Signing Up Made Easy

2.2 Signing Up Made Easy

First though, you have to sign up. Here’s how you do it.

The sign-up page asks for a relatively small amount of information, not all of which is as obvious as you might like.

First, you’ll have to tell Google whether you want an “individual” account or a “company” account — whether you’re a company with more than twenty employees or practically a one-man show that’s just you and up to nineteen others. That’s important for just one reason: it tells Google where to send the money. Take a business account and the payments will be made in the name of your company; take an individual account, and they’ll be paid directly to you.

You’ll also be able to choose between three different ways of receiving your money: Electronic Funds Transfer, local currency check or Secured Express Delivery. In general, it’s better to get your money by direct deposit using the Electronic Funds Transfer; Google charges for express mail checks.

(What you won’t be able to choose is whether you’re paid per click—on a “CPC” basis—or for every thousand times you show an ad—on a “CPM” basis. Google decides that for you. Some ads will be CPC and others will be CPM.)

Fig. 2.1 The AdSense sign up page

The next piece of information that Google demands is your URL. There’s only room for one URL, which can be confusing if you have more than one site and want to put AdSense on all of them. Don’t worry about it. It won’t affect how you use AdSense at all, so just submit your biggest site for now.

The next question is about whether you want content-based ads — the type of small text ads I’ve been discussing so far, search ads or both. (Contentbased ads are better but I’ll tell you how to benefit from each so I recommend that you choose both.)

Once you’re approved, you’ll just have to copy and paste a small piece of code into your website and you’re done!