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You've built a website, and
you're getting a decent amount of traffic. Now
it's time to make some money! Here are some ideas on how you can turn a profit from your website, or at least make it pay for itself.
1. Sell Banner Ad Space
If you can show businesses that you have a steady stream of traffic (targeted traffic is even better), you may be able to bring in some money by charging for banner ads on your website. Log into your analytics account and look at your unique visitors. This is the number advertisers will be interested in because it shows roughly how many different people visit your website on a regular basis. That translates into the number of impressions their ad will get. The higher your number of unique visitors, the more you can charge for the ad space on your website.
2. Place Pay Per Click (PPC) or Cost Per 1,000 Impressions (CPM) Ads on Your Site
Joining a PPC or CPM program is one of the easiest ways to make money with your website. The programs are generally free to join. Once you are approved to participate, the ad networks will send ads related to the content on your website. With PPC, you earn money when your visitors click on those ads. With CPM, you get paid every time an ad is served regardless of the number of clicks.
There are many programs to choose from. Internet Giants like Google and Yahoo! each run their own ad network. Smaller providers such as Affinity are also worth looking into.
3. Add Ecommerce Functionality to Your Website
A website is far less expensive than opening a store front. If you have a product to sell, you can easily get an ecommerce store up and running, and it
doesn't have to cost a lot of money. You need shopping cart software to create your online catalog and track your inventory, and you need a payment gateway and merchant account to collect your payments.
4. Join an Affiliate Program
The concept is simple: you refer business to another website, and that website pays you for your efforts. Many different companies have affiliate programs. Find an affiliate program that fits your business. If
you're in the technology industry, join a Web hosting affiliate program. If you sell books, Amazon.com is an obvious choice.
5. Offer Premium Content for a Fee
If you have a niche audience willing to pay and a source for stellar content, you could make this model work for you. You may want to offer some low-level information free on your website to hook your readers, then ask them to sign up and pay for a subscription to your more in-depth information they
can't get anywhere else.
6. Write and Sell Ebooks
If you have an idea for a book, but
don't have the money to publish it yourself, consider writing an ebook and selling online. Because there are no printing costs, your sales are almost 100% profit.
7. Start a Subscription-Based Web Community
You can make money and provide a valuable service to your friends, acquaintances or business network by creating a Web-based community and charging a subscription fee to maintain an exclusive membership. Whether
it's a dating site or networking site,
you'll need to review applicants and monitor activity to make sure it provides top-level service. Otherwise your audience will turn to similar services offered for free.
These are just a few ideas for site-driven revenue streams. The bottom line is your website can certainly help earn its keep and maybe a whole lot more.
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The setup was easy, it worked seamlessly,... and the value was outstanding." 