As a blog or site owner, you can make some cash with Google's AdSense pretty easily. To maximise your potential earnings, here are some tips that may help you:

1. Create Well-designed Sites

People are impatient and will not tolerate poorly designed websites. Make sure that your site's colour scheme is overly gaudy, glaring, or plain hard-to-read. Use a readable font size, and always make use of bulleted lists, dividers and make your paragraphs short whenever possible.

Never create an overloaded website and always focus your content. Ensure that your navigation is easy to understand and that the user will intuitively know where to click to get to where he wants. A good well-designed website is the first step in attracting more visitors.

2. Place AdSense Ads On Pages With Content

Content in this case means text, because images and other media may not return targeted ads. Only text is used by Google's targeting technology to determine what kind of ads will be served.

3. Make Them Prominent

Put your ads in a place where your visitors will have a high chance of looking at them. For example, place them in the middle of your content, or above the fold of the page, where they can see your ad before scrolling down.

4. Customise Your Ad Colours

Google allows you to customise the colour of ads, so why don't you? There are two schools of thought here: You either make the ads look like part of your site, or make them look very outstanding. For variety's sake, you can even rotate up to 4 different color palettes for a particular ad.

5. Use Appropriate Ad Formats

AdSense has a number of ad formats available for you to choose from, so make use of them to create ads that suit your layout best.

6. Double-check Framed Ads

If your page uses frames, check that you have selected the Framed page checkbox on the Ad Layout page. Otherwise, AdSense cannot gather the proper information about your site and will not be able to serve targeted ads.

In fact, I highly recommend that you place this line in the AdSense code of all your ads anyway:

google_page_url = document.location;

It's just for the simple reason that while your site may be frames-free, someone might have clicked through to your site while in someone else's frames, and your ads may not be showing targeted ads anymore.

7. Use channels to track performance

Channels are the best tool to analyse your ad performance. Use them to determine the performance of a page or site. Test your colour schemes, placement and formats with channels to tell which are the performers that you want to keep. Remember to give your channels descriptive names that you will be able to understand.

Alvin Poh has been specialising in web development, content distribution, advertising and marketing strategies since 1995. His goal is to provide practical information based upon his years of experience to help webmasters, website designers, and self-employed people achieve their goals in today's competitive Internet. At his site, you can learn how to make money online.