Welcome, I want to share some of the methods on how you can make money off of a website, I have tried most of them myself, and experienced at least some succes in PPC and affiliate marketing.
Pay-Per-Click ads
This one is common, as this is the advertising model from Adsense and Infolinks. You will earn a certain amount when somebody clicks on an ad from your website or web 2,0 article. PPC ads are also heavily used in niche sites, by creating websites and making the adds blend in by with color, font, size etc.
If you have a website, and are looking to increase Pay-Per-Click earnings (Adsense, primarily), most important steps you can take are the following: Make your ads blend into your content, randomize ads and most crucial, get yourself a kickass theme. I have experienced conversions as high as 19% myself, and seen a few reach up to 35% convertions with the WordPress ClickThrough Rate Theme.
Private advertising
Not everybody has a popular website with a loyal following, but if you have, and know your audience well enough, you can land yourself some amazing advertisement deals. Instead of displaying an adsense ad, you would display a banner (for example) from the sponsored company. If they provide something you audience, companies pay (depending on your pageviews, subscribers, pagerank) up to $5.000 on mediocre ‘people created’ websites. The negative is you have to be well established, and already made a brand for yourself.
Affiliate Marketing
If you have ever read the Smart Passive Income blog, you know Pat Flynn is earning some serious cheddar through affiliate marketing. He has a loyal following, and provides tons of quality content for free, which made him able to earn a year of income in one month, every month. The amazing part is, he doesn’t do aggresive advertisement, but rather teaching people how he used certain valuable products. And if you promote a quality product closely related to your audience, without being pushy, chances are some of your will convert!
Create Your Own
In todays world, it has never been easier to be a publisher. You can be one, if you’d like! Write a short informational book, which solves a problem, publish it for a low amount of money. Since you have no production costs, the essential part is to get your book sold, and profit margins are skyhigh when you are publishing an ebook on your own site, or through any web 2,0 platform! Go to SmartPassiveIncome.com to download a copy of his ebook teaching you how to write the perfect one!
Paid Posts
Personally, it is not my favourite because of two reasing, it is not passive income and it is not trustworthy. You get paid by a company who then wants you to mention them in a blog post, or review one of their products, and it is a one-time payment. If you are operating in this field, I suggest only to accept from companies who has something of value to your audience, worst case by not doing so would be if your audience felt mislead and reacted negatively.
Do you have a website?
I know the website-talk can seem frightening for someone only used to write on 2,0 sites like this one, Squidoo and Infobarrel etc.. But today, you can buy a desired domain name for $8 and host it for as low as $5/month. If you are thinking about expanding your ‘online empire’ a website would be an amazing idea. It is very easy to install the free WordPress platform, and create a website with little to no experience. A year ago I even did. 😉
At last, I want to advertise that I have my websites as HostGator. I have tried 4 hosts overall, and I’m not gonna point any fingers, so they will remain anonymous. But I’m done with waiting hours for email responds, or talking to fappy ignorant employees. When I signed up with HostGator, I contacted them approximately 20 times via Livechat in the first month. And every single time, waiting time did not exceed 120 seconds- I was blown away 😛
If you decide to sign up for HostGator, and want the two first months to be free (equal to $9), use the coupon code: smartoffer
