Monetize Your Site
HOW CAN MY WEBSITE MAKE MONEY?
1. Contextual Advertising.
You can get advertisers many ways, but let me tell you first about the most popular advertising program in the world: Google Adsense.
The fantastic thing about Adsense is that you do not have to go out and look for advertisers on your own. Google, through their Adwords program, has millions of advertisements. Then, through Adsense, they have millions of publishers.
When you sign up for Adsense, you can put Google ads on your web site. these text and/or image units are contextual. This means the Google bots will read the keywords on your page and determine which ads in their inventory should appear on your site.
The advertiser has to pay only when his ad is clicked. And you earn anywhere from $.01 to tens (or even hundreds) of dollars PER CLICK when this happens.
Let’s go back to the healthy dog food website. The ads that will appear on your site would probably be the following:
1. Healthy Dog Food Recipes
2. Veterinary Services
3. How to Train Your Dog Videos
Of course Google is not the only one out there. There’s Adbrite, Text Link Ads, Yahoo Publisher’s Network. But by far, Adsense is the easiest and the best to use.
2. In-house Advertising.
You can also get your own advertisers who will pay you directly. For example, if you’re running a portal site for your community, like I do for my hometown, you can sell ads offline for the internet marketing campaigns for the different businesses there.
You determine, based on your unique visitors (the ones who enter your site) and page views (how many pages of your site your unique visitors surf) and your Search Engine Rankings, how much you want to charge for ads on your site.
The specifics of how to do this will be explained in detail much later. First we get you to build a site.
3. Affiliate Sales.
Everybody on the web has something for sale, whether it is an actual product, a service or even information. The way affiliate marketing works is:
1. You are the expert on your topic.
2. You write articles on this topic or give away relevant information for free on your site.
3. You sign up to be an affiliate (seller, reseller, booking agent) of a particular product from which you will get a commission on the sales.
4. When you write an article on your nich topic, you willinclude links to products you are promoting.
5. You make money if your reader or site visitor clicks on the link and buys the product by making a commission on the sales.
4. Direct Sales.
For example, you are a real estate developer and are selling or leasing residential or commercial property in “real” life. On the web, you create a website that features the properties on your list. If anyone buys from you, you have made a direct sale.
For example, you are a photographer and create a site that features your portfolio, your services and your rates. Someone finds your site, likes your work and hires you for their wedding. You have made a direct sale of your service.
