There is nothing more rewarding than receiving the check of hard earned money. You must have seen thousands upon thousands of online testimonies of how they 'got rich' from Google Adsense and how they make thousands per week. Some of these stories are not entirely false.
The main secret behind making money from Google Adwords/Adsense program is content. There is no shortcut. Content is the first step behind any successful money making website. Of course, there is SEO-ing, but content is what drives the potential customers to your site. How much you are willing to invest will determine how much you will make per month, but it is possible to make money without spending a dime.
First of all, you will need a website. Assuming your content will be purely textual (since Google spiders crawl on text/keywords), you may either get a domain and hosting or choose to post to a blog, or you could sign up for free ad-supported website. It is recommended that if you plan on making money from your website, you ought to get a website with your own domain name, after all, ad supported hosting defeats the purpose of your money making; plus, you want your website to appear as professional and less congested as possible.
Now that you have a website, the next step is getting content for your site, but we'll get to that at the end of this article.
Now that you have a domain name and a niche, you will have to sign up for the Google Adwords Program. Note that Google Adwords enables you to get paid for advertising and Google Adsense is when you will have to pay for advertising.
Now that you have your domain with efficient hosting, and your Adwords account, you will need to build your site. If you are already a site-creating guru, then you are a step ahead. If not, creating your content site is not purely throwing out HTML pages. Sooner or later, content is going to keep growing and you may either get an efficient content manager or get hired help.
Traffic makes the difference between you making money or you not getting a dime. In order to get traffic, you can either optimize your website or get traffic by spamming. Now, remember that spamming will not get you repeat visitors, and will give your business a very bad reputation, plus, spamming may cost your website not to be listed on search engines, and Google has the right, under the 'Terms and Conditions' to revoke your Adwords account. You definitely do not want to start from scratch.
Traffic can come by word of mouth and efficient SEO-ing. SEO is an enormously broad topic that ranges from content, link popularity, link exchanges, keywords, web description, etc., to website rankings and so on. In order to remain on the top of your niche, you will need to always want your customers coming back. In order to keep that traffic flowing, you will need to keep content coming fresh and keeping your site constantly optimized and up to date. You will need to be aware of most common spider crawling techniques and use it to your advantage.
Another most common made mistake in getting website content free and cheap is to copy other websites or repeat the same information (if you have more than one money-making site). This is a bad move! Search engines will see this duplicate content as spam and remove it from searched results. Also, if you copy and paste content that is not yours and/or of public domain you will be infringing copyright. Copyright infringement is a crime.
As far as content goes, you can hire help to write articles or you can conveniently buy articles in bulk. Bulk articles are normally distributed by renowned companies and usually are more cost-efficient. Bulk content is also good if you are thinking of expanding your site. A renowned company that can help you with content and marketing strategies is the Myrdhinn's Marketing Madness. There are thousands of articles in different niches and since it's from a trustworthy company, you can always return for new quality content.
Remember that signing up for Google Adwords is free. If your website gets rejected at first, don't worry. Just build your site and re-apply. As long as your website is legitimate and is not an 'about-me' site, you are more than likely to get approved. Plus, having an Adwords account opens you to the Google community and you can increase your PageRank dramatically.
Good luck on your first check!