Making Money From Your Website

Depending on what kind of website you run, there are plenty of ways of getting money from it. The one thing to watch out for though is that you don't let the efforts you're making to monetise your site outweigh the original content and put users off.

There are of course many methods to turn some of your traffic into cash, so this article is by no means a comprehensive breakdown of all the monetising options out there, but does seek to give a broad overview of the various methods you can explore.

One of the principal methods of earning money from your site is by using targeting advertising campaigns which can either be "pay-per-click" or "pay-per-view" strategies. Pay-per-click advertising tends to be the most commonly used advertising method, since only bigger websites like Yahoo!, Google and MSN generate enough traffic for pay-per-view to be of any significant value to them. With pay-per-click advertising, the advertising network usually provides a snippet of code to the webmaster to place in his webpages that will allow the adverts (usually targeted for the site's content) to be displayed.

Currently there are many different advertising networks to choose from for pay-per-click adverts, and one option, rather than choosing one, is to use multiple advertisement suppliers and rotate them either at random, or more carefully by checking which is paying more at the time. One of the most popular networks is Google Adsense, but others include AdBrite and Bidvertiser.

The amount of money paid per click by the advertising network depends entirely on what the subject of the advertisements is (topics such as Law and Web Hosting will pay more than topics like Sports Supplies etc.) as more popular subjects have more competition between advertisers and hence the ads pay more. Other things that can affect how much money you earn from advertising on your site are your "click through rate" (how often the adverts are clicked on compared to how often they are displayed) and advert positioning on your pages. For that reason there are a lot of sites on the internet dedicated to tweaking your adverts to maximise the revenue gained from them.

Enough about advertising though! What else can you do to generate some money from your site? Well, if it's relevant to your website you can sell any downloadable items such as artwork, music and eBooks through sites such as Payloadz, or if your site is of public interest and you don't have anything to sell, why not consider adding a "donate to us" button to your site using an online payment site such as PayPal.

One of the other main ways to make money from your site is by joining an affiliate scheme with sites such as Amazon, where you get a percentage of any sales made through their site when the user gets there from yours. Affiliate schemes do not always mean the user has to buy something, there are plenty out there who will happily pay you for users doing other things that don't involve spending money such as sign-ups etc.

The bottom line then is that there are plenty of ways of monetising your website out there, it's just a case of deciding what you want, particularly what's relevant to your website, and implementing it without scaring off your site visitors and seeing a decline in traffic to your site.