Making Money on Your Site

Now that you have a website, there are many ways you can use your website to make money online. Here’s a brief summary of a couple of the quickest and easiest ways to get started making money on your website.

First you need to take a good look at your own site. Is everything on your website set up as it should be to begin making you money?

 

1) Is your content in place?

 

It goes without saying, but it is extremely important to be sure your website has good content. When people first come to your website, it should immediately be obvious what your website is all about. Be sure your content is focused and contains the information your users need.  Make your site stand out from the rest by offering content that is organized and useful. Visitors will recognize your website is different and unique, bookmark the site, tell friends and other websites will link to you increasing your "popularity".

 

Be sure that you use plenty of good relevant words in your description on the Home Page. Relevant text will help your website to be found easily by search engines. Don't make it all pictures and graphics as this will do you no good in your positioning with the search engines.

Make sure your home page describes the site, its purpose and uses the words that the visitors use when they're looking for your site. Use the same words and alternative words in your metatags.

 

 

2) Do you have traffic and a promotion plan?

 

Obviously it is of supreme importance that you promote your website properly. Your website needs to be well known and easily found for you to be able to make any real money. The amount of money you can make is directly related to the amount of traffic your website can generate.

 

Here are some suggestions to help build traffic:

>Use descriptive keywords in your website title

>Use the same keywords in your meta tag, header tag, and the first sentence of your body text.

>Develop webpages focusing on particular keywords

>Submit your website url to all search engines

>Submit your site to key directories and/or vertical portals

>Request reciprocal links

>Promote your website through on line forums and blogs

>Add affiliate ads

>Purchase pay-per-click ads

 

3) How many page views do you have per month?

  Very important!  More traffic, More money.

Promote your site!

 

 

4) Who uses your site, what are they looking for and what might they respond to in an ad or affiliate program.

  This can build traffic as well as get you money through affiliate marketing.

 

 

5) How much time do you have to put towards this project.

  Don’t be fooled!     TIME SPENT = MONEY

 

Now Let’s Look at Making Some Money

We have all heard a lot of talk about how you can get rich on the Internet. But, if you are serious about making money on the Internet, remember, it's NOT a get rich overnight business. Internet success takes TIME, EFFORT and KNOWLEDGE. There's no easy "get rich quick" method, so you will need to spend the time necessary to build the income stream from your Web site.

There are many different types of Web sites that have the aim, directly or indirectly, to make money. Aside from online retailers who sell products and are using their sites to directly make money through sales, you can find many Web sites with all kinds of moneymaking features.

Check out this page describing some realistic ways of making money on the Internet from your personal Web site - Work From Home. Notice there are no "get rich quick" schemes here, just proven, reliable ways to build an online business or use a Web site to expand your brick and mortar business.

Remember before you can make any kind of real money, the most important thing you need is lots of traffic. If your site only gets a few hundred visitors per month, as most personal Web sites do, save your breath, there’s no money in it for you.

 

Affiliates

Affiliate programs are one of the best free ways to make money on the Internet, especially for beginners. Here’s how it works. You add a link to their site on your website. If people who have come to their site from a link on yours buy something from them, they pay you a percentage of the sales you generate for them. You don't have to spend time and energy creating your own product. No dealing with customer service, fulfilling orders, and the like. And some of them pay as much as a 100% commission.

If your intention is to make money on the Internet with affiliate programs, you should find a market niche and target it. You should know your visitors, and you need to choose the best affiliate programs whose products or services match the audience you attract to your site.

Don’t fall into this trap! Many affiliates make the mistake of joining dozens of programs with little regard to their audience. They figure the more associate programs they join, the more money they can make. Even if they attract decent traffic, they have little chance of converting it into sales because the people their site attracts are not interested in the product advertised – that’s why they’re on your site in the first place. Join only a few affiliate programs that fit with your site concept, and concentrate on providing attractive content that will generate traffic and sales.

