There are many tips on ways to make money of your website online. Websites are not limited to personal blogs, information websites or e-commerce websites but could be about literally anything. If you are planning to build a website for just online presence purpose (i.e. promoting your business), then most likely you goal is to gain more clients or customers and careless about promoting third-party products and/or services.
The question remains, how to turn your website to a money generating machine?
Unless you are selling products or services, the only other way to generate revenue of a website is through advertisements. However, before considering the idea of making money of online ads, your website must be getting high traffic, else you are out of luck but it is not the end of the world!
You still can run InfoLinks or Google Adsense on a low traffic website but do not quit your day time job yet. It takes time, dedication, hard work and patience to boost traffic to a website.
If you do not already own a website, you should check should I start my website article first before purchasing domain name and a hosting service package.
There are many webmaster tools that can be utilized to monitor website traffic and provide real-time statistics and analytic information to website owners, Google Analytics is one of those great tools – best of all, it is free. Understanding how your website performs among the millions of websites out there should help you make an informed decision on what advertisement method(s) is more suitable for you.
Before looking into available advertisements networks, you should focus more on the contents of your website. Having unique contents, with time, will bring more traffic to your website.
There are many different advertising methods out there. However, the most common ads programs, especially for new and low traffic sites are:
- Cost-Per-Click (CPC) – This type of advertising works by displaying ads on designated locations of your website, and when a visitor clicks on one of the displayed ads, your website generates money. Google Adsense and InfoLinks are great examples of advertising networks that use this method. However, there are many other ads networks, that pay a lot more, but sadly, many websites do not meet minimum monthly page-views required to qualify.
- Affiliate marketing – as the name implies, is an affiliate program that is usually easy to join yet offers generous revenue to you since you are directly working with affiliates. It works by placing a link on your website of specific service your affiliate offers, and when visitors click and sign up for a service, you make as much as 50% of the cost of service your visitors paid. An example of this advertisement method is recommending a gym membership, a magazine subscription or high speed Internet service. However, unless your website contents are related to the service(s) you recommend, most likely you won’t generate any revenue.
- Fixed fee ads: Considering you have fair amount of traffic to your website, you could offer advertising banners on different locations of your website at a flat fee. For example, $50/a month for the banner, regardless on how many impressions. This method attracts advertisers with a set budget. However, unless you have high traffic, this method is not recommended.
There are other advertising programs but most low traffic websites do not meet the minimum requirements for entry but their return is a lot higher than CPC.
