Popular belief says metros are the only place to be to make money, but Deepesh Agarwal, thinks otherwise. Agarwal is the owner of a tiny cyber café in Mount Abu. Mount Abu is not a particularly affluent city—the average earning of the residents here is only about $300 (approx Rs 13,500) a year.

But Agarwal’s monthly earnings match those of white collared executives in the metros—he makes a whopping packet of about $1,500 (approx Rs 67,500) a month. How? In his spare time, Agarwal runs a free software download web site that runs ads by Google Adsense on his homepage. Google Adsense is a program that pays website owners for advertising space. When visitors click on the ads on Agarwal’s website, Google makes profit from the advertisers and in turn, pays a percentage of that profit to people like Agarwal.

But Agarwal is not alone. Hundreds of thousands of people are making similar profits just by starting blogs, forums or other informational sites and getting paid for posting ads on Google’s behalf. Take for instance Jimmy Wadhera in Chandigarh, who despite being grounded for health reasons, earns about $400 (approx Rs 18,000) a month from Adsense.

"Since its launch in 2003, the Google Adsense program has revolutionised web publishing, turning blogs and personal web sites into potentially lucrative ventures,” says Mahesh Murthy, CEO of Pinstorm, a search engine marketing firm. The service is easy to join. A blogger or a site owner has to simply fill up an online Adsense form. Google then starts scoring your content and places ads on the site just like the ones that appear next to Google searches.

The ads are contextually matched to content on the web site, so if you are running a blog on gadgets, you would have technologyrelated ads.

Anyone with a site is eligible. And there are tons of success stories from around the world—of small online entrepreneurs placing ads on their sites and watching cheques from Google trickle in.