• Developing your killer content first should be your top priority, especially as a new blog. Any energy in any other direction is wasted in my book.
• You should also seek to “earn the right” to offer advertising to your users. I think waiting, especially if you’re just starting out, is a good thing for you and your community. This goes hand in hand with providing exceptional value as well.
• Testing is your greatest weapon when it comes to optimizing your Adsense units, position, design, and more. To do so requires that you have an adequate amount of traffic to make good estimates and to test thoroughly. As a result I still hold pretty firmly that you should wait until you have 250 unique visitors per day. In fact, I suggest even more.
• Without enough traffic you inevitably won’t have enough organic traffic to make the conversions necessary to make you competitive financially as well as give you enough motivation to continue. Most people quit at this point and never see it through to the end of their true earning potential. But, you need to have enough traffic!

Varying Degrees of Success

1. Quick Start – It’s incredibly easy to get started with Google Adsense and if you’ve registered and joined other advertising networks you know that some of them can be incredibly arduous and long-winded as well as hard to get in (some require a personal phone call!).
2. Very Few Restrictions - Many other advertising programs require some levels of site traffic and/or earning potential to make it into the program as well as having certain caps and/or limitations/requirements on the sites that you use. With Adsense you have very few restrictions and that’s a good thing.
3. Customization and Options - You can easily customize the look and the feel of your advertisements to make sure that it fits nicely with your blog and website. It’s surprising that many other ad networks don’t even have that level of customization! In addition, the amount of options for types of advertisements, sizes, and placements are great too.
4. Robust Reporting - The reporting is pretty much second-to-none with advanced reports, specials templates, and other such features that give you the ability to optimize to your heart’s content.
5. Optimization Tools - You get great reporting but it’s not just for looks – they give you all the tools that you need to maximize your earning potential (and trust me you’ll need them).
6. Incredible Network - The number of advertisers that are available is also top-notch and you can’t really find an equal when it comes to the number of available advertisers to fill the spots that you create.
7. Contextual Targeting - When Google Adsense says that there advertisements are contextual they really do mean it. Most other advertising networks say that they can target but their algorithms and software aren’t even close to being as good. This also works well with the large network too.
8. Great Payouts - Of course you need to make sure that you optimize and execute on strategy but the payouts and financial earnings are actually quite good and you can start earning from the first day you put some ads on your blog. Few other networks can promise near-instant returns on your time commitment.
9. Global Monetization - This works in tandem with the last point but you can truly monetize global traffic instead of just domestic. If you’re blog gets global traffic (which many of them will) then you’ll want to make sure you’re working with a network and system that can provide global monetization, and Google Adsense does.
10. Doesn’t Require a PH.D. - Finally, most people can not just start easily but start making money without having to know much about anything! I like the idea that the bar is lowered and that bloggers from all shapes and sizes (and education levels) can make it, but you’ll need to educate yourself to beyond just the basics to do as well as you’d like to!