If you have a website, and some traffic, you can be earning money with it! It's very easy to ad advertising to your website and make money online. When done correctly it can even ad value to your site. Adsense is the most well known, but there are a large number of ad programs out there. When you sign up as a publisher to display Google's Adsense ads on your site, Google spiders your site to find out what each page that you are going to place an ad on is about. Google then displays ads that relate to your site in some way. This is called targeting and it's what makes the Adsense program work.

As a publisher you can choose what sizes of ads you want and where to put them on your page. You have a number of options like whether to allow image ads as well as text ads, and what sites you do not want ads from appearing on your page. You get to choose the color schemes and formats to make the ads match the style of your website and web pages. There are quite a few options for you to choose from to both customize the ads to your site and to determine what types of ads and services you want. You can even put a Google search box on your site and earn money from that too.

Another form of advertising you as a publisher can put on your site is similar to the old banner ads, but it is contextual. The ads are still banners, but they match the products being advertised to the content of your web page. These programs pay by ad impressions instead of click-throughs. This is referred to as CPM or cost-per-thousand. Fifty cents per 1,000 ad impressions is a fairly typical amount paid to publishers for these ads.

Most ad programs limit the number of ads you can place on a page. The CPM ads I use require any ads to be ?above the fold? (Visible when the page loads without having to scroll down). That's reasonable since you are being paid in effect for page views, so the advertiser wants to be sure that his ad is actually seen by someone. You could click away without scrolling down and thus the advertiser would have to pay for an impression that did not occur. I can get 2 ads above the fold, so I make $1.00 for each 1,000 page views.

Whether to use the CPM ads depends upon the amount of money the average page view produces. Some of my sites earn very little from Adsense because the topic of the page is not as valuable to advertisers as others. If my site is making me $5.00 per 1,000 page views with Adsense, then I won't be putting the CPM ads up, since I only make $1 per 1,000 page views. If the site is making less than $1.00 per 1,000 page views with Adsense, then it's worth putting the CPM ads up, with Adsense below the fold.

Adsense doesn't have an above the fold requirement so I place Adsense ads below my CPM ads. That way I get paid for every visitor, without them having to click anything, and then there is still a chance they will click on an Adsense ad and make me even more money.

Another way to make money from every visitor without the visitor having to click anything is using the new 5 second audio ads from NetAudioAds. When a visitor lands on your website a 5 second long audio ad plays. Once the ad has played, the visitor will not hear another ad for at least 3 minutes. If after three minutes has elapsed, the visitor clicks to another of you pages, he could then hear another ad, or if he refreshes the original page he would hear a second ad. Only one ad per 3 minute period is ever played to any one listener.

Not only do you get paid for every visitor even if they don't click anything, they never leave your site. With pay-per-click your visitor is gone, but not with 5 second audio ads. Another neat thing about he audio ad program is it has a referral program that goes down two levels. If you refer a publisher to the program, you get money when ads play on the referrals website. If your referral refers another publisher then you make money from those ads as well. It stops at that point, but by referring lots of new publishers your earnings can really skyrocket.

The audio ads do not interfere with Adsense or CPM ad programs, and they don't take up any room on your page either!

Yet another way to make money online with your website is through affiliate programs. If you become an affiliate, and direct visitors to an advertiser's website, and the visitor makes a purchase, you get a commission. That's pretty much how affiliate programs work.

So mix and match your advertising for maximum earnings and go take a cruise ship vacation or something.