I’m always surprised by how many great sites I come across that aren’t monetized. If you’re unfamiliar with this terminology, monetized refers to including on your site ways to make money. This is usually in the form of advertising. Now, most of us won’t get rich from advertising on our sites, but given some time and, of course, good content posted frequently, we should be able to at least pay for our hosting.

Out of all of the advertising options available, one of the easiest to get started with is Google’s AdSense. This service allows you to post some ad code on your web site or blog and Google will look at the content of your site and automatically serve up ads that are related to what you’re writing about. This is called contextual advertising.

Getting started with AdSense is easy. Simply go to their sign up page and follow the directions. They will guide you through the steps of signing up and putting the code on your page.

There are three main types of ads you may choose:

AdSense for content – This is the contextual advertising mentioned above.

AdSense for search – This is a search box that can search your site or the web using Google’s search engine. Ads will be shown on the results page and you get credit for those that are clicked.

Referrals – These are Google products or services you can advertise on your site and you’ll be paid a commission for some action your visitors take after clicking, such as downloading and installing Firefox with Google Toolbar.

Believe it or not, it’s very important where on your page you place your ads. Here are a couple of charts from Google that show you the best places for visitors to notice and click on your ads:

I’ve had the most success with placing ads on my blog according to the above chart, but Google also has suggestions specifically for blogs. You may want to experiment to find out which works best for you.

After placing your ads on your page, there are a couple of things you should be aware of:

Don’t ever click on your own ads! This will get you kicked out of Google’s AdSense program. They consider this to be click fraud and take it very seriously.

Don’t ever ask your visitors to click on your ads, either. This is against Google’s Terms of Service agreement that you must agree to before signing up.

Read the Terms of Service. This is important to being successful with AdSense and also not being banned from the program. There are restrictions about how many ads of each type you may show on your site.

Although, there are some scary warnings about using AdSense, it’s really very simple to set up and use. As long as you follow Google’s terms, you’ll have no problems and be able to have a simple way of generating some extra cash from your web site or blog.