Ways to Make Money from your Website

Websites are one of the top ways to make money online, and tthere are many ways to make money with your website. Do you want to monetize your Website? Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their Websites. If you think commercializing your Website is evil, immoral, unethical, uncool, lame, greedy, obnoxious, or anything along those lines, then don’t commercialize it. But also remember that if your website provides quality information it is just like any magazine or newspaper. Generating income from your Website is very challenging in today’s environment compared with several years ago. You should feel good to earn income from your Website — you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed. If your website provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it.

Can you make a decent income online?

Yes, absolutely. At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for an individual working full-time from home. If you have a day job, it will take longer to generate a livable income, but it can still be done part-time if you’re willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it. I’ve always done it full-time.

How should you choose an affiliate program? My suggestion is not to choose a program according to the payment scheme, but rather according to the kind of people who are likely to visit your website. For example, if you are targeting parents on your site, links to affiliates with educational software, books and the like may generate more revenue than banners that link to web hosting companies. The most important rule of choosing an affiliate program is to know your target audience. Affiliate systems allow you to run ads for other businesses and make money when people click on the ads. Content websites typically earn money through one of four ways: Commission/Affiliate ads, selling text links, selling your own ads, and pay for click search engine content.

Most news websites earn the bulk of their money through ppc advertising networks. Google, Yahoo, and Miscosoft search engines all offer these services. Ad networks can handle the sale and display of ads on your site. All you need do is drop a few lines of code into your Web pages where you want the ads to appear. The most popular ad network for independent publishers is Google's AdSense program. AdSense is a "pay per click" program, where you earn money each time one of your readers clicks on a Google-served ad. Since you earn money on clicks, rather than completed sales, PPC ad networks can provide a more reliable source of income for sites whose readers are not looking to make a purchase right away. Other notable PPC ad networks include the Yahoo! Publisher Network and Ad Voyager.

The following are the Various way to earn money.

PPC Advertising Networks
Google AdSense is the most popular option under this category, but there are also others. Basically you need to sign up with the network and paste some code snippets on your website. The network will then serve contextual ads (either text or images) relevant to your website, and you will earn a certain amount of money for every click. The profitability of PPC advertising depends on the general traffic levels of the website and, most importantly, on the click-through rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC). The CTR depends on the design of the website. Ads placed abode the fold or blended with content, for instance, tend to get higher CTRs. The CPC, on the other hand, depends on the nice of the website. Mortgages, financial products and college education

Direct Banner Advertising
Selling your own advertising space is one of the most lucrative monetization methods. First and foremos it enables you to cut out the middleman commissions and to determine your own rates. The downside of direct banner advertising is that you need to have a big audience to get qualified advertisers, and you will need to spend time managing the sales process, the banners and the payments.

Text Link Ads
After Google declared that sites selling text links without the nofollow tag would be penalized, this monetization method became less popular. Many website owners are still using text links to monetize their sites, though, some using the nofollow tag and some not. The advantage of this method is that it is not intrusive. One can sell text links directly through his website or use specialized networks like Text-Link-Ads and Text-Link-Brokers to automate the process. The major search engines determine a websites rank and placement based on how many other sites link to them. So, webmasters buy links to their website to help boost their search engine rankings.

Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a very popular practice on the Internet. Under this system you have a merchant that is willing to let other people (the affiliates) sell directly or indirectly its products and services, in exchange for a commission. Sometimes this type of advertising is also called CPA (cost per action) or CPL (cost per lead) based. Affiliates can send potential customers to the merchant using several tools, from banners to text links and product reviews. Commission Junction, cj.com, is one of the most popular Affiliate networks.

Monetization Widgets
The latest trend on the web are widgets that let you monetize your website. Examples include Widgetbucks and SmartLinks. Some of these services operate under a PPC scheme, others behave like text link ads, others yet leverage affiliate links. Their main differentiator, however, is the fact that they work as web widgets, making it easier for the user to plug and play the service on its website.


Sponsored Reviews
PayPerPost pioneered this model, with much controversy in the beginning (related to the fact that they did not require disclosure on paid posts). Soon other companies followed, most notably Sponsored Reviews and ReviewMe, refining the process and expanding the paid blogging model. Joining one of these sponsored reviews marketplaces will give you the opportunity to write sponsored posts on a wide range of topics.

RSS Feed Ads
With the quick adoption of the RSS technology by millions of Internet users, website owners are starting to find ways to monetize this new content distribution channel. Feedburner already has its own publisher network, and you can sign-up to start displaying CPM based advertising on your feed footer. Bidvertiser recently introduced a RSS feed ad option as well, with a PPC scheme.

Sponsors for Single Columns or Events
If you website has specific columns or events (e.g., a weekly podcast, an interview series, a monthly survey, a special project) you could find companies to sponsor them individually. This method increases the monetization options for website owner, while giving advertisers the possibility to target a more specific audience and with a reduced commitment.

Premium Content
Some websites and blogs give away part of their content for free, and charge for access to the premium content and exclusive tools. They have a very popular blog that gives advice and information on wide range of SEO related topics. On top of that visitors can decide to become premium members

Private Forums
While the Internet is populated with free forums, there is also the possibility to create a private one where members need to pay a single or recurring fee to join. There are many possibilities to create a private and profitable forum, you just need to find an appealing angle that will make it worth for the members.

