What you need to get started with Adsense: If you’ve already got a website generating lots of traffic, Adsense from Google is an excellent way to make it pay for itself. With Adsense, you add a selection of adverts from Google to your pages and each time someone clicks one of the links, you earn some money.Sign up for an Adsense account at www.Google.co.uk/adsense . You’ll need to let them know your site details so they can review it to make sure your site is appropriate for their content. The adsense approval process takes from 24hrs to 1 week.

Once you’ve been approved you can start adding the Adsense code for whatever banner style you choose, to your pages. You can change the colour and style of the ad’s through your control panel. Then all you do is upload your pages to the web. Google senses what content is on your page and displays appropriate adverts from their advertisers.

Should you find that a direct competitor is being advertised on your site you can block their Adsense adverts through your control panel.

Play around with different placements of the adverts and different colour schemes to see what gives the best click-thru rates. The more traffic you’ve got, the more chance of gaining those clicks, so make sure your site is optimised and submitted to the search engines.

Once your account is over $100USD at the end of a month, a cheque is generated 30 days later and sent to you.

If you live in the UK, ask your bank how to lodge your Adsense cheque. Most banks make a charge of £5-10GBP. If you’re making plenty of money from click-thrus though, this wont bother you much. Depending on the deposit method of the Adsense cheque into your UK account, it could take a couple of days to 6 weeks to credit your account. Ask your bank for the quickest method.

UPDATE: Adsense now send cheques in GBP so you can deposit them straight into your UK bank. They also now offer a EFT - electronic funds transfer to cut out the post delays.