Google has a rather new search term-targeted advertising program called AdSense. This focuses on bringing ads relevant to the content they are placed in ? or to put it in Goggle's words: "if you like the web-page, you will love the ads".

This program is available even to small websites, especially with niche topics that the big affiliate programs will not let in – so they can maybe at least earn the money needed for the website-hosting or so see also

How it works:

• You create an account with Google at the Adsense home – yes it?s self-service.
• You wait for approval ? check the requirements and make sure you have a page-rank ? without it (i.e. your page is too new) there is no chance of getting in. Sometimes personal pages, which are actually disallowed by the program, get into the program. Discussing with the Google-Team about the content, the design and program join itself will help most of the times ? after all they are humans reviewing your site.
• Google gives you a piece of JavaScript HTML to put in your web site code. This code can be customized for colors and various fixed dimension formats. It is currently (08/03) not possible to change the styles completely free (although I have no doubt that this feature will follow some time)
• Google analyzes the content of your pages periodically (with search-engine indexing through "freshbot" maybe daily and "deepbot" every month or so
• For each visitor the JavaScript code gets some ads that are probably being searched for online (while your page loads) and are displayed. These ads are from the 100,000 advertisers Google claims to have.
• Sometimes there are ?related Google searches? displayed, which should actually help Google gain more search-traffic and therefore money for it?s own ads. Decide if you like it, but according to ?this thread?: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum89/309.htm it?s not appreciated much.
• Make sure that your main-content loads before these ads, so the visitor gets something to see.
• For each click ("click-through" to the ad customer site) Google pays you an amount from a few cents to maybe even a dollar (according to what I read)

Some more news about it at News.com and Globetechnology and Silliconvalley

Google's AdSense is probably the fastest and easiest way to generate revenue from a website that contains great content.

I decided to join the club of Adsenser?s because I believe Google is doing a great job in content-related ad placing (from what I experienced the last month). Furthermore I created the new category ?marketing? on my weblog ? which topics combines fine with the University for Marketing & Sales I start in 3 weeks?