Making Easy Money with Google by Eric Giguère

Make Easy Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program by Eric Giguère. Berkeley, California: Peachpit Press, 2005. ISBN: 0-321-32114-6

Yes, Tillabooks now has ads by Google (scroll down to the end of this post to see one). I've gone over to the dark side, surrendered to the base money-grubbing capitalistic impulses that inhabit some dark corner of my tarnished soul, given over to the desire for filthy lucre which is the bane of our society, the root of all evil, etc. etc. And this book helped me get there.

Actually, I was considering playing around with AdSense on my blog before I got a hold of this here book, especially since Blogger, bought up by Google some time ago, has recently incorporated AdSense directly into its management console, making the process relatively painless.

Unfortunately, I can't quite get it to work the way I want to. You'll notice the space labeled "Advertisement" over to the right in my sidebar is blank. It will only fill with an ad if you click one of the links from the "Recent" or "Author Index" sections of the sidebar. I haven't been able to figure out how to get Google to fill that space first, and only THEN fill up the spaces below my posts (I want ads in BOTH places). So if anyone has a clue about how to accomplish that, please post me a comment!

And, I certainly don't think I'm going to get rich any time soon through this endeavor. The problem? My site doesn't get a lot of traffic. I'd probably need to spend a lot of time promoting the site to get much in the way of results. But it's fun to try and tap into this latest manifestation of the zeitgeist, to see what (if anything) comes of it.

This book can definitely give you an overview of what's involved in making money with Google's AdSense ads. But I'm afraid that you'll find the “easy” part of the title to be rather misleading. There really isn't any way to make easy money this way. Like any other way of earning money, there's quite a bit of work involved, and the author lays it out pretty clearly.

The book is written at a level similar to that of the “for Dummies” series. Anyone can read it quickly and easily. Putting its advice to work is more problematic. The book covers a lot of territory quickly, and by necessity, in a fairly shallow manner for the most part. But for people (like me) who already know quite a bit about the Web and how it works, much of the content can be quickly scanned or skipped, allowing the savvy reader to skip directly to the parts that are of real interest. How does AdSense work? How can I make it work for me?

The book also has a companion website: www.makeeasymoneywithgoogle.com/ although the "companion sites" promised in the book "aren't quite ready for prime time yet" to quote the site itself. What appears to be the most useful aspect of the site at this point is the author's AdSense blog.

And for those who decry my surrender to the dark side of Internet commerce, I can only say this: I've been ignoring ads on web pages for many years now. You can do the same. If you're not interested, no one is forcing you to click the ads, or even to look at them, for that matter. But whatever you do, don't click them repeatedly in hopes of “helping” me make money. That's the quickest way to get a person kicked off the AdSense program by Google. Only click if you're genuinely interested in whatever the ad is trying to sell, and only click once! Thanks.