By Shawn Collins; Jan 8, 2006, 03:17

The Affiliate Summit 2006 show started up today at Bally’s Las Vegas. The events began at noon with a workshop on Google AdSense by Joel "Dr. AdSense" Comm. This was followed by another workshop on blogging from famed blogger, Dave Taylor.

In the evening, hundreds of folks assembled for the speed networking session. This was one of the highly anticipated events of the conference, and the attendees seemed to really enjoyed the spirited, short meetings with eight people each in the span of two hours.

R.O.Wise and MediaWhiz sponsored this session and generously provided an open bar to lubricate the conversations.

By Joel Comm who is Dr. AdSense, an Internet entrepreneur who has been online for more than 20 years. Joel is co-creator of ClassicGames.com, now known as Yahoo! Games and is the author of the web’s best-selling AdSense ebook, "Google Adsense Secrets (Or What Google Never Told You About Making Money With Adsense)".

It’s very easy to make a lot of money with Adsense. It’s easy because in a short space of time, We’ve managed to turn the sort of Adsense revenues that wouldn’t keep me in candy into the kind of income that pays the mortgage on a large suburban house, makes the payments on a family car and does a whole lot more besides.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any number of mistakes that you can make when trying to increase your AdSense income - and any one of those mistakes can keep you earning candy money instead of earning the sort of cash that can pay for your home.

There is one mistake though that will totally destroy your chances of earning a decent AdSense income before you’ve even started.

That mistake is making your ad look like an ad.

No one wants to click on an ad. Your users don’t come to your site looking for advertisements. They come looking for content and their first instinct is to ignore everything else. And they’ve grown better and better at doing just that. Today’s Internet users know exactly what a banner ad looks like. They know what it means, where to expect it - and they know exactly how to ignore it. In fact most Internet users don’t even see the banners at the top of the Web pages they’re reading or the skyscrapers running up the side.

But when you first open an AdSense account, the format and layout of the ads you receive will have been designed to look just like ads. That’s the default setting for AdSense - and that’s the setting that you have to work hard to change.

That’s where AdSense gets interesting. There are dozens of different strategies that smart AdSense account holders can use to stop their ads looking like ads - and make them look attractive to users. They include choosing the right formats for your ad, placing them in the most effective spots on the page, putting together the best combination of ad units, enhancing your site with the best keywords, selecting the most ideal colors for the font and the background, and a whole lot more besides.

The biggest AdSense mistake you can make is leaving your AdSense units looking like ads.

The second biggest mistake you can make is to not know the best strategies to change them.

Take a look! It would be better if you just blend AdSense color, size, and placement into your content.

Now, how easy would it be to raise that 1% to 2%? That’s not a very big jump by any means. Quite likely, you could jump to 2% or even 3% by doing nothing more than tweaking your AdSense colors, ad size and/or placement. Little tweaks. Tiny tweaks. Nothing major at all.
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