Anybody with a website can easily start to earn money. As you know, building a website is just the first step towards earning from the web. There are many ways to earn an income from the web, including:
1. Selling your own products and services
2. Selling other people's products and services
3. Advertising other people's products and services
Of the many ways you can make your website earn money, my favorite is the 3rd option: advertising other people's products and services. It has a clear advantage over the other options, because you do not need to develop your own product nor do you need to find someone with a good product to sell.
The best way to earn from advertising online is through pay-per-click programs. To me, this is simply the easiest way to earn from the web. When a visitor to your website clicks on the advertisement appearing there, you get paid. Whether or not the visitor eventually buys the advertised product is immaterial to you.
There are many pay-per-click programs available, but the most popular is Google AdSense. It isn't the easiest to get accepted, but once you get in, you are on your way to earning an income online.
I am sure you have heard of Google. The majority of us use it for its Search Engine. More than half of all searches conducted on the Internet today are done through that bizarrely simple-looking homepage of Google. However, behind that simple front is one of the most sophisticated technology on the web. If you're a web publisher - that's to say, someone with a website - you have the opportunity to harness that technology for your own benefit by enrolling to Google AdSense.

What is Google AdSense
Google AdSense is the ad serving program run by Google. It places text, image and some times video advertisements on websites that enroll to it. You are paid when someone clicks on the ads appearing on your webpage.

How does Google AdSense work
Where do the advertisements come from? On the reverse side of the coin from AdSense is Google's advertising tools called AdWords. Businesses wanting to advertise through Google enrols to it. Their advertisements appear in two places: as "Ads by Google" in websites participating in AdSense, and as "sponsored links" on Google's search results.

Google matches advertisements according to the content of your website. For example, if your webpage is about boat building, Google looks for advertisements related as closely as possible to boat building, and displays them on your website. You determine the number of ad spaces. Google allows you a maximum of three ad spaces.

As a webmaster, you are concerned about the "Ads by Google" that you can place on your website, because it generates money for you every time someone clicks on it. Those who are serious about earning from the web often work hard to maximize their AdSense income, and we'll look into that in future chapters. There is also other programs similar to AdSense, but if you can get AdSense, the other programs are all secondary.

Let's straight away enroll into AdSense, so that you can start putting the ads on your website. I am assuming here that you do have a website to enroll, otherwise go through the earlier chapters to read about how you can go about setting one up.

To set up your Google AdSense account, go to the Google homepage and click on Advertising Program. Then click to Google AdSense and follow the steps to sign up. I will leave you to set up the account and submit the application. Google will evaluate your website to determine whether or not they will to enroll you. You will receive a notification from Google after a few days of submitting your application, informing you whether or not Google has approved or rejected your application. Yes, Google may reject your application if they find that the website you show them is not suitable for their ads. For that reason, it may be to ensure you have some content on your website before attempting to apply with Google.

Assuming that after submitting your application, you received the happy news that Google accepted your application, then you're in. The bad news is, now the real work has just begun!

As you probably expect by now, putting up a website and throwing advertisements into it is just the tip of the iceberg. Sure, you now have a profit-making website, but if you leave it as it is, the amount of profit you make is going to be minuscule.

I will cover the steps to take to optimize your website to make the most profit in future articles. For now, I would urge you to proceed to set up your AdSense account and get familiar with it.

Timothy Tye began earning an income from the web when he launched his first website four years ago. Since then, he has started several successful websites that allow him to earn an income without holding a job. He believes that anybody can do it and shares useful tips and knowledge in his website, http://www.happyjoblessguy.com.