Webmasters who provide their visitors with information often find it difficult to monetise their websites.

Selling advertising space is not always the easiest of tasks, particularly if you don’t have the time to pro-actively pursue potential advertisers. And even then chances are you will be left with plenty of white space where ads could be.

Enter stage left Google Adsense. Sign up with Google Adsense, add some code to your webpages and Google will insert advertising - text and / or banner ads - into your web pages. The ads are specifically targeted to the content on your pages so should appeal directly to your visitors and Google splits the advertising revenue with you.

When I first came across Google Adsense I wasn’t sure if it was right for my websites. I had seen it on other websites and wasn’t convinced that it added real value to those pages. I actually thought it looked tacky, particularly on “made for Adsense” siteas that offer visitors no intrinsic value whatsoever.

So what I did was test it on a site that wasn’t making any money anyway and left it on its pages for two months.

The result was that I earned a couple of dollars (literally a couple of dollars) and thought no more about it. Most days it hadn’t generated any revenue whatsoever and any thoughts of rolling it out across my websites ended there and then.

Or at least they would have done had it not been for Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc saying his blogging empire was on target to make a million dollars in a year from Adsense revenue alone. At the time, there were 103 bloggers and nine full time employees at Weblogs Inc (it has since been bought by AOL for US$25 million), but part of my own network of websites revolves around blogs and that figure madfe me sit up and take notice.

So time to put Adsense ads on a few more sites, including maybe a few that would actually benefit both the advertisers and my visitors, and to give it a second chance.

And I’m very glad I did. It’s against the terms and conditions of the program to give out specific figures, but in both November and December of last year my websites earned just short of US$400. And we are not talking websites with major traffic either.

That got me interested enough to look at better integrating the advertising into my websites and to test different ad sizes and placement. At the same time I started work on my “one man mission” to create a business worth a million and started to lick my sites into shape, improving both the content and visitor numbers.

The result? I earned US$370 (give or take a few dollars) in January. Okay, dollars aren’t pounds, but it certainly shows the potential of Google Adsense.