Assumptions

This book does not explain HTML and will not tell you how to create or modify web sites. To put the concepts and software explained into practice, you need to have basic knowledge of web fundamentals and skills or to work with a webmaster who does.

Part I, Making Money with Your Web Site, and Part II, Getting the Most from AdSense, are intended for readers who have, or are interested in building, web sites that can be used to make money with advertising. To take advantage of this material, you will need to be able to publish web pages and to modify the HTML code of these pages, for example, to add affiliate links and to add the JavaScript code needed to display Google AdSense ad units on your pages.

You don't need any technical skills to become an effective advertiser on the Web using Google's AdWords program. So, in a sense, Part III, Working with AdWords, is the least geeky part of this book, although, as you'll learn when you read Part III, advertising on the Web does have its own complex discipline and metrics. If you want to take advantage of AdWord's nifty conversion- and cross-conversion-tracking features, you'll need to be able to add JavaScript code to your HTML pages.

To profit from Part III you need, of course, a service or product to advertise that makes you money, but webmasters who are simply interested in monetizing the content of their own sites, and not in advertising per se, will gain from an understanding of "how the other half lives." An interesting idea to explore is to see if you can profitably drive traffic to your site using AdWords and make more revenue from AdSense and other programs than it costs you to get the traffic.

Part IV, Using the AdWords APIs, is written for programmers and assumes an audience that has a basic understanding of the web services mechanism, already knows how to program, and can sight-read code (in PHP or C#, depending on the chapter).