By now, everyone knows what Google AdSense is.  It’s those little ads a lot of people, including me as of today, put on their site in the hopes that people click on the ads so they can make a little money.  In Aug. of 2005, I apparently made $0.44 with AdSense.  Funny how accounts from long ago can show you history and bring back memories of a naive person.

I have more and more people asking me about this lately.  They think they have something good to put on the internet, and, of course, their initial revenue model is advertising.  What easier way to get advertising then to sign up for Google AdSense?  No need to pursue advertisers, no applications, just sign up, agree to their terms, and have ads on your site within 30 min.

It seemed time to put Ads on my site and see how they work.  I don’t expect to get rich, but I do expect to learn how the reporting works and various ways to execute them on a site.

I haven’t found a great plugin for this stuff.  Honestly, that doesn’t surprise me since not a lot of people put AdSense on their site, but I found one that works pretty well, and allows for multiple ad placement if you want it.  All I wanted was a sidebar widget, so I had to turn off the other ads, but that wasn’t too tough.  The plugin is Easy AdSense Lite and can be found at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/easy-adsense-lite/.  If someone knows of a better one, let me know, I’ll write a bit more on how it works after it’s there for a few weeks.