The at-home writer's guide to the galaxy (A Google AdSense guide.)

Google AdSense remains standing as one of the strongest methods of attaining income for freelance writers and bloggers. You simply sign-up, write and earn. It's common knowledge that writers can earn respectable amounts of money publishing articles on their own blog/website, but it's often more productive to write for other revenue sharing sites as well as your own. By doing both simultaneously, you can gain the attention of a wider audience and increase your visibility as a writer through the creation of backlinks (we'll talk about those later.) Essentially, I think it's a really good idea to establish your own creative voice through a blog or website of your own and branch out onto revenue sharing sites. So if you haven't got a AdSense enabled blog/website already, you should probably go and make one. Trust me, i'll be here when you get back.

Personally, I see one's own blog or website as the heart of their AdSense content. The revenue you'll earn from it isn't split between you and another party; you'll take home all of the earnings. One solid way of promoting your blog/website is by submitting it into directories. Directories will list your blog/website online for anyone surfing the net to see; thereby increasing traffic.

Blog directories, Website directories

As mentioned earlier, your own blog or website can serve as a central hub for backlinks. Backlinks are referrals that lead from content on one site/page to content on another site/page. Quality backlinks will increase your visibility as a writer by making your content more likely to show up on search engines such as Google. Simply link quality content from your site to related content on another site to create a backlink. Now it becomes more obvious why writing for your own blog/website as well as revenue sharing sites can substantially increase your earnings. It's a simple equation; the more visible your content is, the more viewers you'll get, which makes you much more likely to earn money for your content.

Successfully promoting your content can be the most difficult aspect of writing online (aside from the occasional case of writers block.) A good way of manually promoting your content is to participate in forums. If a revenue sharing site you write for has forums then participating in them can be worth the time. If you leave interesting posts in forums then readers will be more likely to trace your posts back to your published articles. This also works in blogging networks such as google blogger. You'd simply comment on blog articles instead of in forums. It takes some time but it's still stands as a viable means of promotion. Another, more leisurely form of promotion is simply linking your content to social networks such as facebook and twitter. Your newly published content can be broadcast to thousands of friends and followers with just a few key-stokes and mouse clicks. Social networking sites can obviously be a very strong, very necessary form of promotion. Follow this advice and you'll be well on your way to establishing a brand name.

Above all: be careful. Make sure everything you publish is legitimate, unique content. Plagiarism won't be tolerated by Google and in doing so you'll put your account at risk of being frozen. Don't click on any of your own content's advertisements as well, doing so will be considered click fraud and your account will be frozen. You have now reached the end of this guide. Good luck out there!