From almost the time the Internet became mainstream back in the 1990’s many people have tried to use it to make money. Back then, the proposition of designing and then hosting a website was very expensive, and this was primarily the domain of universities and large corporations. These days, with a little knowledge of HTML and Photoshop, anyone can design a website and have it online for less money than it takes to take the family out to dinner. One thing has not changed in all these years, though, and that is the desire to make money on the Internet. And one company, Google, has made it easy for the average Joe to earn ad revenue on his very own website.

Through Google’s AdWords program, anyone can sign up for an account and in minutes place contextual ads on a website to start earning revenue. Google’s servers scan the site looking for relevant keywords, and serve ads based upon the content of each page on which the ads are placed. Payouts range from pennies per click to more than a dollar, and can add up in a hurry for a site that is extremely popular.

The keyword though, is “popular.” The vast majority of web pages will never get the thousands of hits per day needed in order for the AdWords revenue to amount to anything. Some people, though, have found a way to generate traffic through the use of Google’s AdWords program itself.

Dubbed “AdWords Arbitrage,” this system involves using cheap Google ads on other sites to drive people to one’s own site, where hopefully they will in turn click on more expensive ads located on the landing page. The money is made in the difference between the costs of the two ads. Website owners can control these costs to some extent by bidding very low for the ads they place, and then developing web pages about subjects that are likely to attract expensive ads from Google’s AdSense system.

If successful, this system can earn a webmaster a lot of money, but it is not without its risks. For one thing, there is no guarantee that a person will click on an ad once he or she lands on the page. In fact, a person is less likely to click on an ad once they’ve already clicked on a previous ad. This can be controlled somewhat by only placing ads on the landing page, with no other links. Of course, the user could click the browser’s “Back” button, type a URL into the browser’s address bar, or simply close the browser window. If any of these three things happen, the website owner is out the cost of the ad without generating any revenue in turn.

So, AdWords Arbitrage can be a lucrative system for making money on the Internet if one can find the right combination of ads and website content to make it work. Through placing cheap ads to draw traffic that will hopefully click on expensive revenue-drawing ads, one can hopefully sit back and watch the profits roll in.