Let's say you have set up a web site and put Google Adsense on your site, after following previous guides in this magazine. And let's also say you noticed that the ad revenue coming in from your site is disappointingly low, perhaps less and a dollar a day. And finally, let's say that this is most definitely not what you expected when you started your site, and not what all the testimonials online said about Google Adsense. Where are your giant Google novelty checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars

It just doesn't come all at once. There's a third ingredient that you need besides an amazing web page and an intimate relationship with an ad network. You need visitors. Visitors are the only difference between earning $0.25 a month and $25,000 a month in ad revenue.

How do you get visitors Well, if you've got good content, you need to let people know about it. The best and almost only way to actually do this on the Internet right now is through Google. Theoretically, if you just let your web site sit around long enough, a Google spider bot will eventually find it and start crawling around indexing things. If you would like to speed up the process, you can create an account with Google Webmaster Tools. You can register your site with Google and submit a site map to let the nice friendly Google spiders know exactly where all the content is located. You can even get feedback reports telling you when and how often the Google bots have searched and indexed your site.

If you're still too impatient to wait for your indexed web page to gain reputation over the years as a solid source of information on whatever your subject matter is, you can once again speed up the process by getting other web sites to link to yours on a particular topic. Internet search sites like Google place great stock in what other web sites think of yours. This means that a link saying “great info on car parts” that points back to your site goes a long way to establishing your web site as a good resource for car parts in the eyes of Google. Call up or email your online friends and see if they can help you out with a link and a name-drop. You will be in their debt forever. Also, you can start to pester other popular news sites or blogs with emails asking them to give your content some consideration or linkage. They might actually do it.

An extreme version of this idea is to make a formal agreement with a web site that is already popular to share content and drive traffic to each other's sites. An agreement like this can be a godsend to a web site that is just starting out, and by helping your web site gain reputation, the more popular web site is creating a valuable ally that can in turn help them gain even more popularity.

Also, a little online advertising of your own can really help your new site to get traffic. You can join those ranks of intrepid Google AdWords advertisers who already pepper your own site with ads by signing up for a new account and going through the process of building a few ad blocks, selecting keywords, and setting the whole contraption loose on an unsuspecting public. However, since Google AdWords is such an organic system it requires constant oversight from you. This is ideally two or three hours a day maintenance, changing ineffective keywords for effective ones and tweaking the bids of your effective keywords. Make sure that's something you want to do.

So you can't make millions of dollars just by having a web site, you still have to spend 8 to 10 hours a day advertising it. There's still no such thing as a free lunch, but the effect of even a little work on the internet can have great returns.