If you are a webmaster and you want to earn through your website without actually having to sell anything then AdSense is the best way to do it. There are many webmasters toiling away in an effort to earn a significant daily income but at the opposite end of the spectrum there are the "masterminds" who are bringing in hundreds of US Dollars or Euros or GB Pounds a day from the AdSense ads on their pages. So what is the difference between these two differing types of website owners? The successful ones read and act on the tips which Google itself offers to webmasters as well as thinking of their own ways of improving their AdSense performance.

Here are five tips which have helped many website owners to improve their AdSense incomes and continue to do so.

1. The ad format which seems to work best for the majority is the Large Rectangle (336 x 280). Statistics show that this size has the tendency to result in higher click through rates (CTR). If you are wondering why this particular size and shape works the best, it is probably because, properly placed and blended with the site and the advertisements having relevance to the content of your pages they will attract visitors to click on them.

2. Google offers you the facility to create a custom colour scheme for your adverts, so select colours which reflect the background, font colour and design of your pages. If your pages have a plain background then use that colour as the background of your ads; use the same colour as your normal font-face and don't use a border for your ads. If, however, you are using a content management system such as PHPNuke, many of the templates for which use boxes with borders to divide the different parts of the pages, then use the same coloured border for your AdSense advertisements.

3. Placement of your Advertisements is very important. As much as possible, put them "above the fold", which is basically above the point on the visitors screen where they have to start scrolling down. This makes them immediately visible because many visitors won't bother to scroll down to see the whole page.

4. Some websites offer you the opportunity to insert your own AdSense code into articles or reports which you submit. Make sure that you keep your ads up to date on the better of these sites and if there's a choice, try to make sure that your ads are the prominent ones.

5. Save yourself some time by using SSI (or server side included), if your server supports SSI. You just need to save your AdSense code in a text file, "adsense.txt" and upload it to your root directory. Then utilising SSI, call the code to the pages where you want it. This is really handy for those webmasters who use automatic page generators to populate their site.

6. The points above have helped many webmasters to earn a generous income from AdSense. To ensure that they work for you, make sure that your site has a tight niche so that the people visiting want to be there and the advertisements provided by Google fit your subject matter. Thus, your visitors will have an interest in the adverts and want to click on them.

7. Don't forget that there will be loads of pages on the internet covering the same subject as yours, most of which will contain AdSense, so take a look at these sites and see what the ones with the highest ranking have, that yours doesn't.

8. Lastly, test and try your AdSense placement and colour schemes, using the Google "channel" facility. This will help you make sure that you are using the optimum adverts for your particular website.

Follow these tips and watch your AdSense income improve.