Getting started

First of all, find the time to visit the AdSense mainpage, it is probably a good start.

Now, before you can do anything with AdSense, you should sign up. This means you have to submit a request to the AdSense Team, asking them to have a look at your website and to approve it for showing AdSense blocks. This where your first challenge arises – you really need to have a website with some useful information in order to qualify for AdSense. That means, the website has to be up and running. And it would be best if your website had been around for some time, this would mean it's been indexed by Google and it would make the whole validation process at least faster, if not easier.

How Google AdSense it works 

Usually the AdSense Team will send you an email with their decision regarding your AdSense application within just a few days. The reason your website should be index by Google crawlers is this:

Google AdSense is a system of placing targeted ads across various webpages of your site. Google does this by having you place a link to their JavaScript code which analyzes the content of your current page, finds the keywords on it, and then places relevant ads in a visual form you define. This JavaScript code doesn't analyze your actual page in a browser window, but instead analyzes the indexed copy Google has in its database. In case some of your pages are not indexed yet, the script will have to try and do some basic analysis of your page on the fly, but it will not necessarily provide the best results – most often such analysis will only allow AdSense select ads relevant to some keywords found in your content based on their frequency in the text.

If your page is very new and hasn't been indexed yet, it will probably not show any targeted ads – depending on the visual type of your ads, AdSense will either show you some text links which may not seem awfully relevant to your content, or it will show one of them standard placeholders – inviting people to advertise with AdSense.

Google AdSense is activated only once 

This means that once you get approved for AdSense by submitting a particular website link, you then get an AdSense account which you can use to place ads on ANY of your websites. You will not have to activate anything for them – just create some ads and put the JavaScript code on your pages, and AdSense will immediately start serving ads for these pages.

You will not have to wait until all the new pages get indexed before you can place your ads. There is an opinion among webmasters, that placing AdSense ads on brand new pages will actually trigger Google bots to come and index your website sooner than they would normally do.

I will make sure to tell you more about AdSense usage in the coming weeks, so stay tuned! And yes, if there is anything in particular you'd like to ask, please do – I'll be glad to help! 

Useful resources

I think you will benefit a lot by subscribing to the Inside AdSense blog feed, as it contains tips suggested and approved by the AdSense Team.