Google's Adsense is one of the most powerful weapons in website publisher'sarsenal. It enables you to monetize your sites easily and if used properly cangenerate a very healthy income. However, if you're not using it properly andmaximizing the income you squeeze from it, your leaving money on the table? something we all hate doing.

Boosting your return from Adsense can be done very easily and quickly, and you'llbe amazed by the results.

I ran Adsense on my sites for over a year before I discovered these techniques, andlike many people, I though I was doing pretty well. My clickthrough rates and CPMfigures were very healthy, and I didn't honestly think that they could be improved agreat deal. How wrong I was. Immediately after I implemented a few quick changesmy clickthrough rate more than doubled, and by doing some fine tuning I mangedto get nearly three times as many people to click on the ads as had been previouslydoing so.

The first technique is one that was 'discovered' by the amazingly helpful Debs, onSiteSell's SBI! forums. When I read it originally, it made sense and I decided to goiveit a go, but Iwasn't prepared for the immediate impact it would have on my income. It involvesmaking only a few simple changes to the format and positioning of your Adsenseads.

Firstly, forget about using banners or skyscrapers. These ad formats are almostuniversally ignored by surfers. Why? Because we've all been conditioned to recognisea skyscraper or banner as an advert and as these adverts are rarely of any interest,we ignore them. What's needed is a way of integrating Adsense ads into the editorialon your site as seamlessly as possible. To do this you need to do three things:

1. Use the 250 x 250 rectangle format 2. Make the background color of the ad the same as the background color of yoursite, or as close to it as possible. 3. Make the ads borderless by setting the border color to be the same as thebackground color of the ad.

These changes can be made by logging into your Adsense account and creating acustom format. Just select the 250 x 250 ad format, and create a custom colorpalette. Use the color picker to pick the coor you want. The Javascript isautomatically generated at the foot of the page, ready for you to copy and paste intothe pages on your site.

Now, you need to position your ads where surfers are most likely to click on them.Research using retina scanning technology has shown that the place that surferstend to look at first and most often is the top left. I don't know the reasons for this,perhaps it's because that's where we're used to seeing the most useful searchengine results (at the top of the rankings) and search engines are the sites we mostoften visit, so we automatically look at the same place on other sites.

Whatever the reasoning, as soon as I made the above changes to my Adsense ads,clickthrough rates doubled, immediately.

The second technique is much newer and one which is entirely based on my ownexperience. Google has recently added a new type of Adsense format, calledAdlinks. This displays a series of links on your page in the same style of Ad unit asregular Adsense ads. When a user clicks a link they are taken to a page of advertsthat resembles regular Google search results. As a publisher, you are paid everytime a user clicks one of those ads.

Adventurous soul that I am, I jumped in with both feet and started to trial Adlinkson my most visited pages as soon as it was launched. I'm using the four links in asquare box format, positioned top left of my page content. After a few weeks ofrunning Adlinks alongside regular Adsense ads, it's clear that the return on Adlinksis about a fifth to a quarter higher than regular ads. There's no clear reason for thisbut one explanation may lie in the fact that clicking on an Adlink takes the user topage of 'results'. When a user clicks on one of these, you are paid for the click. If theuser finds what they want, great, if not, it seems that they hit the Back button ontheir browser and try again, just as you would for normal search engine results.Then they click on another result, and you get paid again. So it's possible to be paidmore than once from the same Adlink click. Now, this reasoning is speculative, butit does make perfect sense in the light of my Adlinks results.

Finally, Adsense has some excellent tracking statistics that allow you to track yourresults across a number of sites on a site by site, page by page, or just about anyother basis you choose. This is a very powerful tool and you should use it to findout which ads are performing best for you and fine tune your Adsense and Adlinkads accordingly.

So you see, by spending an hour or so of your time making a few adjustments to theAdsense ads on your sites, you can very quickly treble your Adsense income. Give ita go, you'll be amazed by the results.

Kenny Hemphill is the editor and publisher of The HDTV Tuner and has been making money from Adsense for two years.