So you have a website that has been a white elephant up to now, zero traffic and no sales and you are wondering how everyone else seems to be able to make money excepting you?

Relax, there is way that you too can make money online even if you are not selling anything. If you don't already have Adsense ads on your site, head over there right now and go and apply for it! If you don't know what Adsense is, what planet have you been on for the last three years?

It is not as difficult to get your site Adsense approved as you may think. Here are some tips help you get your site approved:

1. Your site must at least have some valuable content and not just be a sales site.

2. It does not have to be the most beautiful site on earth but it must look presentable and not have too many images, flashing banners, pop-ups or animations.

3. It has to have at least 15-20 pages.

4. It must not be under construction

5. It must not have any broken links

If your site does not have the required 15-20 pages, you can easily find articles related to your site content from:

? http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles/
? http://www.goarticles.com
? http://www.ezinearticles.com
? http://www.ideamarketers.com
? http://www.marketing-seek.com/articles/

Just select some articles that are appropriate for your site, copy it into your site template and ftp your new articles to your server. Make sure that you link to them from somewhere on your site though!

Once you are approved for Adsense you will want to make the most out of it. The best way to make money out of it is to find the best (and highest paying!) keywords/keyword phrases related to your site and building content pages around those keywords.

Tip: If you write a really good article around your keyword you can submit your articles to any of the above places. Articles are an excellent way to get listed high on the search engines. Other people will want to use your articles at their sites and this will result in a higher page rank as well as more visitors! I wrote an article a while ago on how to add random rss content to websites. If you do a search on Google for random rss content, you will see my article at the top of the list as displayed at: http://ezinearticles.com/?How-To-Add-Random-RSS-Content-To-Your-Site&id=26228 The article posted on my own website shows up third! Magic, huh?

To find good keywords for your site, you can use this nifty little tool: http://www.set-4-success.com/tools/goodkeywords.exe

Tip: instead of trying to find just keywords, you should look for keyword phrases - that is the way most people do searches on the Internet. E.g. instead of using just "money", use "how to make money online" - you will get a whole lot of alternative search phrases that people use on a daily basis.

Once you have a good couple of keywords, I would suggest that you now try and find out how much these keywords are worth to you. One of the best ways I have found is to use my Google Adwords account to see how much people are prepared to pay to have their ads displayed in the highest position on the page. Signing up for Google Adwords will cost you $5 but I promise you it is on of the best investments you will ever make. You will be using this account mainly for researching the highest paying keywords, so it will not cost you anything more, unless of course you want to use it for advertising.

So, once you have a Google Adwords account, all you have to do is set up a mock Adwords Campaign. (You can learn more about how to do this at the actual Adwords site.) Once you have set up a campaign, all you now have to do is copy the list of keywords (you can also use the Adwords Keyword tool) and past it into the space for your keywords in the campaign you have created. Click on Save Keywords.

This will take you to a page where you have to enter how much you are prepared to pay for the keywords. Don't worry, you are not going to pay for anything, so just enter any amount here. Now click on Calculate Estimates. The next page will show you how many searches there are for your specific keyword, the average cost per click, etc. The average cost per click is basically what other people are bidding to get high listings and this is the information that you are after.

I would suggest you copy this page, and paste it into an excel spreadsheet so that you can manipulate and extract your information.

Once you have it in your spreadsheet, you can delete the columns that are unnecessary, e.g the cost a day, average position etc, but keep the columns with your keyword descriptions, average clicks per day, as well as average cost per click.

You might want to delete the rows of keywords where there are no clicks for that keyword, or where the bid is only $0.40 - these keywords will not be worth anything to you. After weeding out all the useless keywords, you now have a list of gold!

You will now be able to see what the highest paying keywords are, and of course which phrases are getting the most clicks! You should now select the keywords that are the most searched for (even if they are not the highest paying keywords!) and write content around that phrase. The reason why I don't always use the highest paying keywords is that there might be very little searches for it - and you won't make money if no one is searching for that phrase - you want to use phrases that lots of people are searching for!

Once you have written your content, upload it to your website. If you have content that is suitable for an article, submit it to the article directories as I explained earlier on.

Do this on a regular basis, keep on regularly submitting articles, keep on adding content to your site, and watch how your income steadily increases.

Now you have no excuses not to make money online!

About the Author
Joan Masterson is the owner of http://www.set-4-success.comwhich is aimed mainly at teaching women effective ways on how to make a living on the Internet. She is also the owner of http://www.womenatwork.co.za