How Google AdSense Works

Not surprisingly, Google AdSense is the largest PPC ad network for third-party websites. There are competitors (from Microsoft and Yahoo!, primarily), but Google is the big dog in the online PPC advertising space.

So if you want to generate revenue from your website or blog, you need to sign up as an affiliate with Google AdSense (www.google.com/adsense). AdSense will place relevant PPC ads on your web pages; you get paid whenever a visitor clicks on one of these ads.

Who can sign up for Google AdSense? Just about anybody; the AdSense program is open to any person or company that hosts a website or blog. You don’t have to be a big site or a big company; one-page sites run by individuals also qualify.

The amount of work you have to do is minimal. The sign-up process itself is a snap; all you have to do is fill in a few forms and supply your bank account information (so you can get paid). Google then generates a snippet of code that you must insert into each page on your site. That takes a little bit of work—and some working knowledge of HTML coding—but it’s a one-time thing.