Job Boards
All the popular blogs are trying to leverage job boards to make some extra income. Needless to say that in order to create an active and profitable job board you need first to have a blog focused on a specific niche, and a decent amount traffic. The advantage of this method is that it is passive. Once you have the structure in place, the job listings will come naturally, and you can charge anywhere from $10 up to $100 for each.

Marketplaces
Depending on your niche, a market place that allows your visitors to buy, sell and trade products could work well. Over the time you could start charging a small fee for new product listings. The problem with this method is that there is no standard software on the web, so you would need to hire a coder to get a marketplace integrated into your website.

Paid Surveys and Polls
There are services that will pay you money to run a small survey or poll on your website. Basically, you need to sign up with them, and select the kind of polls that you want to run your site. Most of these services operate under a CPM model.

Selling or Renting Internal Pages
These websites sell for a single fee or rent for a recurring fee internal pages on their domain. Usually they have either high Pagerak or high traffic, so that people purchasing a page will be able to benefit in some way. Implementing this method on a small blog would be difficult, but the concept is interesting and could be explored further.

Donations
Placing a “Donate” link or button on a website can be an efficient way to earn money, especially if your blog is on a niche where readers learn and gain value from your content. Personal development and productivity blogs, for instance, tend to perform well with donation based systems.

In-text Adverting
In-text adverting networks will place sponsored links inside your text. These links come with a double underline to differentiate them from normal links, and once the user rolls the mouse over the link the advertising will pop. Should the user click on it the site owner will make some money. Some people make good money with this method, but others refrain from using it due to its intrusiveness. It is also interesting to note that very few mainstream websites have experimented with in-text advertising.

Pop-ups and Pop-unders
Pop-ups are a common yet annoying form of advertising on the Internet. If you are just trying to make as much money as possible from your website, you could experiment with them. If you are trying to grow the traffic and generate loyal visitors, however, you probably should stay away from them. Just consider the hundreds of pop-up blockers out there: there is a reason why they are so popular.

Audio Ads
Also called PPP (Pay Per Play), this advertising method was introduce by Net Audio Ads. the concept is pretty simple: play a small advertising audio (usually 5 seconds) every time a visitor enters into your website. The user should not be able to stop it, creating a 100% conversion rate based on unique visitors.

Selling the Website
Selling your website could be your last resource, but it has the potential to generate a big sum of money in a short period of time. Marketplaces on online forums like DigitalPoint and Sitepoint are always active with website buyers and sellers. Keep in mind that they use parameters to determine the value of a website, such as the monthly revenue.

Selling Templates or WordPress Themes
As more and more people decide to get an online presence, website templates and WordPress themes become hotter and hotter. On this segment you have mainstream websites like TemplateMonster, as well as individual designers who decide to promote and sell their work independently.

Offering Consulting and Related Services
Depending on your niche, you could make money by offering consulting and related services. If you are also the author of your blog, the articles and information that you will share will build your profile and possibly certify your expertise on that niche, making it easier to gain customers.

Creating an Email List or Newsletter
Email lists and newsletters represent one of the most powerful marketing and money making tools on the Internet. They offer incredible conversion rates, and the possibility to call people to action in a very efficient way. Creating a big list is a difficult task though, so if you have a popular website you could leverage it to increase the number of subscribers on your list.

Automated Context-Sensitive Advertising
One of the latest trends in website sponsorship is to sign up with an advertising network like Google AdSense The advertising network automatically checks your web page and determines the most relevant advertisement for the page. As a result, without much additional effort from you, you get advertisements targeted at the interests of your visitors. As mentioned earlier, targeted ads tend to result in better performance and returns

Selling Banner Ads
Advertising revenue is one of the most effortless ways to earn money from your site. You merely have to put the banner there and wait for the money to roll in. (Well, okay, not quite. You will still need to have some visitors first before you can make anything.)


How to build traffic for your Websites,
Now if traffic is so crucial, how do you build it up to significant levels if you’re starting from rock bottom? Why is traffic so important? Because for most methods of online income generation, your income is a function of traffic. If you double your traffic, you’ll probably double your income (assuming your visitor demographics remain fairly consistent). You can mess almost everything else up, but if you can generate serious traffic, it’s really hard to fail. With sufficient traffic the realistic worst case is that you’ll eventually be able to monetize your web site via trial and error (as long as you keep those visitors coming). If you can’t build traffic, it is going to be very difficult to succeed. Traffic is the primary fuel of online income generation. More visitors means more ad clicks, more product sales, more affiliate sales, more donations, more consulting leads, and more of whatever else that generates income for you. And it also means you’re helping more and more people.

With respect to traffic, you should know that in many respects, the rich do get richer. High traffic leads to even more traffic-building opportunities that just aren’t accessible for low-traffic sites. If you’re intelligent and web savvy, you should also be able to eventually build a high-traffic web site. And you’ll be able to leverage that traffic to build even more traffic.


In the End I don’t think one will get very far if money is his motivation for website. You have to be driven by something much deeper. Money is just frosting. It’s the cake underneath that matters most.

About HostChart.com
HostChart, a Web Hosting Company Resource, is a leading web hosting directory website that has been in business for over 5 years. They provide numerous web hosting articles and tutorials as well as news, interviews, and reviews. You can use their extensive set of tools to research and evaluate your current or future web hosts. HostChart is a Property of Advantage1 Web Services, which also operates ResellerConnection.com, a Reseller Web Hosting Resource, HostingKnowledge.net, and FoundHost.com, a Budget Hosting Resource