For many webmasters, Google AdSense has become a great revenue generator. Since the program pays the webmaster every time a visitor of their website clicks on the ads that Google displays in their web pages, the same has become a truly viable and profitable option to earn a living online. As a matter of fact, there are countless webmasters who have dropped their day jobs so that they could focus on the AdSense program. They build dozens and dozens of websites, all of which carry their AdSense code, hoping to generate amazing earnings from such an approach. After all, if one website can generate $25 per month (a low average at that), how much could 100 websites be able to produce for the webmaster?

But success with the Google AdSense program is contingent on three things:

1. Cost Per Click (CPC) attached to the ads that will be displayed;

2. Page impressions, or the number of people who will get to visit the website; and

3. Click Through Rate (CTR), or the ratio of people who will click on the ads vis a vis page impressions.

The CPC can be approximated by checking out the going rate of the keyword to be targeted before building a website. The resource that can be found at www.adsensearena.com is an excellent tool to help anyone in determining the possible CPC for certain search words or phrases.

The CTR can be improved by arranging the AdSense blocks in a manner that would make them look like organic parts of the website.

But page impressions would be a little more difficult to achieve.

Page impressions are actually equivalent to what is generally known as web traffic. Web traffic, of course, refers to the volume of users who manages to load up a particular page of your website. It has been said that traffic is the lifeblood of any online venture, and this couldnt be truer for websites that earn via Pay Per Click (PPC) programs.

In a nutshell, the success of your Google AdSense campaign would depend on the volume of traffic youll be able to generate for your website, or websites.

You could try a lot of marketing tactics, but often, these strategies take time to gestate. Additionally, each and every competitor of yours would be trying out the same techniques, and there is no real guarantee about how much traffic you could derive from them.

This has led many webmasters to try out PPC advertising for their PPC earning campaigns. The way it goes is that they will advertise their websites through Google AdWords. Google will then display their links the way it displays AdSense ads. The webmasters who decide to take this route would then have to pay Google every time a user clicks on the ads that lead to their websites.

How do these webmasters earn, when theyre supposed to spend for every click?

Well, most of them build websites that are exclusively made up of AdSense ads. Hence, whenever a user is led to their pages, hed have no choice but to click on the relevant ads that appear therein.

There are some webmasters, on the other hand, who rely on the strength of their content. They use AdWords to expose their websites to people, hoping that those very users would love what theyll see and theyll keep coming back every now and then.

There are pros and cons to this strategy, however. Lets take a look at the advantages first.

* You will attain guaranteed traffic.

* You will attain highly targeted traffic. Since your visitors will be composed of people who are interested with the subject of you website, there is a higher likelihood that they will click on the ads that would appear on your pages.

* You will only have to pay for the traffic that your website would receive. Nothing more, nothing less.

But its not rosy for this approach. Here are the disadvantages.

* Youd have to spend.

* There is no guarantee that youll be able to recoup your financial investments.

* Google is cracking down on websites that are merely composed of AdSense ad blocks. If you opt to use this approach, and your website is composed exclusively of AdSense ads, chances are, your website would get de-indexed and your AdSense account would get suspended if Google catches you.

The best way to go is to rely on the strength of your website. Prepare unique, premium content and hook your visitors with the same. Content is king in the World Wide Web, after all.

If you decide to use AdWords to get some traffic, make sure you have a mailing list in place to capture their contact details and ensure for yourself some repeat visitors. PPC advertising should only be used to gain initial traffic, until your other marketing strategies would finally produce the desired results.

Mark Flavin is an online marketing expert. Mark specialises in website traffic generation, affiliate program promotion & email marketing. You can find out his secrets for free at http://www.markflavin.com

Mark recommends The Business Professional for increasing your profits online - http://www.markflavin.com/business.html