Popular Ways To Make Money Online With A Website

If you know a method that is not listed below, just let us know and we’ll update it. Notice that ways to make money with a website are different from ways to make more money from it. Methods to increase your traffic or click-through rate will help you make more money, but they do not represent a method of making money per se.

For example, one could suggest that blending AdSense ads with the content is a way to make money from a website. In reality it’s not; it’s just a way to make more money by improving your ad click-through rate. The real monetization method behind it is a PPC ad network. The answer is, it depends. It depends how big your site is, how new it is, what niche you are in, what your goals are etc. Today’s post should answer your questions about what monetiziation technique is best for you.

Over the years I have tried dozens, if not hundreds of ideas and ways to make money from my websites. Some worked and some failed, it is important that if you try something and it doesn’t work, don’t just give up. The main reason I see people fail with a business online, isn’t because their idea or website is bad but because they give up too soon.

The list is divided into direct and indirect methods, and examples and links are provided for each point. These are Popular Ways To Make Money Online With A Website.

Making Money From Advertising

If you look at many websites, you will probably notice that there are banner advertisements displayed on most pages. In reality, anyone with a website can get advertisers. While it is true that if your site is well-known, you may get companies contacting you to offer to advertise on your site, you can get advertising revenue even if you are just starting out and your site is relatively unknown.

The way to do this is to join as an "affiliate" of various companies or sites, either directly, or through an affiliate network. An affiliate network is simply an intermediary with whom you can sign up to get advertisers (as opposed to dealing with individual companies separately).

Sell Advertising Space

The most popular form of making money from a website is by placing ads on it. We all know what it is, but it can make you money in different ways, such as Paid Per Click, Paid Per 1000 Views or Paid Per Time Frame.

The most common form of advertising is Google Adsense which is paid per click, however a lot of people know what Adsense is in some industry’s so perhaps in those markets the other two may be more profitable.

If you want to sell advertising I recommend either complete site domination with Google Adsense, placement is important, where you put it on the site can be the difference between $10 a day and a $100. If you have more traffic or depending on your industry I recommend you sell a small amount of advertising at the highest price possible.

Join PPC Advertising Networks

Basically you need to sign up with the network and paste some code snippets on your website. The network will then serve contextual ads (either text or images) relevant to your website, and you will earn a certain amount of money for every click.

The profitability of PPC advertising depends on the general traffic levels of the website and, most importantly, on the click-through rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC). The CTR depends on the design of the website. Ads placed abode the fold or blended with content, for instance, tend to get higher CTRs. The CPC, on the other hand, depends on the nice of the website. Mortgages, financial products and college education are examples of profitable niches (clicks worth a couple of dollars are not rare), while tech-related topics tend to receive a smaller CPC (sometimes as low as a couple of cents per click).

The source of the traffic can also affect the overall CTR rate. Social media traffic, on the other hand, presents terribly low CTRs because these visitors are tech-savvy and they just ignore ads.

List of popular CPC advertising networks:

Google Adsense

Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN)

BidVertiser

Chitika

Clicksor

Join CPM Advertising Networks

CPM advertising networks behave pretty much as PPC networks, except that you get paid according to the number of impressions (i.e., page views) that the ads displayed on your site will generate. CPM stands for Cost per Mille, and it refers to the cost for 1,000 impressions.

A blog that generates 100,000 page views monthly displaying an advertising banner with a $1 CPM, therefore, will earn $100 monthly.

CPM rates vary with the network, the position of the ad and the format. The better the network, the higher the CPM rate (because they have access to more advertisers). The closer you put the ad to the top of the page, the higher the CPM. The bigger the format (in terms of pixels), the higher the CPM.

CPM advertising tends to work well on websites with a high page views per visitor ratio (e.g., online forums, magazines and so on).

List of popular CPM advertising networks:

Casale Media

Burst Media

Value Click

Advertising.com

Tribal Fusion

Right Media

Join Direct Banner Advertising

Selling your own advertising space is one of the most lucrative monetization methods. The most popular banner formats on the web are the 728×90 leaderboard, the 120×600 skyscraper, the 300×250 rectangle and the 125×125 button.

The downside of direct banner advertising is that you need to have a big audience to get qualified advertisers, and you will need to spend time managing the sales process, the banners and the payments.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a very popular practice on the Internet. Under this system you have a merchant that is willing to let other people (the affiliates) sell directly or indirectly its products and services, in exchange for a commission. Sometimes this type of advertising is also called CPA (cost per action) or CPL (cost per lead) based.

