You’ve heard of Google ads, right? They’re all over the web and they help a lot of websites pay for themselves, and in some cases people who publish websites monetized with Google Adsense can hit the big time financially.
There are plenty of other ways to monetize a website, but for the majority of web-niches, monetization is best with Google Adsense.
If an advertiser pays $1 for a click, Google keeps 33c and you get 67c. It may be possible to make more if you can sell ads directly to an advertiser in your niche – you can keep 100% of the ad money – but most people starting out on the web aren’t in a position to attract business advertisers.
To get started, you need a website. This is quite easy to do. If you use the WordPress platform like this website does, you don’t need too many web skills before you’re up and running.
Even easier, get yourself an account with blogger or hubpages and start publishing articles there. If you join one of these sites, it makes it easier and quicker to get an Adsense account.
If you build your own website, it’s unlikely you’ll be accepted for the Google Adsense program until your site is six months old. You’ll also need to make sure your site has worthwhile content. If you’ve cut and paste someone else’s content, most likely you’ll be rejected.
I’d recommend cutting your teeth on blogger or hubpages. You need to learn how to write stuff that people will link to. If nobody likes your work, they won’t link to it. If nobody links to it, nobody will visit your site. If nobody visits your site, nobody will click on your Adsense and you won’t make any money.
How can you get links to your stuff?
The best you can hope for is that you’ll write something and paste a link to it on something like Facebook or a forum and it goes viral. If it does, you’ll gather a ton of links and life will be good. If this happens, you’ll wish you had your own site, because a ton of links to your own site means that Google’s search engine will start trusting your site and send traffic to other things you write, not just your viral article.
Other ways to generate traffic include posting videos on Youtube. Again, if you can post a popular video, some of the people who look at it could click through to your site. Of course, if you can make videos that people enjoy, you could get an Adsense account by becoming a Youtube partner. Just make sure you don’t load videos that you don’t own the copyright for. That way you’ll lose your Adsense account. Google isn’t very forgiving of people who it bans from Adsense, you make sure you do things by the book.
YouTube’s Terms of Service
Adsense Program Policies
Adsense Terms