The primary goal of any webmaster is to earn money from his website. There are two types of websites: E-Commerce websites and informational websites. E-Commerce websites earn money from various e-commerce activities whereas informational websites can earn money through various forms of advertising. The following are the different ways to earn money from your website:
PPC advertising: This is the most popular source of income for informational websites. After signing up with a PPC network, you are supplied with some codes which are to be pasted on your webpages. Your website will then show some contextual ads relevant to it’s content. When visitors to your site click on these ads, you earn some money, which may vary from a few cents to a couple of dollars. The earnings per click depend upon the general traffic level of the site, as well as it’s niche. Niches like financial products, loans, mortgages, collage education etc. are very profitable. The most popular PPC network is ‘Google Adsense‘. Other networks include ‘Yahoo Publisher Network’, Bidvertiser, Chitika, Clicksor etc.
CPM advertising: This is similar to PPC advertising, only with the difference that you earn money according to the number of page views which the ad displayed on your site generates. The term CPM means cost per thousand impressions. For example, if a website or blog generates 100,000 page impressions per month and if the CPM rate for displaying an ad is $1, then the site/blog will earn $100 per month. The closer you put an ad to the top of the page, the higher will be the CPM rate. The rate also depends upon the size of the ad ( the bigger the format, the higher is the rate). Some important CPM networks are ‘Casale Media’, ‘Value Click’, ‘Advertising.com’ etc.
Selling your own ad space: You can directly sell banner ads on your website. By doing this, you can cut down middlemen commissions and determine your own rates.
Affiliate marketing: Affiliate marketing involves selling other people’s products for a commission. This is a very profitable online business. As an affiliate, your duty is to send prospective customers to the merchant’s website. If the customer purchases something, you earn a commission. You can promote the products by putting banner or text link ads or product reviews on your website. The two most popular affiliate marketing networks are Clickbank and Commission Junction.
Private forums: You can put up a private forum on your website and charge a monthly fee from your members for accessing the same.
Job boards: You may put up a job board on your site and charge for the job listings.
Marketplace: Some websites have put up marketplaces for buying and selling of goods and services. They charge a small fee for each listing.
Donations: You can put up a ‘Donate’ link on your website and receive donations from your visitors.
In addition to the above, there are other ways such as, Pop-up and pop-under ads, audio ads, text link ads, sponsored posts etc. which may be used to earn money from your website.
6 Comments
Fergal, Business Advice Forum
June 13, 2009 at 11:23Good post, I don’t see e-commerce websites listed as a source of revenue.
Zak
June 13, 2009 at 18:16Hi Fergal,
I didn’t listed e-commerce websites in this post because I consider that e-commerce websites are a business model itself, i tried to focus on ways that you may use to monetize and make money from your website..
Thanks everybody for commenting!
Ryan
June 23, 2009 at 22:07Will you believe I tried to add this post to my favorites and it was already there.
Zak
February 28, 2016 at 15:45Hi Ryan,
Yes I believe on that, thank you.
Miller
July 6, 2009 at 18:51Hi! I like your srticle and I would like very much to read some more information on this issue. Will you post some more?
Daph
July 27, 2009 at 01:42I know this post is quite old, but I just wanted to thank you for posting it (found it using Google)