Making Money With A Website

In my last post About Making Money Online I put forward the idea that one of the better ways to make money online from a work at home business was to have your own website. In this post I'd like to expand on some of the reasons why I believe this is the case. I'll also discuss some of the different types of money making web sites presently in use. I should stress up front that this is not a get rich quick scheme but rather a long term way earn extra income which should grow over time.

Setting up your own website can be quite cheap. In fact if you're willing to do the setup yourself, you can get away with just buying a domain name and some cheap web hosting and you're on your way. There are also free services available. If you're just starting out this can be a great way to get your feet wet. You'll learn alot and all it will cost you is some of your time. Then once you've found a concept which works, you can invest the money to set up a more permanent internet business.

As I mentioned in my last post, owning your own website is an incredibly scalable way to earn extra cash. Once you've set up your website, you can scale up from 100 visitors per day to 1,000 then 10,000 and your revenue will grow at the same rate. While you'll need to put in the work to grow your traffic levels, servicing a site with 10,000 daily visitors is not much more work than maintaining a site with 100. You can make money 24 hours per day, 7 days per week - you don't need to be there. In fact, depending on how you set it up, it can almost run on autopilot giving you an ongoing residual income. And the internet is global. How else could you reach hundreds of millions, if not billions of people worldwide. That's an impressive potential customer base from which to start making money online.

But what sort of website can you use to make money? The only limit is your imagination. One of the more common approaches, particularly for beginners, is to create a content based website. Content based websites may be set up in a number of ways. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

Blogs:
A weblog or blog is a website which is kind of like an online journal or diary. But it can be used to publish information about any topic you like - it doesn't need to be personal. Blogs are normally updated frequently with new articles called posts. In my experience, search engines seem to like blogs, probably because there's always new content being made available. Blogs are cheap and easy to set up. Google offer the Blogger service for free and while it's looked down upon from some, it suits me fine. Wordpress is a popular free weblog software package but you'll typically have to provide your own web hosting to run it.

Forums:
An internet forum is a website which facilitates community based discussion about particular topics. Typically the content of a forum can be viewed by anyone, but in order to contribute to discussions you need to sign up and become a member. There are a wide variety of forum software packages available.

Wiki:
A Wiki is another form of collaborative content based website. It's a collection of web pages normally available to everyone to read and modify. Although many wikis are not-for-profit, I have seen this model used to make money as well.
While each of the above mentioned sites normally provide free content, a natural extension to this is a paid membership version of any of the above. The content would obviously have to be compelling enough and of a sufficient quality to get people to join up, but there are plenty of examples of subscription based business models out there.

eCommerce:
eCommerce websites raise the complexity level a little, but are another viable internet business model. You may already have a bricks and mortar business which you'd like to take online or you may have developed a new product which you'd like to market directly. Using an eCommerce website, you can sell your own goods or services directly on the internet. It's a great way to start making money from home.

Social Websites:
I said before that your imagination is your only limit. In more recent times Web 2.0 sites like Facebook and Myspace have become very popular especially among Gen Y. These websites are more complex to develop and will obviously require greater outlay. But if you have an idea you think might take off, give it a go.

The common thread with all of these types of websites is that you need traffic to make them successful. Almost all monetization methods rely on a steady stream of visitors. Website promotion or traffic generation is a whole series of articles in itself but two of the more common and reliable methods are paid traffic through placing ads on other sites and free search traffic generated by search engines.

There are plenty of advertising networks available if you want to pay to get your traffic. One of the most popular is the Adwords program offered by Google. This is a Pay Per Click (PPC) model. This means that you pay a fee each time a visitor is sent to your site via an ad placed on another site. Adwords has a large inventory of publishers and manages where the ads are displayed. However before you embark on an advertising campaign, be sure your internet business will make enough sales and make a sufficient margin on each sale to at least break even. If you don't know what you're doing, you can spend alot of money very quickly with very little to show for it.

If you're looking for free traffic, this second option is for you. By applying Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to place your website near the top of the search engine results for your chosen keywords, you'll receive a continuous stream of visitors to your website with no monetary outlay. While SEO is seen by many as being too hard, by following some basic rules should should have some success especially if you choose some less competitive keywords. A proper discussion of Search Engine Optimization is beyond the scope of this article, but I will write more about it in the future.

Once you have your own website and it's receiving visitors, there are numerous ways to make money. For internet entrepreneurs just starting out, placing ads on a content site is a very common business model. There a many ad networks available or you can sell advertising space to advertisers directly. Some of the networks operate on a Cost Per Click (CPC) basis. This means the site owner gets paid each time a visitor clicks on an ad. Another common model is CPM. This is where a publisher is essentially paid just for displaying an ad. Rates are normally quoted per 1,000 impressions (page loads). Cost Per Action (CPA) and lead generation are other avenues you could investigate.

Another method is to promote affiliate products on your site. Under this model you will promote someone else's product on your site either actively within the written content of your site or passively by placing banners or other types of ads on your site. You will then be paid each time a customer referred by your website makes a purchase. There a plenty of affiliate networks which act as intermediaries between the publisher (website owner) and the affiliate. They facilitate things like tracking referrals and handling payments to publishers. There are many affiliate programs out there with ClickBank Commission and Junction being two of the more popular ones.

While there are plenty of other online business opportunities out there, these are the simplest to get started with (and this post is already way longer than I originally intended). With little or no outlay you can establish a home based business and be on your way to an internet income in a matter of hours. As you scale up to more complex models you'll need more infrastructure in place (like payment processing or shopping cart capabilities) and this will obviously cost more. But the potential profits are greater as well.

So I'm advocating most beginners get started with what I will call the publisher model. Create a content website, generate some traffic to it (preferably free search traffic) and run ads and/or promote affiliate products. Once you've learned the ropes, you can move on to something more advanced. There are many examples of publishers wgo successfully earn money from website including Darren Rowse from problogger.net and Steve Pavlina from stevepavlina.com. While they're both ostensibly bloggers (ie. their websites are set up as blogs) the format of their websites is not important. The important thing is that they generate traffic by publishing content then sell advertising and promote affiliate products to generate a full-time income.

As it's one of my preferred I will be writing a lot more about making money with a website in future posts.