The cornerstone of Internet marketing for most non-ecommerce websites is pay-per-click advertising like the Google Adsense ads appearing at the top and bottom of this page. There are many such programs available on the net. Most are offered by the major internet companies like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Some individual companies also offer pay-per-click programs.
These ads are familiar to most internet surfers. They are available in various shapes and sizes to fit most situations. Most of these ads will have a contextual basis. The ad server checks the page and tries to serve ads that are relavent to the content. Therefore, it is important to have good clear content on the page and to make use of key words that represent that content. The less well written content that is on the page the less likely that the ads served will be relavent to the content on the page. Relavent ads are much more likely to be clicked by your visitors than ads that have little to do with the reason they came to the page in the first place.
Placement of the ads can make a big difference it the number of clicks that you get. There are guide lines as to what works best generally, but what works best on one site may not work as well on another. You should experiment with the layout of your pages. In addition, if you have several page layouts for different parts on your site, what works best with one layout may not work best with another layout. There will probably be a way for you to track which ad units are performing best for you. You will need to use this tracking to optomize the presentation of ads on your pages.
With most of these programs the amount of the payment per click will vary. Most advertizing on the internet is sold via bids on key words. The amount that is paid depends on the amount that is bid for the key word. Many of the clicks will only be worth a penney or a few cents. Therefore you need a lot of clicks to make much money. In order to have a lot of clicks you need a lot of traffic, a lot of people need to see the ads so that a few people click on something that catches their eye. Of course there are many ways to get traffic, but those will be discussed in another article.
With all of the pay-per-click programs, and most other programs, the site owner can not click on the ads on his site. There are also rules about using automated means to click on ads. You may not tell your visitors to click on ads on your pages. These types of actions can get you barred from the program. Most of the terms of service agreements that I have read include forfiting any balance that you may have accumulated. Fraud is a serious problem and the service providers have means set in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening.