Google Adsense For Dummies - Jerri Ledford

Edited on March 2nd, 2009.

Google Adsense For Dummies
Jerri Ledford
Wiley Publishing
Copyright: 2008
9780470292891

Quick and understandable. I bought the book yesterday evening, and I finished reading it this morning (with time for sleep).

Normally I avoid the Dummies series (and also the Idiots series), there's just something about the title that turns me off. However, I was flipping through this book, it being one of the only recent ones I've seen about Google's Adsense program, and I found several useful tips on just quick flips, so I decided it was worth it to buy the book.

Although the book title is Adsense, much of the book content is as much about ways to increase the traffic to your site as it is optimizing the Adsense ads. There are chapters on server logs, on Search Engine Optimization and the like. The author's rationale is that the more people find your site, the more they are likely to click on the ads. Makes sense to me.

Regardless, I found there were a lot of things I could apply to my site, (and to this blog) to perhaps improve traffic and visibility. Some of it I'd read before, in a couple of other books on Google, such as the importance of constant new content. Even if you know some of what Adsense for Dummies has in it, I'm sure you'll find other information you didn't know before.

On the downside, the book is already outdated, even though it came out just last year (now that the New Year has passed us by). For example, the Referrals program which the book spends part of a chapter on seems to have been canceled. Also, it looks like the Adsense for Feeds, which at the time of the book's writing was still in beta seems to have gone live for everyone, although I can't seem to get it to work for me.

There were some sections, such as the ones on video ads that I'll admit I skipped reading as they don't fit in with any of my sites as I have them currently planned.

I'm hoping the tips the book had will show some improvements for me on my sites. Either way, I'm putting more work into both right now.

I do recommend this to anyone interested in the Adsense program, it worked in a logical progression that seems to be missing from the Adsense help center.