Affiliates can send potential customers to the merchant using several tools, from banners to text links and product reviews.

In order to find suitable affiliate programs you can turn to individual companies and publishers like Dreamhost and SEOBook, or join affiliate marketplaces and networks.

List of popular affiliate marketplaces and networks:

Commission Junction

ClickBank

Azoogle Ads

Link Share

Where to Find Affiliate Programs

You can find a list of affiliate programs and affiliate networks on thefreecountry.com's Affiliate Program page at http://www.thefreecountry.com/webmaster/affiliate.shtml

To join an affiliate network or program, simply go to the site and complete their online application form. Once it is approved, you'll be given some HTML code which you can cut and paste into your web page. Note that some affiliate networks and programs will not accept you unless you have your own domain name. If you are planning to earn from your site, you should seriously consider registering your own domain name.

How To Choose An Affiliate Program

How should you choose an affiliate program? My suggestion is not to choose a program according to the payment scheme, but rather according to the kind of people who are likely to visit your website. For example, if you are targeting parents on your site, links to affiliates with educational software, books and the like may generate more revenue than banners that link to web hosting companies. The most important rule of choosing an affiliate program is to know your target audience.

Some studies suggest that sites that make the most money from affiliate programs are affiliates of only a small handful of programs. Furthermore, concentrating your advertisements from one network may allow you to be paid faster. If you advertise for hundreds of different affiliate networks on your site, you may end up earning only (say) a few dollars per month from each network. If your advertiser's minimum payment amount is higher than what you can earn each month, it may take you a long time before you accrue enough to be paid.

On the other hand, that formula does not necessarily hold true for every site (or every page on your site, for that matter). For example, if your site has a particular theme, and an affiliate network only supports one or two suitable advertisers, you might want to sign up for a few affiliate networks so as to get a greater number of relevant advertisers. (What's the point of putting banners from only one affiliate if nobody is going to click them?)

Selling Services

Selling services is a very popular technique people use to make money from a website and is often the reason for them building a blog in the first place. A nice example of someone selling services is Underground Wellness.

The easiest way to start selling advertising on your blog is to create a new page within WordPress and call it services. Here you can put in the information about your service, testimonials and a buy now button.

Collect Emails & Market To Them

Building a email list can make you a lot of money, help build a solid brand and of course help readers come back to your site, time after time. Email marketing can be seen to make you money in a few different ways, such as direct email promotions, to deliver free reports that are monetized and my favourite, to drive traffic back to your site where you make money from other methods.

The most profitable follow up series I ever wrote came only 10 minutes after I completed the most amazing email marketing crash course we’ve ever come across – the McIntyre Method. Last year I quadrupled my subscribers by adding PopUp Domination to my blog, which is a WordPress plugin I developed myself. I’m also a huge fan of squeeze pages.

A squeeze page is dedicated to getting the visitor to sign up for their mailing list. You can see an example of a page like this by checking out our squeeze page for our Traffic Domination video! If you want to create amazing high converting squeeze pages (+ a lot more), check outOptimizepress, we wrote an in-depth review on it.

Review Products as an Affiliate

I know quite a few people who review products on their blogs, it makes great content and if the product you are reviewing has an affiliate program, can make you a lot of money.

Offer a Membership Site or Premium Content

Premium content is paid for in a special members area, typically there is free content which attracts readers and then they realize they need more and will pay for it. Then, you want to create a membership area for them to login and see the information your selling, I spoken about this in detail here. Next, I would do 3 things, email my mailing list and do a blog post about the membership, then create an advert for the bottom of every post which says something like, Liked this?

Create & Sell Your Own Digital Product

The simple version of creating a product is as followed, create a 30+ page word document about something, turn it into a PDF and sell it.

Sell Paid Directory Listings

I see it as a smart way to sell advertising, you see instead of putting adverts on your sidebar, you have a directory on your blog where you link to different company’s and websites in your industry and charge a premium for the listing. If you charged a monthly fee, so for example, say you had 1000 people listed in your directory and charged $7 a month, you would earn $7000 a month in continuity.

In some ways, this is actually beneficial to the reader, say you have a website about becoming a model, in the directory could be a section for photographers, where photographers pay to list their services.

