I am personally tired of folks who come out and claim that you can make a decent living online without having to work hard. These folks claim to have made millions out of Adsense and eBay without having to work more than 4 minutes a day. The truth is making money with Adsense is possible, but it’s not as easy as it looks.

In order to have success with Google Adsense, you need to have:

• Content: it helps if your content is useful. But you want to make sure your content is optimized for search engines as far as the on-page factors go. Use a catchy keyword rich title and don’t forget your SEO basics.
• Traffic: driving traffic to your Adsense site is the only way to make the kind of money folks are claiming to be making these days. SEO is great but you will most likely have to spend some money to keep your momentum going.
• Form & Placement: ad placement is one of the most underrated factors here. Folks often learn from their past experiences with your site and start to ignore your ads. That’s not good if you intend to make money with Adsense. You should always test different forms of ads on different sections of your site to keep your visitors on their toes. You can’t just sit around and expect the cash to keep coming in.

Making money with Adsense is possible. But you’ve got to be smart about it. Try different ads, use different keywords, and move your ads around to make sure folks don’t get used to your ad positioning on your pages. And as long as you are testing and improving your landing pages, you should see the progress easily.

Your take: how much are you making with Adsense and what’s your 2009 Adsense goal?

As the economy gets worse (and you can expect it to hit rock bottom sometime in the near future), you are going to see folks who are going to sell you Adwords/Adsense things that can, get this, help you make millions out of these networks. That’s the oldest trick in the book. Let’s say, I have lost my job, I have a couple of kids to feed, and I have the year-end approaching fast. What do I do? Simple! I am going to get a book that will show me how to make millions in a year, and if I get 5% of that number, I will be happy.

I am all for learning. You should never stop learning, and one way to do that is by keeping up with blogs and reading books on a weekly basis. However, when it comes to Adsense, you can really learn a lot from watching the best do it. And who’s the best when it comes to using Adsense? I would like to think it’s Google!

There are no two ways about it. When Google bought YouTube, they did it to make money and get their initial funds back. There were other reasons, but bear with me here. So you have the largest online video library anywhere, and you are trying to monetize it for months. Does it make sense for you to put Adsense units that don’t make you money? You tell me!

I am no Adsense expert. I do make a few bucks a day from Adsense, but it’s not really my focus (that does not keep me from checking it every 10 seconds). Now here is the thing. YouTube is a goldmine when it comes to Adsense. You can figure out what formats would work for your niche site. And you are going to learn what Google is spending millions of dollars researching – where to put your ads.

I am not suggesting that Google CEO is actually checking YouTube’s Adsense account to see how much they are earning, but the ad format and positioning should be a good indication on where on your page you can expect to make more money. Each site is different, and your results will probably be different from mine or Google’s. But, you don’t have to read a book to figure out what works and what doesn’t with Adsense.