkish almost black and grey for the text and url. No borders. The same background as your page. Will it merge into your content? No, that's bogus. There are maybe 4 surfers in this galaxy who can't tell a Google ad when they see one. They are not going to believe it's part of the text. Wake up, OK?

3. Another format which is being reported to more or less work is the full wide banner type layout with text ads and images directly above the links. Try it and see if it works for you. Maybe it's a fad.

4. Keywords and related content are critical if you want targeted ads. If you want high paying clicks you need to target the costly keywords AND have content that supports the keywords.

5. You need traffic interested in the ads. Which means your traffic generation techniques have to be targeted not scattershot. You might hear that 1% or 1.5% clickthrough rate is OK and 3% is good. Nonsense. Really successful people get CTRs that are often well above 30%. Even with modest efforts you should be getting an average 6 to 15% CTR (per ad impression, not pages).

6. You have to track what you're doing and you have to test variations in ad layout, placement, color and related content to optimize your income. No one can tell you how to do it except the traffic coming to your site. If you don't test and track, you're flying blind.

7. You need to keep building new sites.

You are now a member of the AdSense Illuminati. Quite possibly you already knew all that. So why are you looking for something else? Really. This is all you need to start doing it.

Probably any course or book can help you if that's what it takes to get you moving and doing. Ultimately, no one can really show you exactly how to do it. You're going to have to learn the ropes and put in the time.

Like everything in life - the greatest traffic generator, the ultimate course or the super MLM opportunity, if it sounds too good to be true, then it is. There's no magic bullet, no ultimate secret to buy. There's no easy, painless, work free, certain road to riches (except, maybe, inheriting it and that can be very hard on the heirs).

Whatever you do on the net, do it wide awake and with your brain actually functioning. The final un-numbered key is that a technique, a shortcut, an idea that will make what you do easier, faster, or more profitable - one single tiny thing - is worth more than any book or course costs. One useable idea and you've gotten a great deal. If you learned something you didn't know or had forgotten, then it's worth much more than you paid. There may not be any magic solution out there, but there are useful concepts, techniques and ideas. You just have to see them for what they are, and then get busy and really use them.