Make Money Online
Making Money from Your Website
There is a number of ways to make money from your website, blog or other online content.
- Sell a product or service.
- Advertise a product or service
- Carry Adverts such as Google AdSense or similar where you get paid for each valid clicks.
Sell a Product or Service
I do not know accurate figures for the success/failure rate for online businesses, it is just like any other business it can succeed or fail, and with failure there is a cost. So before you invest in any online venture you need a business plan, you need to have carried out marketing (even if this is discussing your ideas with friends) and you will need money to start the business. Many people have successfully started an online business and one great advantage of it being a web based business is that you can often keep your full-time job and do the work in the evenings and weekends. This provides you will a real world income while you develop your online business.
A Very Important Message
One very important message – do not buy a website that promises to make you money, they are usually rubbish and the only person that will make money from the website is the person selling it to you. They will often promise you an easy way to make money, that you will make money while you sleep and other such nonsense – they play on your dreams and aspirations’ to make a little (or a lot) of money and it will come to nothing.
This is not to say you should not pay someone or a company to create a website for you – you will often need technical advice, design skills and knowledge that most people do not have when starting a business online. Just be sure that it is YOUR idea that is being developed and not some OFF THE SHELF spam website that will never do anything for anyone, especially you.
To make money online involves having a good idea, the willingness to do hard work and the technical skills in putting it together. What is the old saying “20 percent inspiration 80 percent perspiration” – I probably got that wrong however you get the idea, it takes ideas and hard work along with a little luck to make money online – selling things.
Advertise a Product or Service
There is billions spent every year online and most high street retailers have their own online shops. One way to make money with your website or blog is to advertise websites that sell products of interest to your visitors / readers. It is considered best to target the advertising you carry with the interests of the people who visit your site and this is where developing small niche sites can help you make money. A niche site is often on a topic, or even one area of a topic. What do I mean? Well if you are enthusiastic and knowledgeable about a subject then you will know that of this subject or hobby there is many different areas of interest. So if you love knitting for example then there is people who are mad keen to know more about and see examples of knitted hats. By developing a website / blog on this one aspect of your hobby you are more likely to rank (position well) in search engines for that micro topic or niche. Get the idea!
The main thing to remember is the old adage – content and visitors first, adverts second. It is easy to get desperate and splatter adverts all over your page in the hope someone will click and buy something; it does tend to make the website look a bit spammy. It is better to build up a regular group of visitors who will come back to read your latest ideas and content – who will then be interested in supporting your website / blog by buying through it. Less is more, sometimes.
Advertising Summary
- Create niche content (ideally websites on a specialist topic) that provides new ideas, or a fresh way of looking at something. Give people things for free – it can be pictures of what you have made, places you have visited for example. The idea is content is king, definitely.
- Add content related adverts to your site / pages. If your site is about Travel then add adverts on this, ideally deep linking to specific pages related to your web page content.
- Use online marketing companies such as Tradedoubler, Commission Junction for adverts. There are dozens of legitimate marketing companies, use ones that are successful. Often large commercial websites will have their own affiliate programmes and these are ideal to join – just look at the bottom of their main page and often if they have an advertising programme they will provide details of their associate / affiliate programmes.
Pay Per Click Advertising
Pay per click advertising is just that, you get paid for every legitimate click someone makes while visiting your website. It is very important to remember NEVER click these adverts on your own website, NEVER encourage others to click them, and DON’T get friends to do you a “favour” and click on your adverts. If you do you will quickly find that your account is closed and at worse you will end up in court being sued for fraud.
A number of Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising programmes exist and the most common one is Google AdSense. Google provides advertisers with the way of putting their adverts onto your website – through placement adverts – blocks of adverts on your page, or in search results when you add a search engine feature to your site.
Google has two ways of delivering adverts to your site, one is by analysing your sites content and then delivering adverts based on these areas of interest. Secondly by recording the web browsing behaviour of your website visitors and delivering content based on their browsing history. You can switch off this for your adverts. I have it switched off as it is a little too much like “Big Brother” spying to me. Google AdSense is still one of the most successful advertising programmes and it is one you should consider.
Yahoo and MSN both have their own advertising programmes and if you are North America based then both of them may be of use to you. Just remember you are only allowed to display ONE advertising programme on a page that delivers text / image based adverts (Pay Per Click).
Positioning is everything
Google has a Heat Map where they recommend positioning of their AdSense adverts, they tend to be above the fold or where people can immediately see them without scrolling down the page. Probably the most effective layout for adverts such as this is in the middle of the page at the top, just below the page heading. A large 300×250 text / image advert is used a lot by publishers to show flash based adverts as well as text based adverts. Another popular sizes include 160×600 (right/left hand column), 336×280 and 728×90 leader board (across the top of the page). Some people like using text links – especially at the top of the page under a menu block.
With Google AdSense you can give each advert a channel so that you can see what the best performing adverts are.
Sign up pages for Google AdSense – https://www.google.com/adsense
To learn how to add Create your first AdSense advert
