Google Adsense

Google Adsense
The Basics
Google Adsense is arguably the most popular of all online money making systems. In Fact, many of the 'other' systems advertised online, are just variations of Adsense. The idea is that you place ads on a web page, and get paid when someone clicks on them. The amount you get paid varies greatly depending on a number of factors.
If you already have a web page, it is simply matter of registering on Google, then applying for an Adsense account. Your application may not be accepted, but when you apply there is a whole list of what you need to consider before you apply. Also there are some programs that offer instant or already set up accounts.
If you do not have a page of your own, it actually is quite easy and pretty cheap these days to start one. A large number of the "make money with Google" programs you see advertised on the web, are simply pre-made web pages that you pay the person who made it for the right to use. They do all the work, you reap all the rewards, is the tagline, but it's really not that easy. To good to be true and all that as it were.
Getting Started
Whether you already have a page or get one ready made, what it's really all about is traffic. Not everyone who visits your site will click on your ads. In fact, most people probably wont. So if only a small percentage of people click on the ad's, to make a good amount of money, you need a large amount of people visiting the site, the more traffic the better the odds of a good amount of clicks.
That ultimately is the job. That is, driving traffic to your web site. So the real question is, how to do that.
You want to pay close attention to the content of the website itself. For example, if you do a search on bing for Star Wars there are 88,900,000 results. So if your page is a Star Wars fan page, what are the odds that someone is going to click on your page, or even find it amongst all the others?
So the first thing you have to ask yourself is if your page fits in an over saturated market. If so, you may not be putting yourself into a good position to make money. You do want your page to have a niche, but you want it to be something very specific, something people will be able to find, and somehow unique.
There are many pages for just about any subject you can imagine, but when I say unique I mean the content, you want all of your own original content on the page. You should be able to write, and should write just about everything yourself. A very good way to help add content to your site, without doing all the writing yourself, is to have a forum. Your guests will end up doing most of the writing.
Next Steps
Okay so you started (or purchased) your web page and have been approved for an Adsense account. You have a good amount of unique content and are ready to start driving traffic to your page.
The best way to start is to get your site listed on the search engines. For Google, because you already have an account with them at this point, you just have to verify that you do indeed own the page, (usually by copy and pasting some html code into the web page itself) and then request it be listed. This means that when someone does a search for whatever your page is about, your page will be one of the ones that comes back in the results. Many sites offer a paid service that does the listings for you, often the more expensive the higher your page will appear on their lists. Whoever your host for your web site is may offer this, and if you bought a pre made page and they don't offer this service, you probably should have bought from someone else.
Next, find other web sites about the same basic topic and advertise on their forums. This of course is if they allow you to do so, some forums do not allow people to promote their sites in the forum. However for the ones that do, there is potential for many people to learn about your site in this way.
You will also want to join various webrings, which are pages in the same category that have links to each other featured on the sites. Links can be very powerful tools, you just have to do the legwork, find similar pages and e-mail the webmasters asking to link your page and of course offer to link theirs as well. Also you can always do the facebook or myspace thing advertising your site there, sending your friends to your site and such.
Now if you don't mind spending a little money, you can get whats called, google Adwords. This is you putting ads on other people pages that, when someone clicks on the ad, it leads them to your page.
One of the more questionable methods used is pay per click. One of the online Jobs that you will see on the web is pay per click, where someone pays you to click on the ads on their page. The problem with this is, even if the person does pay the fact of the matter is, this is against Google's terms of service, and they do have a system of checks and balances in place to remove peoples accounts if they do this. Still, if you want to drive people to site by offering to pay them to click on your ads, that's your problem and don't blame me when you get busted.
Eventually you may want to repeat the process with several other web pages. Look at it in terms of, you can try to get 100 people to visit your one page, or try to get one person to visit each of your 100 pages. Either way you can make it work, but if you have only one page, it better be a real seriously good page.
Conclusion
Google Adsense can be a good way to make money, if you're willing to do the work. You don't necessarily have to be a computer mastermind to do it, you just need to take the time to do it right. Don't just spam your way through trying to be lazy, you won't have any long term income that way, maybe a blast of a couple hundred bucks here or there, but nothing you can quit your full time job over.