How is this possible?

The checks above are payments resulting from my Google Adsense account. The Adsense revenue is money that is being generated from advertisements posted on my website.

What’s awesome about making money online from advertisements is that I’ve created an automatic income stream that’s being generated from work that I’ve already done .

To explain a little further, I’ve been publishing articles in my blog since 2007. Everything that I’ve written is freely available on my site, but readers have to tolerate an occasional advertisement, normally at the beginning or end of something I’ve published. The advertisements are the source of my online income: the more people that view my website, the more money I make.

After four years of writing, I’ve published nearly 150 original articles, and my site now averages between 1000 and 2000 visitors every day day. A small percentage of site visitors click on ads, and the Google Adsense program tracks those clicks. The dollar amount that an advertiser is paying for these “click through ads” gets immediately added to my Adsense account with every click. Then, at the end of each month, if my Adsense account has more than $100 in it, Google sends me a check for the my total earnings.

In short, the process is: Create website, add advertisements, receive checks.

Although it really is that simple, please don’t confuse “simple” with “easy.”

Even if you have the technical know-how to create a website, and the technical know-how to add advertisements to it, there is no guarantee that you will be able to attract any visitors to your website. The amount of visitors you can successfully lead to your site will directly influence the amount of money your website will make. The amount of visitors and their corresponding statistics is commonly referred to as “site traffic.”

The larger the amount of traffic you can generate, the larger your checks will be. This is why you see “super bloggers” like Darren Rowse and Steve Pavlina who get hundreds of thousands of visitors every day making lots and lots of money online. LifeReboot is a work in progress, and although my blog earns money online, it is not yet the heavy hitter I’d like it to be.

That being said, if you are capable of earning even ONE DOLLAR online, then you are more capable than 99% of all internet users. I say this because the majority of people using the internet are simply “internet consumers.” They search and view online content, but don’t create or add any of their own. This is the average person, and this is your audience.

If you need to learn how to create a website, what a web hosting service is, or even what “copy and paste” is, then you have many things to learn. Recognize that needing to learn how to do these things to get started is perfectly normal.

When I first started, my goal was to make $1/day in my first month. I would get seriously excited over a single visitor that clicked an ad that made me 10 cents… Like everyone else that wants to create a website that earns them money, you will have to start at the starting line. Know that when you first start out, you’ll be earning nothing — at least for a little while.

If you have a website, and are ready to add Google Adsense advertisements to it, you can sign up for an account at www. google. com/adsense. The way this works is that your site must be approved by Google for their Adsense program. I don’t remember all of the specific details, but to be approved your site can’t have any trickery (no scams), it can’t contain pornography, and you can’t tell your audience directly to click the advertisements.

Once Google approves your site, they will need to verify your account by confirming your address. This process may have changed since I first did it in 2007, but they sent a postcard to my home that had a special web address and confirmation code on it. I had to type the code on the postcard into a verification box online so Google knew my home address was legitimate.

After your account is verified, you can create “ad blocks” to use on your site. An ad block is a designated space where advertisements from different advertisers will appear. When creating ad blocks you can select certain preferences like width and height of the ad blocks you’re using, and you can customize their style using different fonts and colors. There is a limit to the number of ad blocks you can add to a single page (3 ad units, and 1 text link unit).

Initially, the ads displayed in your ad blocks will be extremely generic. Google will eventually adjust the advertisements on your site so that more relevant ads are shown, but it will take some time for their system to understand what your website is about. For example, since this article is about making money online, any ads on this page will likely link to other sites discussing how to make money online.

With your ads in place, you can start to monitor your site’s daily earnings. Here are a few images taken from my Adsense account interface, and the spreadsheet report from the time period I’ve been showing to you. You’ll notice that some of the earnings values for the months match the numbers from my checks in the images shown previously.

Once again, this is money that is being sent to me each month whether I write new content in my blog or not. It’s interesting that even if I don’t publish anything new, articles that I’ve previously written will still attract enough site traffic to earn a $100 check from Google.

With this in mind, I really should publish new content more often so that my blog will attract more readers. Seriously, if I can automatically earn $100 a month without writing anything, then if I were to focus on writing new content often, who is to say that I couldn’t earn $1000 a month? As I mentioned before, this blog is a work in progress, and I hope to get there someday.

So, at this point you may be overwhelmed with the amount of work you have ahead of you, or you may be enthusiastic about the prospect of making money online using Adsense. I will let you know that Adsense is not the only income stream I use on my site. There are also donations from generous readers. and I use a Paypal account for this. Paypal also lets me accept transactions from direct advertisers. who often contact me to add text links or sponsored image advertisements that appears on specific LifeReboot pages.

If you are serious about making money online, then I encourage you to investigate the many different options for monetizing your website. Personally, I prefer the non-intrusive options like Adsense and Paypal, because I want to treat my readers with respect (allowing them to read articles without forcing them to deal with ads that pop-up, or are similarly annoying). Although there are many other programs similar to Adsense that allow you to earn money through online advertisements, I can’t speak to how they work or how successful they are.

As a final note, I want to mention that there was a period of time where I had only a small, out-of-the-way advertisement in one of my site’s navigation bars. My site earned diddlysquat with this tiny advertisement. If you’re serious about making money online, and want to do it using ads on your website, then REALLY put ads on your website — don’t just hide a small one somewhere and pray for clicks.

My original line of thinking was to put ads somewhere unobtrusive so that I wouldn’t annoy my audience, but later I learned that it’s smarter to publish new content without ads at all. As I create and publish new content, my older articles get pushed back into the content archives. I will then go back and edit the older articles to include ads. This way none of my subscribers or constant readers get aggravated by ad placement, but anyone visiting my site from a link or a search engine becomes a greater source of ad revenue.

Thanks for listening. I hope the entrepreneur in you is feeling inspired, and that you’ll soon be putting your plan to make money online into action. I also hope that everything I’ve written is helpful and clear. Let me know if there’s anything that you need me to elaborate on, or if you have any questions!

Edit 9-30-11: After publishing this article, my Google Adsense earnings have increased! Here is my new monthly Adsense check “High Score” which is over $250 !

If you liked this article, you may also want to check out my series on earning income online. where I explain what I did to start generating money automatically from my website.