Imagine you were a really big company and walked into the offices at Google, saying "I'll offer you a deal: I'll add your advertisements to my Web Pages, you sell the ad space, and we'll split the revenue." Sound too good to be true?

It's not. It's Google's Adsense Program and it's the basis of thousands of different sites currently earning money each time someone clicks on an ad. Some of these sites earn just a dollar or two each week, but others are earning over $500 each day. Without doing anything special, without managing ad inventory, and without worrying about collecting payment from advertisers.

So how do you sign up for this wonderful program? First off, you need to meet the Google criteria for Adsense, which are mostly just common sense. Remember, the Google mantra is "do no evil", so you shouldn't be surprised at all by what they detail.

Perhaps the most important item on their list is that your site must also adhere to Google's Webmaster Guidelines. These are good reading anyway, because by talking about what you shouldn't do, they give some very good clues about what you should do to maximize your searchability and page ranking.

But let's stay focused and look at the specific criteria Google lists for eligibility in the program:

Your site may not include:

• Excessive profanity
• Hate, violence, racial intolerance, or advocate against any individual, group, or organization
• Hacking/cracking content
• Illicit drugs and drug paraphernalia
• Pornography, adult, or mature content
• Gambling or casino-related content
• Excessive advertising
• Pop-ups, pop-unders or exit windows that interfere with site navigation, obscure AdWords ads, change user preferences, or are for downloads. Other types of pop-ups, pop-unders, or exit windows may be allowed, provided that they do not exceed a combined total of 5 per user session
• Deceptive or manipulative content or construction to improve your site's search engine ranking, e.g., your site's PageRank.

They have a very useful Overview of Google Adsense (PDF) that's worth reading for all the details.

Sound like a good program, one where for the cost of maybe an hour of tweaking your pages, you could start having your site be profitable, rather than a monthly expense? It is!

I really like Google Adsense, and along with many of my colleagues, I'm earning more than enough to cover all of my hosting and networking bills.

Have a quick read through their terms of service for Adsense, then sign up right now and get started!

Then please come back here and add a comment to let us know how it's going!

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