How to make money with Google Adsense

I have been doing a lot of research about this lately, there are loads of sites telling you how to make thousands from the google adsense affiliate program. They all make it sound so easy. In reality you have to put in a lot of hard work. From my research there are three main factors which will enable a high payout from google:

1. Lots of traffic
2. A good click through rate (CTR)
3. High paying keywords

Lots of traffic
There are untold strategies to boost traffic to a site, including well optimised pages and keywords (meta data), inbound links, paid advertising etc. in my opinion the best way to drive visitors to a site is to have decent content. If you offer something to your visitors, be it information or advice or the free use of a service you will undoubtedly get a certain level of traffic

A good click through rate (CTR)
Positioning of ads can help increase this, either by blending in your ads or making them stand out from your content. Some people place images next to the ads, which apparently increases CTR by attracting more attention to the advert.

High paying keywords
Now this is tricky. Making a site only to generate high paying key-worded ads is a bad idea, and not allowed by google. This doesn’t stop people doing it though! I personally think if you don’t know what you are talking about, then don’t bother writing about it. Pick a subject you are interested in, your visitors will have a far more informed and enjoyable visit and will keep coming back.

One way of increasing the keyword price is by using section targeting. This allows you to emphasise or ignore certain content from the site. Results aren’t immediate as you have to wait for google to re-crawl your site before there is any noticeable difference.