Welcome to our first-ever guest blog post on Inside AdSense. We’re thrilled to have none other than Blogging Evangelist himself, Darren Rowse, to share his expert tips on AdSense optimisation. Darren first discovered blogging in 2002, and initially thought he’d turn it into a hobby to supplement his full-time job. These days, Darren runs a
handful of successful blogs, his most popular being Digital Photography School, and has co-authored a book. He also posts regular tips and advice on ProBlogger.net, a respected and successful resource for bloggers around the world.We recently caught up with Darren at his home office in Melbourne Australia, and asked him about his experience with Google AdSense.October 4, 2003 is a date I’ll never forget – that was a day that my life changed.

It was the day that I discovered AdSense and added it to my very first blog. I added that first advertisement to my blog on a whim, with what I thought was the lofty dream that I might be able to pay for my blogs hosting costs. Over 5 years later, those little text ads have paid my mortgage, fed my family, and enabled me to move my blogging from a hobby, to a part time job, to a full time job and beyond.It’s not been an ‘overnight success’ by any means but as I’ve learned to use it, AdSense has been one of my highest online income streams.

My #1 Tip for Using AdSenseIf I had to narrow my advice on using AdSense down to a single word it would be ‘experiment’. Let me explain. That day back in October of 2003 I had no idea on what I was doing. The next day when I logged in to see how much I’d earned it was barely enough to buy me a coffee. However, on that day I decided that those few dollars in earnings showed potential and I determined within myself to learn how best to use AdSense to grow that income. Almost everything I’ve learned since that day has been through trial and error. It has been a long process of testing and tracking results. You see, while there are a few good home truths that seem to work on most  sites, every website that I’ve used AdSense on is different. Some things work well on some sites, but it is rare to find something that will work on every site. As a result I tend to experiment with my use of AdSense in these six ways:

- Ad Position – Most AdSense publishers have seen the neat little heat map that AdSense has produced to show where ads work best on websites.In general it works fairly well and is a great place to start, but make sure you experiment with new positions for ads and see what works best for your site. Hint: Ads near (or even surrounded by) content have worked the best. I’ve also found ads at the end of content perform well. People get to the end of reading your article and then are looking for something to do or click — an ad positioned there can work well.