Cautionary Notes About Make Money Online

Never Click Your Own Google Ads
One of the things you must always remember is never click your own Google ads, even if it is to find out whether the site linked to is acceptable for your website's audience. Since (at this time) Google pays AdSense for Content ads according to the number of clicks, clicking your own ads is regarded as fraud, and will, at the very least, get you kicked out of the AdSense program.
Although Google doesn't say this, if you are showing off your blog or website to your family members, make sure they do not click any of your advertisements either. This is the case even if they are genuinely interested in the products advertised. They can always look for it by name in a search engine later if they wish, but for anyone living in your own household, any Google advert on your site is strictly off limits. The reason for this is that clicks from your household will look exactly like clicks from you.


Don't Expect a Fortune Unless You Have Traffic
Those who have read my article on How to Increase Your Website Revenue from Affiliate Programs will probably know that if you are just starting out with your site, you probably won't be able to make a fortune from your ads unless you have enough people visiting your website. This only comes after you have done some serious website promotion or advertising.

Be realistic: remember that even if someone clicks your ads, you may just get a cent or two from that click, assuming that Google doesn't discount that click for some reason. In addition, only a very miniscule percentage of your visitors will actually click ads. Put those factors together and you can roughly guess how much you are going to make if you only have a few visitors per day.
If you can, try not to put Google AdSense ads or, in fact, any advertisements at all, if you are trying to sell a product or service on your website. There are a couple of reasons for this:
You may be inadvertantly advertising for your competitors. You cannot predict what sort of ads are going to pop up in the AdSense code for your site. What you see when you load your site may not necessarily be what your visitors see. If a competitor places an ad that Google finds relevant for your page (and it surely will, if Google's context-sensitive engine works correctly), then their ad will appear on your page. You may thus lose sales to that competitor as a result of the ads.
Ads distract your visitors from the real focus of your site. You want your users to read your sales copy, and not be clicking on links to go to some other site even if those links do not lead to your competitors.