Host Webinars & Sell Something

People get on webinars to hear you speak, not someone else to do a sales pitch. Once you complete the webinar series, you now have a product that you can sell as a home study course

Start by buying GoToWebinar, personally I would host a free webinar and not sell anything on your first one so that you can get in some practice with the software and talking live with people.

Sponsors for Single Columns or Events

If you website has specific columns or events (e.g., a weekly podcast, an interview series, a monthly survey, a special project) you could find companies to sponsor them individually.

This method increases the monetization options for website owner, while giving advertisers the possibility to target a more specific audience and with a reduced commitment.

Mashable illustrates the case well. They have several advertising options on the site, including the possibility to sponsor specific columns and articles, including the “Daily Poll” and the “Web 2.0 Invites.”

Problogger also runs group writing projects occasionally, and before proceeding he publicly announce the project asking for sponsors.

Private Forums

While the Internet is populated with free forums, there is also the possibility to create a private one where members need to pay a single or recurring fee to join.

SEO BlackhatPerformancing also launched a private forum recently, focused on the networking aspect. List of popular forum software:

vBulletin

Simple Machines Forum

phpBB

Vanilla

Job Boards

All the popular blogs are trying to leverage job boards to make some extra income. Guy Kawasaki,ReadWriteWeb, Problogger… you name it.

Needless to say that in order to create an active and profitable job board you need first to have a blog focused on a specific niche, and a decent amount traffic.

List of popular job board software:

JobThread

Web Scribe Job Board

SimplyHired Job-o-matic

Jobbex

Marketplaces

Sitepoint is the online marketplace by excellence. Some websites and blogs, however, are trying to replicate that model on a smaller scale.

Depending on your niche, a market place that allows your visitors to buy, sell and trade products could work well. Over the time you could start charging a small fee for new product listings.

The problem with this method is that there are no standard software on the web, so you would need to hire a coder to get a marketplace integrated into your website.

Paid Surveys and Polls

There are services that will pay you money to run a small survey or poll on your website. The most popular one is called Vizu Answers.

Selling or Renting Internal Pages

Highlighted Posts from Sponsors

The tech news aggregator displays editorial posts on the left column, and on the sidebar they have a section titled “Techmeme Sponsor Posts.”

On that section posts from the blog of the advertisers get highlighted, sending qualified traffic their way.

Donations

Placing a “Donate” link or button on a website can be an efficient way to earn money, especially if your blog is on a niche where readers learn and gain value from your content.

Personal development and productivity blogs, for instance, tend to perform well with donation based systems (one good example being Steve Pavlina).

A small variation of this method appeared sometime ago with the Buy Me a Beer plugin.

In-text Adverting

In-text adverting networks like Kontera and Vibrant Media will place sponsored links inside your text. These links come with a double underline to differentiate them from normal links, and once the user rolls the mouse over the link the advertising will pop. Should the user click on it the site owner will make some money.

Some people make good money with this method, but others refrain from using it due to its intrusiveness. It is also interesting to note that very few mainstream websites have experimented with in-text advertising.

Pop-ups and Pop-unders

Pop-ups are a common yet annoying form of advertising on the Internet. If you are just trying to make a much money as possible from your website, you could experiment with them.

If you are trying to grow the traffic and generate loyal visitors, however, you probably should stay away from them. Ad networks that use pop-ups:

Tribal Fusion

PayPopup

PopupAd

Adversal

Audio Ads

Also called PPP (Pay Per Play), this advertising method was introduce by Net Audio Ads. the concept is pretty simple: play a small audio advertising (usually 5 seconds) every time a visitor enters into your website. The user should not be able to stop it, creating a 100% conversion rate based on unique visitors.

Selling the Website

Selling your website could be your last resource, but it has the potential to generate a big sum of money in a short period of time.

Market places on online forums like DigitalPoint and Sitepoint are always active with website buyers and sellers. Some people also make money trading and flipping websites. They either create them from scratch or buy existing ones, and after some revamping they sell them for a profit.

Indirect Methods

Selling an Ebook

Perhaps one of the oldest money making strategies on the web, using a website to promote a related ebook is a very efficient way to generate revenue.

You could either structure the website around the book itself, like SEOBook.com, or launch the ebook based on the success of the website, like FreelanceSwitch did we the book How to be a Rockstar Freelancer.