This is a Guest Post by Kathy Shaidle. Kathy Shaidle started blogging in 2000. Today she runs a number of blogs (her own and those of her clients), including BloggingPowerTool.

I started blogging back in 2000. I did what most bloggers did in those days: I stuck a bunch of Google AdSense ad units on the blog without giving it much thought. And like most people, I was lucky if I earned a few dollars a month. It took me nine years of blogging to make enough the minimum amount of money -- $100 – so that Google had to send me a check for my AdSense earnings.
What an embarrassment. So what changed? The answer is pretty simple: I finally read up on Google’s own tips for where to place AdSense units on a blog! That and some tips from expert moneymaking bloggers like Darren Rowse at ProBlogger, and now I earn well over $100 every month from Google AdSense.

No, it’s not enough to retire on – but I kick myself thinking of all the thousands of dollars I left on the table for almost a decade by not making a few simple changes to my AdSense strategy. I could have made an extra $12,000 by now. First, I picked up some tips from how to get the most out of Google AdSense from Google’s own AdSense blog. You’d think that would have been the first thing I’d have done, but no: I thought I could “wing it.” I was wrong. In one post at the Google AdSense blog, they talked about a website that had been putting 468x60 Banner AdSense units at the bottom of their pages.

That wasn’t earning them much revenue. But then the website started using 300 x 250 Medium Rectangles instead, right inside their actual posts. Practically overnight, their revenue went from $10 per day to... $1700! No, that isn’t a typo. Google highly recommends using the 300 x 250 Medium Rectangle unit, and placing it right inside your post. Not in a side bar or at the bottom of the page. You’ve probably noticed more and more blogs and websites doing this now. While it isn’t pretty to look at, the fact remains: it works in terms of increasing your revenue.

So after reading that post, I started doing the same thing. I kept one AdSense horizontal banner ad at the very top of my site, then inserted a 300 x 250 Medium Rectangle into two blog posts, at the top left of each post, with the text wrapping around the ad. You can see what this format looks like at my Twitter Power Tool site: http://www.twitterpowertool.com/ (Note: Google limits you to three Google banner ads per page, so that’s what I used. If you accidentally put more than three AdSense units on your blog one day, don't worry -- Google automatically replaces those extra ones with a blank space.)

What happened next was pretty incredible: Within 24 hours, I went from making 20 cents a day with Google AdSense to making $2 or $3! It only takes a few minutes to change how you place Google ads on your site. (I use the Socrates WordPress blog theme, which is designed to make AdSense placement as easy as possible.) That small change can make a big difference in your Google AdSense revenue. I just wish I’d done it sooner.