Can I really make tons of money fast with Google AdSense?

Ah yes, the mystical lure of lucre, the possibility that vast riches wait just over the next hill or around the next corner. Not a day goes by that I don't have some email in my mailbox offering "easy money" or "get rich quick" strategies for business.

Like picking a winning lottery ticket, though, it's not quite that easy to make tons of money with Google AdSense...

However, it's surprisingly not that difficult when you learn some insider tips about ad placement and traffic generation on your site.

To start, you should sign up for Google AdSense by clicking on:

then they'll give you the snippet of code needed to include advertising on your Web pages, allowing you to customize it however you want.

For example, here's the code I use:

<!-- begin googleadvert -->

  <script type="text/javascript"><!--
  google_ad_client = "pub-7950118917489847";
  google_ad_width = 336;
  google_ad_height = 280;
  google_ad_format = "336x280_as";
  google_ad_channel ="7026605662";
  google_color_border = "FFFFFF";
  google_color_bg = "FFFFFF";
  google_color_link = "000099";
  google_color_url = "666666";
  google_color_text = "333333";
  //--></script>
  <script type="text/javascript"
    src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
  </script>

<!-- end googleadvert -->

Kinda complex and fancy, but you only have to get it working on one page, then you just copy and paste it onto your other pages. If you have a Weblog, it's even easier because you just drop it into your template and all your pages them magically have the correct code to produce the adverts.

However, there's a world of difference between having the ads on your page and having them generate revenue for you and, while I rarely recommend information you need to buy versus something that's free, I'll offer two links here for you to learn more about how to turn your Google AdSense into a revenue generation system.

The first is my upcoming book The Complete Idiot's Guide to Growing Your Business with Google, which will be out this summer. Reviewed by Google's AdSense team and by groups like Wordtracker, it'll be full of excellent advice and tips for generating lots more traffic to your Web site (a critical prerequisite to actually earning money with AdSense, of course) and will have a great introductory chapter on how to work with AdSense.

The second is an electronic book written by my good friend Joel Comm, called Google Adsense Secrets. It's $79, but I'll tell you that it's really helped me understand how -- and why -- to change my AdSense ad placements to maximize the ad's value to the readers and increase the percentage of time that one of you readers clicks on something advertised on the page. That $79 is a drop in the bucket when you implement all the ideas he presents, frankly, and it'll earn its cost back in just a week or two, I bet!

The Google AdSense terms of service prohibit me from sharing exact numbers with you, but I can tell you that the ads on my Web sites earn more for me than if I had a robot working at McDonald's full time, and for Joel, well, they earn more than the managers of two or three McDonald's. His best month to date saw him earn over $18,000 from AdSense. No kidding.

If you want to learn more about his electronic book, you can read his amusing sales letter, but since he has a 100% money back guarantee, you could also just take the plunge and buy the book. Then ten minutes from now you'll be learning all of Joel's secret tips.

Oh, and I know that the book is a good one, full of useful tips and all of Joel's hard-earned insider knowledge because I helped Joel write it as he went along.