If you spend any amount of time online, you know that there is money to be made out here in cyberspace; and many of the pioneers in this still vastly uncharted territory have struck it rich with little more than their personal computers and an eye for opportunity. Making money online is mostly about customizing a monetizing formula for your blog. Depending on your skill level, network, and current traffic levels your blog has a variety of options. Even if you’re not looking to work full-time at home, the internet offers a viable source of money which can help to supplement your regular income.
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. 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.
PPC Advertising Networks
Pay Per Click is an advertising program in which ads are placed on your blog and you are paid whenever your visitors click on the ads. It is the most common method bloggers use to make money online. It involves almost no effort and is so incredibly easy that many blogs have too much advertising on them. Money is maximized as traffic levels increase. The source of the traffic can also affect the overall CTR rate. Organic traffic (the one that comes from search engines) tends to perform well because these visitors were already looking for something, and they tend to click on ads more often. Social media traffic, on the other hand, presents terribly low CTRs because these visitors are tech-savvy and they just ignore ads.
CPM Advertising Networks
Cost Per Thousand (”m” is roman numeral for thousand) is an impression based advertising system. This means advertisers place ads on your blog and you are paid based on how many times the ad shows up. This can be profitable for blogs with big traffic, and can start to bring money to even the smallest blogs. All you need is pageviews to increase this monetization method. You can get as low as $0, 10 and as high as $10 per 1, 000 impressions (more in some special cases). CPM advertising tends to work well on websites with a high page views per visitor ratio (e.g., online forums, magazines and so on).
Text Link Ads
In-Text advertising is one of the least obtrusive internet advertising techniques. Basically, hyperlinks are placed within relevant text on your website and distinguished from regular links by a double underline. When you place your mouse cursor over the text, a small box appears with additional information on the product or service being advertised. There are advertising services which, when installed, will automatically place the links for you and will even allow you to set parameters for the products you allow to be sold through your site.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing requires that apply for membership in an ‘affiliate network.’ That is, an agency that maintains and monitors accounts for various companies who are willing to pay individuals for sales generated through their websites. Again, a small bit of code is placed on your site to generate ads; and when someone clicks on the ad, your unique affiliate number is automatically associated with that person’s IP address. If that individual buys a product from the advertiser, you receive a commission on the sale. Commissions can range between 5-20%, or they can be a flat fee per sale.
Direct Banner Advertising
A banner is simply a graphic ad that you can sell in any size or shape you wish. Banner ads can be animated, they can rotate through a series of images, or they can be static. In addition to being used with other types of advertising, individual website owners can simply sell banner space at a flat fee or negotiate their own PPC/CPM with independent advertisers which don’t belong to an affiliate network. 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.
Monetization Widgets
A very simple advertising system is easily integrated into your blog’s sidebar with widget advertising. Just embed the widget into your sidebar and watch the ads begin. Their main differentiator, however, is the fact that they work as web widgets, making it easier for the user to plug and play the service on its website.
RSS Feed Ads
RSS Feeds are incredibly convenient for websites that update content frequently. The feeds deliver all the new content from websites that the reader subscribes to; making it possible to stay updated on news and information on multiple websites without having to visit each one. That’s great for the reader, but not so much for you if you rely on fresh eyes for your advertising revenues. Thankfully RSS Feed Ads are now available. These allow you to place both graphic and text ads within your RSS feeds so that they are visible to all your subscribers.
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. Just consider the hundreds of pop-up blockers out there: there is a reason why they are so popular.
Paid Surveys and Polls
You get paid when someone takes the poll that you place on your site on behalf of an advertiser. Polls encourage people to interact with them, and they can be a lot more engaging than regular old banner ads. Most of these services operate under a CPM model. In doing this option be careful to find survey or poll companies that have credible backgrounds as this is a source for scammers.
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. It is an easy and perhaps out-of-date way to try and earn some revenue. Many programmers use this still, but very little revenue is earned through the donation feature. If you have valuable content on your site that you are offering for free, it doesn’t hurt to put up a donation link and point people to it once in a while.
Camellia Bhowmik