How to Make Money with your Website
By: Chris Beasley


Fair warning - this article is not meant for experienced website
publishers. This article is meant for those new to the industry. The ideal
reader of this article will have a website they made without a plan ahead
of time. The website could be a personal site like a blog, or perhaps a
fan site, or any site really that people typically make and then one
day realize "Hey, I could make money with this." The only type of website
that wouldn't really be appropriate with this article would be a site
made to compliment an existing service business. The reason is in those
cases the website is not supposed to make money, it is supposed to
generate interest in your business.

So if you have a content site and you wonder, "Could I make money with
this?" Read on.


Advertising Revenue


The easiest way to monetize a site is to join an ad network and put up
ads. This isn't as simple as it sounds though. Some sites are better
suited to certain ad networks than others, and some sites will have
problems getting in ad networks at all.

There are two major types of ads provided by ad networks, those that
pay every time someone clicks on an ad (called CPC or cost-per-click) and
those that pay every time someone views an ad (called CPM, or
cost-per-thousands impressions). A $1 CPM ad will pay you $1 for every one
thousand page views. I know that can be depressing if your site only gets a
few thousand page views per month, but that's the truth of the online
ad industry. A $0.25 CPC ad will pay you a quarter every time someone
clicks on your ad, which sounds like it could be better than CPM, and it
can, but you'd be surprised how infrequently people click on some ads.
Especially when you consider advertisers who want branding sometimes
design an ad that doesn't encourage clicks whereas ads that get clicked a
lot (such as flashing error box types) are never sold on a CPC basis.

Depending on your site's topic and demographic one type of ad will
perform better for you than others. For instance teen sites tend to have
poor click through rates and they do not attract high CPC ads so they do
better with CPM based advertising. Also forums tend to have poor click
through rates so with those CPM advertising is best. A site about
building a personal credit history however could command excellent CPC rates
and get a good click through rate if they found CPC ads tailored to
their content. The easiest way to figure out what ad type will work for
you is to try them both. Try multiple ad networks and multiple ad types
until you find something that works for you.


Which Ad Networks to Join

The two best ad networks for new general audience sites are Fastclick
and Casale Media. Both networks have relatively low entrance
requirements and aren't as strict about subject matter as some of the other
networks. If your site fits well into a high profit niche (generally,
anything other than entertainment (books, movies, games, sports, tv, etc),
then try Burstmedia or TribalFusion. They have slightly better rates and
can sometimes get you targeted campaigns which pay a premium over
general audience advertisements.

The above mentioned ad networks all offer both CPM & CPC ads with the
exception of TribalFusion which is CPM only. They also all offer a
variety of ad types, including leaderboards (large banner), standard
banners, popunders (ads that popup underneath the current window), popups (ads
that popup on top of the current window), skyscrapers (tall narrow
ads), and boxes (square or rectangular ads often found imbedded in
articles).

For CPC ads the best network is Google Adsense. Google Adsense
automatically analyzes the content on each page and then serves related ads
from Google's library of hundreds of thousands of Adwords ads normally
found on the side of search results. However, as I discussed before, if
your site visitors do not tend to click often or if your content isn't
attractive to advertisers Google Adsense will not do too well for you.
Adsense also has a few competitors, such as SearchFeed or Revenue Pilot,
if you do not get accepted by Google.

You do not need to pick one ad network, try to join them all and then
use the ones who do best for you. You can use more than one ad network
at a time. No ad network can fill all of your inventory (not even
Google) so if you send 1000 impressions to an ad network they might only
serve 500 ads. The other 500 ads are called defaults, and you get to
specify to the ad network what they serve for those ads. So typically what
publishers do is form a chain of ad networks and send defaults from one
to another. So for instance your primary network (best paying) may be
Tribal Fusion, but Tribal Fusion can only fill 50% of your inventory, so
you tell Tribal Fusion to send it's defaults to Fastclick. Fastclick
then fills 50% of your remaining inventory, so you tell Fastclick to send
it's defaults to Casale. Casale then fills 50% of your remaining
inventory from Fastclick. So instead of only serving paying ads 50% of the
time had you just used one network, you serve them 82.5% of the time.
Just in case I'm not clear, or that you take me too literally, 50% fill is
just a percentage I chose for this example. In reality ad network fill
rates can fluctuate between 80 and 20%.


Ad Placement

For CPM advertisements networks have rules about ad placement. You may
think "Okay, if I make $1 CPM for each banner I'll just put 10 on the
page." Fortunately for your site's visitors such ad stacking is not
allowed. Typically you can put only one of each ad type on a page, though
some networks allow both a top and bottom banner paying at different
rates. Ad networks also usually require that you put ads above the fold,
that is where a user on a 800x600 resolution would not have to scroll
down to see the ad.

For CPC ads it is in your best interest to present the ads in such a
way as to give them the most attention. For instance with Google Adsense
most people find the highest paying ad size is the box like what is
used on Website Publisher articles. The reason is that this ad type is
most often situated right in the text of an article so that users have to
see it. In contrast a top banner is often glazed over by users. You can
also experiment with color schemes to see what generates the most
clicks.


Affiliate Programs


In addition to ad networks many content sites also join affiliate
programs for additional revenue. Performance with affiliate programs can be
very erratic though, some sites make a killing with them, other sites
make pennies. The issue is that affiliate programs only pay when a user
buys something. How it works is you refer a user to a merchant and then
get a commission depending on what that person buys (if anything). As
such affiliate programs really only work well when your site's visitors
are already in a buying mood. For instance a site that reviews digital
cameras could do very well with affiliate programs because most
visitors are likely already planning to buy a digital camera. In contrast a
fan site or blog isn't likely to generate much affiliate income because
visitors going there aren't already predisposed to making a purchase.

One benefit from an affiliate program though is that they generally
have more implementation methods than ad networks. You can promote an
affiliate program with as little as a text link in an article. As such you
can use them along with ad networks and any additional money made from
the affiliate program is a bonus and does not come at the expense of
your ad network revenue.

Many merchants, such as Amazon, run their own affiliate program in
house. Others run it through an affiliate network. The major affiliate
networks are Linkshare, Befree, and Commission Junction. Amazon's program
is great, as are many in house programs, but for a new publisher working
with a network will give you more options while you're still trying to
figure out what works for your site.

Link Sales


Search Engines value links in their algorithms and many people in their
efforts to rank higher will purchase links from sites. So even a site
without much hope for ad network success can make money by selling link
placements. You should know however that search engines look down on
this behavior, especially if the links are for completely unrelated
sites. So if you sell a link to an unrelated site you are risking a
potential penalty from search engines.

Prices are generally based on your Google PageRank. PageRank or PR, is
an approximate value if the total weight of the links pointing to your
site. If you use the Google toolbar the PageRank of every page you view
is displayed in a little green bar. Two services for selling text links
are Linkadage and Text Link Brokers.

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Thanks for the tips...ill keep them in mind if i ever decide to make a site again.

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What do you mean?? Too much anime?!??

Thanks cool boy, I am going to really enjoy this place as I am serious about designing and starting my own website business.

Thanks for the tips!!!!

Nice info... Very informative & strait to the point....

Thanx...

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Thanks for the info very useful