How to Make Money from your Website
Introduction
Once your website is established and you are receiving a reasonable amount of visitors, you may want to start bringing in some revenue. At the simplest level, revenue will come from your visitors; if you are running a services/product based website then your revenue is likely to come in as a direct result of sales, however if you are not yet making any sales, or you run an information based website then you may want to think about other avenues for making some money from your visitors. There are several options available to help achieve this, but the basic principle is that all of the visitors that come onto your site are potential buyers (eg they may have money to spend and they may be looking for a particular product or service).
If you can convert these visitors into direct sales then this is where you will make the most money, as you are not giving away commision to third parties, however, some third party sales programs will provide a much quicker and sometimes greater immediate revenue in the short term. I am going to cover the most effective of these programs on this page.
Before I get on to individual programs there are some other points you should be aware of. Firstly, as I said before, every visitor is at best potential buyer and secondly a potential return visitor. However, when you display third party adds on your site you are effectivly giving away visitors to those advertisers; if a visitor clicks on an add you may make say 20p (for arguements sake) but you have lost that visitor - they may follow that link and spend £10 somewhere else, and they may forget about your site completely and never come back. So although it is great when you start making some quick and relatively easy money on your site, you should always bare in mind that, in theory, someone else is making three or four times as much at your expense - so your end goal should be to take direct revenue from your visitors rather than passing them on to third parties. Having said that, these advertising programs are great to start off with and they will help you recoup some of your running costs.
Some revenue programs on offer
Google Adsense
Google Adsense is an advertising program that will pay you every time someone clicks on an ad displayed on your website.
Direct Link Ads
Direct Link Ads will pay you a fixed amount per day per ad that is displayed on your site.
Performancing Ads
Performancing ads in another network that pays you a fixed amount per advert per day.