Monetising your Website

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Hobbyists aside, most people build websites in an attempt to earn income. There are three main ways of doing this:

The first way to monetise your website is to sell advertising space on it and there are a number of options:

a) You could sell text links. You get paid a monthly or annual amount, and the purchaser gets a simple link on your site - usually in the left or right panel, or at the foot of the page. There are two reasons why an advertiser might purchase a text link. First, if your website visitors click on the link, they become your advertisers visitors too. Second, if your site has a high page rank, the rankings of the advertisers site should benefit.

Google however is said to frown on paid links, and there is a chance that they will penalise both sites if they decide that the relationship is commercial.

b) Again, this involves a paid for link, but this time, the link is contextual, i.e it is within the page content. For example, if an advertiser wanted to promote their website building software the link would be the one you have just seen. This is often the preferred method, as the link looks less like a paid advert.

c) Use a text link broker. You'll need to have a site with PR4 or above, not that the PR is much of an indication of anything, but it seems to be the benchmark by which websites selling textlinks are judged. You sign up as a text link, or contextual link publisher, and the broker puts your site details in front of people who want to buy links, usually for a 50% commission.

d) You can add contextual advertising to your website by using Google Adsense (or similar services from Yahoo and MSN). After joining the service, a wizard takes you through the steps of creating the code to display on your website pages, you simply copy and paste the code, and you're done. After around 10 minutes, Google serves up ads that are related to your content - automatically. If a visitor to your website clicks on one of the ads, you get paid a percentage of the money paid by the advertiser. The opposite of Adsense (the system that the advertiser uses) is called Adwords, and generically is known as pay per click advertising or PPC fore short.   

The second way to monetise your website is to sell your own products or services:

Products can be physical or virtual. For Example a physical product could be a CD or a piece of jewelery, and a virtual product could be an ebook, or a software download.

The services offered can be wide ranging:

Advice - Financial Advice, DIY Advice, Cooking Advice, Parenting Advice, Tarot Reading, Business Advice ...

Web Related - Website Design and Build, Website Hosting, Script Installation, Graphic Design, SEO Services ...  

Business Related but designed to attract customers to an offline business - Solicitors, Accountants, Estate Agents, Shops ...

The third way to monetise your website is affiliate marketing: