The online advertising world was dominated, just a few years ago, by banner advertising and pay per click ads were a term few webmasters and advertisers had heard of. However, banner advertising started seeing a steep decline in popularity and the all-important CTR (click through rate) as the banners got flashier and visually annoying. Their place was quickly taken by pay per click advertising, or PPC as it mostly referred to. Online advertisers and advertising agencies soon found out that simple yet relevant advertising links do a much better job at getting the attention of website visitors.

It was soon determined that Internet users had grown to a level of Internet knowledge and refinement that allowed them to effectively "ignore" the CLICK ME!!! CLICK ME!!! colorful "screams" emitted by traditional banners. Today's Internet visitors are looking for relevant, subtle and non-intrusive advertising and PPC ads deliver just that.

How to make money with pay per click ads

The single most important resource of the Internet are website visitors. If you don't have them, you can't run a business or, in our case, you won't find any advertisers that would take interest into displaying their links on your site. Once you developed that little virtual gold mine, it's time to find some good PPC program to place on it.

There are several ways you can do that and the variety of online pay per click advertising programs is amazing. However, there are only a few big players and the monopoly seems to be held by Google's Adsense program . Other programs that offer contextual PPC ads and high-relevance advertising are also popular with many webmasters - Yahoo Publisher Network and Chitika are just some of the more popular pay per click ad programs.

What are the profits that these ads generate?

The revenues obtained from all these pay per click ads fluctuate, but there are plenty webmasters who have given up their day jobs in order to have more time to develop their successful Internet business. Right now, as a newbie in pay per click ads and online marketing, you might think that earning a four figure income on a monthly basis with a business that is on auto-pilot and while working on your site a few hours a week seems like a scam or at least as something impossible; don't make the mistake of underestimating the huge potential of the Internet.

About 15 out of 100 people who decide do open their online cash cow manage to do it. Out of those 15 people, maybe 2 or 3 will make it big, earning thousands of dollars a month while vacationing in Hawaii. The other 12 who managed to start their business will probably settle for a few hundred dollars a week, still something amazing if you consider that they only need to invest one or two hours of their time to update their websites. In other words, you can make a million dollars, like Alex Tew, an English student with a brilliant pixel advertising idea , or you can set up a business that will take a few months of easy work to develop and then it will produce a steady and quite decent income for life!