Making Money - Ways to Earn Money From Your Website

A Website can have serious opportunities for earning money. This may very well be the reason behind building a Web site. Regardless, even if you didn't built you website for making money, you can still use this opportunity to earn some thing and pay the Hosting or other bills.

Lets see some of the opportunities of making money from your website.

How Much Money Can I Earn?

Earning online this way is not a get-quick-rich scheme. The earning potential your website can have depends upon your traffic. Don't expect to get rich. You may start slow but with patience and effort you can make decent money on the internet.

How Can I Make Money From My Website?

There are a number of ways you can use to make money from your website. Lets explore them one by one.

By Selling Things on Your Website

If your website has visitors you can use it to sell your own things. The things you can sell depend on your choice. You can sell physical things or e-goods.

Selling e-goods is easy because anything which is in digital electronic format can be transferred to any part of the world easily by internet. E-goods can include items like,

Website Templates.
Softwares.
E-books. etc

Selling physical things require more setup as actual shipping of items is needed, which has additional costs. To store the items you are selling you might need a warehouse as well.

To sell things of any kind, you will have to adopt a payment method on your website. Please see accepting payments for information on accepting payments.

Open an Online Store

You can open an online store to earn money. In this way your website will be an e-commerce website and selling things will be its main idea or purpose.

The difference between opening and online store and the discussion under "By selling things on your website" is that by selling things i meant that you can use your website's traffic to sell some things of you own. Here your traffic generation source is not selling things but other content of your site. But keep this in mind that when you open an online store, your main goal is to sell things which will be the only traffic source of your website.

Displaying Ads

This is the most common method of earning, website owners use today. You have seen advertisement in newspapers and how they charge the advertiser to show their ads. Same thing is done with websites, but online advertising have different revenue models for payment. They generally are,

Revenue Models/Payment Schemes

CPC (Cost Per Click)
This method of advertising means that a person displaying ads will earn when some one clicks an ad on the website.
CPM (Cost Per Impression)
This method of advertising means that a person displaying ads will earn just for displaying ads. The rates are generally determined per 1000 impressions, means that an amount will be paid when some one displays the ad 1000 times.
CPA (Cost Per Action)
This method of advertising means that person displaying ads will only be paid if some clicks the ad and then end up buying the product advertised.

Lets see the kinds of ads you can accept for your website.

Sell an Ad Space or Banner on Your Website

This type of advertisement belongs to the model of CPM and is similar to the advertisement in newspapers. You reserve a space on your web pages and rent it to your advertiser for a fee which is up to you. Your advertiser will pay you as long as you are displaying their ad on your site. Mostly, people set different ad rates for different pages of their websites with home page usually having the highest fee.

Use Google Adsense on Your Website

Adsense is Google's advertising program and is very popular among website owners. To display adsense ads on your website, a small area of your website in taken and then adsense ads are shown in this area (You can select the size and location of this ad area). Whenever someone loads a page of your website, Google sends targeted ads to that page according to the content of that web page.

You can register your website for free with Google adsense after you have completed it as under-construction websites will be rejected. There are certain requirement like how many pages your website should have to be accepted. I can't say exactly how much pages you should have but i have seen smaller sites been accepted into the program. You can see the complete Adsense Program Policies on Google site. Just make sure you have enough visitors to earn some thing good.

Google usually pays via CPC (Cost Per Click) model. Which means that you will earn a commission when some one clicks the adsense ads appearing on your website. The commission is different for different ads. Some ads will earn you more than others and some less.

Use Adsense Supported Search on Your Website

You can set up Google's Custom Search engine on your web site to provide site wise search facility to your visitors. The good thing is that if you have an adsense account, you can link this account to your search engine to earn some money by the ads that accompany search results. If some one searches your site and then click on the ads shown, you are given a commission. To set up Google's custom search see Setup Google's Custom Search on Your Website .

This gives you a double advantage. First you get a search engine for you site for free and second you get to earn something by using it.

Become an Affiliate

Affiliates are people who sell products of other companies to people and in reward for the sale they make, they are given commissions. You can sell things in this way according to your content.

For example, your content is about furniture and you are an affiliate of a furniture seller. You recommend that seller in your content, when people buy from the recommended seller of yours, you are paid a commission. Or you can promote an ebook or a software or other online services and perhaps much more. The mode of advertising in affiliate marketing is CPA (Cost Per Action).

When you register with a marketing network to become an affiliate they give you a unique link which you have to put in the links on your website. For you to get paid one must follow this link and make a purchase.

There are many marketing networks which you can join to become an affiliate. Note that most will only let you join if you have a website. You can join any of the following advertising networks for free,

Don't Make Thin Affiliate Sites

You might have seen single page sites on the Internet just trying to sell things and filled with affiliate links. These sites are sometimes called thin affiliates site. People only visit websites with content and information. Search engines, now do not index these kind of sites in their search results too. So, don't make a web page just to put lots of affiliate links in it, as this won't work.

Bring Visitors to Your Site.

This is the back bone of advertising. Ads only mean something when there are people there to see them. To bring visitors to your site you must provide them with good content, the information they want to see.

Please see, Writing Content for help on content writing. If you are making a new website see Getting visitors for bringing visitors to a new site.

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