Out of all the programs that I have tried there is one program that has consistently earned me a small but steady (and increasing) amount of money and that is Google AdSense. Once you have a site that is earning more than its hosting fees you can simply create another one and another one. Before you know it you have a number of sites earning money and you can then experiment with Ad placement as well as the look and different types of adverts and see what converts the best for you.

Less is sometimes more
If you fill your entire site up with Google AdSense then you are probably going to far. You need to leave some room for content - my largest earning site has one skyscraper on the left and a small link block on the right. The sidebar skyscraper has the best conversion on that site however didn't do well at all on this blog. So different sites have different results- it doesn't really matter what anyone says you need to experiment. I suggest you create channels for the ad units, try a placement for a month and check your results. Then try something else for the next month - if its better great keep it. If not revert back to the previous or try something else again.

Potential Exponential Increase
The great thing about Google AdSense is that by increasing your traffic you can normally increase your earnings in a similar manner. Think about what you earn now and multiply it by 10 - certainly achievable and what about if you multiply that by 10. Before you know it as long as you can continue to increase your traffic you are going to be giving yourself constant pay rises - something no employer is going to do for you!

Passive?
Is Google AdSense really passive? Well probably not as you do need to work away at building and maintaining the traffic to your site however if you have a website that grows by itself (e.g a popular forum or similar) then Google AdSense could potentially grow without any effort from yourself. It can earn you money while you sleep though which is a great start.

Money in the Bank
At today's approximate US interest rates I worked out how much money in the bank it would take to earn as much as a scale of monthly Google AdSense amounts. Please refer to the table below.

Its interesting to see that to make $50 per month with money in the bank would take savings of 12000 dollars if we were looking at a 5% interest rate. To make $80 per month would take a whopping $20000! Its probably a lot easier to make a couple of websites and fill them with good content than it is to save twenty grand, however I will leave that up to you to decide for yourself.

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