So where does AdSense come in this?

Well, Google has taken the excellent AdWords program and extended it to provide ads on other sites like yours and mine and called this service "AdSense". That's all.

An AdWords ad on your site is an AdSense ad. It was designed by an AdWords advertiser (of whom there are many hundreds of thousands if not millions now) and these advertisers bid to get their ads on sites around the internet.

Key distinction

However, AdSense differs from AdWords in that Google, instead of looking at the search terms entered into its search box to determine what ads to show, looks instead at what keywords you have on your site.

Example

If you have a page on your site all about viral marketing, AdSense technology determines that it would be an appropriate place to post AdWords ads about viral marketing and related products.

This technology is called "content-targeting" and it is entirely automatic which means that once you've started to use AdSense you don't need to worry about getting the right sort of ads on your site - Google does this for you.

How you make money with AdSense

We’ve been over the basic money-making process: people click on ads on your site and Google shares the income with you. Maximizing your income is much harder and it raises what I call the content dilemma which we'll explore later too: 

• Is your site designed to earn AdSense revenue or is its main objective something else?

So that's the background to AdSense.

Tomorrow we’ll look at ways to maximize the amount of money that Google sends you.

There are two pretty complex processes going on behind the scenes that we will examine, paying particular attention to those things that are within your control. Not everything is!