Ways To Monetize A Website
So you’ve created a content, information website (kind of like this one!) and you want to make money? There are several ways you can go about this. Here are the most popular ones:
Google Adsense
Perhaps the most popular way is to put Google Adsense ads on your website. This program, known as adsense, matches advertisements geared towards the keywords on your pages to the advertisers. So if you have a website about prom dresses, chances are, advertisers who bid for keywords like prom dresses will show up on your website.
Google is the leader in this contextual advertising category, but there are some other ones too. The most notable ones are the Yahoo Publisher Network and the new Microsoft Publisher Network. Please note that both Yahoo and Microsoft’s networks are in Beta. Yahoo, especially, has been notorious for not allowing in many new publishers. There’s a reason Yahoo has been in Beta for over 3 years now!
Affiliate Ads
Affiliate advertising is commonplace on the Internet. It’s fairly simple. You show an advertisement. Let’s again say it’s for prom dresses. If someone clicks through your advertisement and buys a prom dress, you get a commission, generally a percentage. There are all sorts of affiliate programs, ranging from ebooks to pet care products. Most affiliate programs go through a central agency which handles many affiliate programs. This makes it easier on everyone since the agency handles the payouts. So, if you are a publisher and you are promoting 10 different places, all 10 places may use the same agency, so you get one simple payment from the agency. Some of the more popular affiliate sites are Commission Junction and Clickbank.
Sell Links
A final way to make money is to sell simple text links. The buyer of the text link may be trying to get traffic or to just boost his/her natural search engine rankings by acquiring more links. It should be stated though that search engines frown upon the link buying/selling business, so it may be a goo didea to not get too cozy with it.