If you are a solo business operator and choose to increase the revenue generated at your web site, you have the option of employing Google Adsense advertising. I believe Yahoo and MSN also (or will soon) offer similar programs that allow the web owner to monetize his content.
There are several factors that determine how much revenue a web owner can generate for each of the particular content pages on his site that serve Adsense advertising.
First, the traffic to a site is important as most Internet advertising is, in part at lease, a numbers game. Your viewers will only click on an Adsense ad a certain proportion of the time.
Let's use the example of 1 click every 200 visitors. Given that type of click-through rate, a site with 200 visitors/page/day will generate 1/10 the income that a site with 2,000 visitors/page/day will get, all other things being equal.
If the same $1 commission were paid to each example site mentioned above, and they each had 10 content pages that drew equally (very unlikely), the first site would realize $10 a day while the second site would generate $100 a day. Or the numbers could be $1.00/day versus $10.00/day. The point is, traffic largely determines income potential.
A second factor that the web site owner can control is the niche he is advertising in. Google will largely control the types of sites it will send in its advertising by the type of content your site generates. Google performs its match by a combination of keyword linking and contextual aligning. No one knows for sure how Google sets its algorithms and Google isn't talking.
Adsense ads that pay large commissions may be the only type of Adsense campaigns that make sense for the small business. So the web site owner can maximize his income by choosing the better niches. Google does not divulge how much they pay Adsense account owners in each niche, but you are able to go to Google and use their keyword selector tool to see how much ads are costing for particular terms.
A third factor that will play significantly into the income that a site owner generates through Adsense is how well he optimizes his web pages for the Adsense program.
Google offers quite a few tips on optimizing sites for Adsense. You can review all their suggestions:
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html&sourceid=aso&subid=ww-ww-et-asui&medium=link
Here are a few suggestions that should help your Adsense campaign:
1. Place keywords in both the title of the page and the content of the page, especially in the first paragraph of the content. Google will use contextual matching to place its ads and you want to be sure that the ones that are sent to you are relevant to the content of your page - the more relevant the better.
2. It is best not to use frames in your web page design. If you do, however, make sure you choose the checkbox for "framed page" when you decide which layout code you want for your Adsense design.
3. It is better to split your content into very "tight" and focused pages rather than having many keywords and concepts scattered over one page.
4. Make sure you don't have a robots.txt file on your site that stops search engine spiders from crawling your pages.
5. Make sure your Adsense ads are served on pages that are static rather than dynamic. In most cases this will not be a problem for the web master.
6. Link every page to your home page via simple text navigation if possible, even if sub-categories are used. You want your visitors to be able to simply and quickly find any and all of your Google-delivered ads.
Be sure to visit the Google Adsense optimization tips page that was mentioned early for Google's web site suggestions.
