So you've made yourself a website, want to start making money from it? You might even by able to turn it into a decent second income.

Some people have the idea that you shouldn't put advertisements on your website because it detracts from the experience. I only agree with this if the advertisements are not relevant to the content of your site, or if it's not something that would be useful to the visitor. But how do you constantly find advertisers who have something of interest to your website users?

That question used to plague website publishers for a very long time, as not only was it hard to constantly find new and consistant advertisers, but the work load of adding the new and removing the old was a nightmare. For people who haven't discovered what I'm about to tell you, they will still continue to struggle. But you wont have that problem.

Introducing Google Adsense:

Google adsense is a product from google (If that wasn't already obvious) that enables you to automatically have relevant advertisements placed on your website for free. All you need to do, is copy and paste a small bit of script onto any area of your page and that's it, it's as simple as that. You never have to worry about it ever again, unless you want to change the look and feel of it again. But again this will only take a few minutes maximum.

So what do these advertisements from google look like?

Well that's really up to you. You can customize the look and feel of the adsense appearance on your site. You can change the text colour, the background colour, the link clolour, the border colour and you can also change the dimensions of the advertisements to fit your page, not only that, but you can also have image advertisements displayed.

How Are The Advertisements Relevant To My Site?

Google sends it's adsense robot to crawl your page and read it. It will then have a grasp of what topic that page is about based on what it has read. For example, if you wrote a page about cars, you would probably get adsense ads on your page related to cars or car parts. As these ads are relevant to what your visitor is looking for they're much more likely to click on the ads, making you more money.

One thing I forgot to mention is that sometimes the adsense ads are targetted to where the visitor lives. So if they're based in london, and they were reading your article on car parts, it would probably display advertisements for sellers in their local area. This makes them even more likely to click on the ads.

Getting Started:

To get yourself a google adsense account, at google.com

Sign up by following the simple instructions provided by google. You'll need to enter bank details if you want the money you earn to be deposited directly into your bank, alternatively you can just provide enough details for them to send you a cheque.

Once you've filled in all the necessary details you can start placing your adsense code.

Log-in to your adsense account and select "Adsense setup" on the tab at the top of the page. Then select adsense for content. For now select text ads only (Just to practise with). Choose the size of the adsense ad that you want to display, then the number of ads in that advertisement block. Now you need to select some colours for your adsense ads, pick whatever you like for now, this is just a practise one, you can do a proper one later.

Press continue when you're happy with the colours you've chosen and you'll be presented with the code to paste on you website. Paste that code anywhere that you want to display the ad on your website, at the time of writing google only allows 3 adsense ads per page. Upload the updated page with the adsense code to your website and take a look at what you've done.

It's as simple as that, just add that code to the rest of your pages, so that whenever someone comes to your website, they're likely to click on the ads and start making you some money.