Granted, many readers may be saying to themselves, “Thank God all those ads are gone!” But by the time others read this post, they may be thinking, “What on earth is this guy talking about?” If you’re the slightest bit interested in making little extra spending money by placing Google ads on your own website, or you wonder why we’ve stopped running ours, please read on. If not, rest assured the ads will be back. Hopefully soon.

Suffice it to say that transferring a Google AdSense account to another user is no walk in the park. Because Google’s AdSense services are tied to one’s AdWords account, you cannot transfer access to an AdWords account without also transferring the associated AdSense account access. This is the gist of our last loose end in the sale of our business, which we are still trying to wrap up nearly two months after the close of escrow. But I digress…

The solution was to contact Google Support directly and close our AdSense account altogether, after providing access to the AdWords account we had created for the business we sold to the new owner. We then instructed the new owner to remove us from the account as Google suggested, but to date she has not done so. Whatever.

Why the big hassle? Had we known better, we would have created an entirely new Google account for ourselves prior implementing AdSense advertising on our blogs. But since Google doesn’t let users know the two would be connected, we had know way of telling and started running ads under our primary AdWords account. A few months later Google combined all user services into one master account and in doing so combined AdSense and AdWords account services in such a way that they could not be transferred individually.

So why deal with such a headache? Aside from the avoidable trouble we went through, AdSense is an easy way to provide supplemental income for anyone with a website. We believe the ads also serve as an added value to users who may be presented with links to relative websites and other resources that we haven’t provided in all the content we provide.

What are AdSense and AdWords? Google allows business owners and website publishers to display syndicated ads. here’s how the two services differ:

• AdWords – If you have a commercial website or sell products online, you can set up an AdWords account that will allow you to create advertising campaigns where your ads will be displayed on the Google results page and other websites when people search for keywords that you select as relative to your product. You then pay a small fee, which you can limit, each time someone clicks on one of your ads. This is called Pay Per Click Advertising.
• AdSense – This is a free service Google service that allows content publishers (like us) to display syndicated advertisements on their own websites. Each time a reader clicks on these ads, the publisher then receives a very small sum. This amount varies, depending on the ad. It is not much, but it can add up.

We also choose to provide Amazon associate links to products we believe readers will find helpful. And from our account reports so far this indeed seems to be the case. Our goal for this blog is not to annoy or make money – though that would be nice! We merely want to provide the most comprehensive full-time RVing resource for anyone considering a lifestyle change or sabbatical … we highly recommend it!