Making huge sums of money with AdSense isn't brain surgery. You simply have to know what you're doing. If you know which types of ads to choose, where to place them on the page and how to use Google's options to design them so that they get the maximum number of click-throughs, you should find your site earning heaps of money very quickly.

But things can go wrong. Revenues can be disappointing, clicks non-existent and pages designed to put off users instead of encourage them to check out your advertisers. You know when one of the worst things possible has gone wrong when, instead of seeing ads on your page, you get public service ads. These turn up when Google doesn't recognize your keywords or can't find a suitable ad to put on your Web page. Instead of showing a blank box, it puts up ads for all sorts of charities, none of which you choose - and none of which earn you revenue.

You might like the idea of your site working for charity. But you might like it better if your site worked for you and you decided how much of that revenue to give to the charities you choose. That's why smart AdSense subscribers - the ones who understand how AdSense works and make giant revenues from it - make sure that they have alternatives set up to stop their sites being used to advertise Google's favorite charities.

There are lots of different ways you can do that. For example, you could create your own pseudo-AdSense ads and use those as alternate URLs to promote your other sites. Or you could use one of the several companies that will use that space to give you targeted paying ads.

There's nothing mean about using these strategies. The fact that Google makes it possible to use them shows that they understand that your space is for you not for them - and that you should earn from it.

With a little bit of reading, you'll find that it's easy to create a website that always serves high-paying AdSense ads. But even the smartest AdSense users make sure that they've got insurance should something go wrong. It's easy to do and your revenues deserve it.