You need to de-emphasize the affiliate links and emphasize more on the content. This means that when visitors come to your site, they should feel that the site is primarily focused on providing information on that topic, and that the affiliate links are just a small aspect of your site.

The links to the affiliate programs should be in context of something that you have written, rather than making them appear as if the main purpose of the site is to get people to click on them.

By creating an information rich site with great content that your visitors value and respect, you become a trusted expert making a recommendation rather than a stranger making a sales pitch.

Don't push your visitors to the link to your merchant's site, make them want to click. And they'll click-through with pleasure, arriving at your merchant's site with an open-to-buy mind. All humans like doing business with a company who has been recommended to them by an expert whose opinion they have come to respect.

 

Finding Advertisers and Affiliates

Finding online merchants with associate programs is one of the easy parts of building your own website and promoting traffic. Just visit one of the most popular affiliates. The site below lists hundreds of merchants who will pay you to sell their products. It has even organized them all for you into categories...

There are also several affiliate networks that provide the tools, technology and services that online businesses need to register, track, report and pay affiliates. They provide merchants with affiliates, and vice-versa.

The most comprehensive and most promising affiliate network you can join any of their thousands of associate programs. Commission Junction combines all of your earnings from any products, banners, and links you place on your Web sites into one monthly payment. You may choose to receive this payment through a check in the mail or through Direct Deposit to a designated bank account.

 

Selecting Affiliate Programs

Here are the most important factors you should consider before joining associate programs...

Which programs are right for my website?
Join only those programs that fit the audience of your site. A close match will always yield better performance.

What about the Commission?
A reasonable commission starts at 20%, and can go as high as 100%, Watch that the product is not too expensive because no one will buy it. The best affiliate programs will also pay you a second tier commission, that's the commission you make on sales initiated not by you directly, but by someone you referred to the program. This way you can get others to make money for you.

Don’t become affiliated with inferior products
Don't associate your business with low quality product or service. In addition, if the quality and usefulness of the product are low, few people will be interested, and the refund rate will be higher.

Be sure the referral duration is appropriate
After you've referred a visitor to a site, how long does the site continue to "remember" you as the referrer of that visitor? Many associate programs won't remember you at all. This means that if the visitors you referred didn't buy directly on their first visit to the site, you'll never get commission, even if they went back to the site later that day to purchase the product.

Good affiliate programs should at least remember you for 60 days. Affiliates usually set a cookie on the visitor's computer when they arrive at your merchant's site. Beware of associate programs that don't mention anything about this cookie and its duration.

Residual Commissions
The best affiliate programs will even pay you commissions for a prolonged period of time, after the original sale has been made. This is especially attractive for programs that sell services with regular fees. For example, if your referred customers make monthly fees, you'll earn the commission each month.

The Payments
Make sure the payments are made often enough, preferably once a month, with reasonable minimum.

 

A short word on how to set up the ads/affiliate links 

Optimize your site so it's easy to add programs and ads. Consider using server side includes (SSI). SSI is primarily used to "paste" the contents of one or more files into another. For example, a file (of any type, .html, .txt, etc.) containing a daily quote could be included into multiple SSI-enabled pages throughout a website by placing an html code into the desired pages. Server side includes dynamically add the header and footer files to your site. You can change just the header file and voila all your ads change on all your pages.

An HTML editor like Dreamweaver lets you insert server side includes. Make sure that your web hosting company supports them.

Of course you can also use one of the many database programs or web content management systems or even weblog software to build your site. Choose an authoring method that works for you.

 

A GREAT AFFILIATE PROGRAM!!

This affiliate program is a great starter!  They give you everything you need including a website! ITS A REAL MONEYMAKER! A MUST SEE! 

 

 

Monitor your website’s performance CLOSELY!

Check often and make changes if needed. Ads grow stale. Do you visitors respond to text links or banner ads. What's new that you could be adding.

Add content and tools can really help attract traffic and hold an audience.

This is VERY important. Take a unique approach on your site and then add good strong related free content and services.