Contents
How to Make Money from Website
Howdy, Folks. In the last article I was telling you how to make money online as a freelancer. Now I’ll cover the aspects of making your own site/blog and making money from it. First of all you need an idea. Yes, an Idea. What is your site/blog going to be about? How is it going to be implemented in the web? Like a powerful portal with your own forum and many other services or a “diary” of your own, that will contain interesting articles and materials. It’s all up to you.
Website
With the knowledge of HTML (hypertext markup language) you can turn practically any idea into life in the web.
You can install a CMS (content managing system) or a CMF (content management framework) and get a highly customizable, extendable and powerful engine for your website even without any knowledge of the html. You can make anything, from a simple homepage to a powerful portal with loads of video/audio etc.
I recommend the following CMS :Joomla and Drupal CMF. Both of them are free and extremely extendable.
Blog
A blog is usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, your own view on things. To run a blog you can use a blog hosting service such as Google’s Blogger
or you can run ot with a CMS. In the world of blogging the only CMS is WordPress
The Technical Part
Your site/blog needs a name, right? Think of a name that describes your project best and register it. at Godaddy for example.
Now for the web hosting. Well, your site\blog’s got to be hosted so that people can connect to it and find out pretty interesting stuff that you want to share with them. 2 types of hosting. Free and non-Free. Well, free… is free. With all of the consequences like slow website speed, server not available errors etc. From all of the companies that provide free hosting I would recommend Freehostia.
Now for the non free hosting. The prices and services vary incredibly, like from 1.5$/month to 20$/month for shared web hosting. Here is a nice comparison of web hosting providers,I Hope It’ll help you choose the right one that suits your needs.
Well now, you’ve got it all settled, the website is up and running, you’ve filled it with good unique content (this is very vital) and are ready to attract visitors and monetize your traffic. Here are the ways of doing it:
Advertisements
So, there are direct advertisements and contextual ads.
Direct advertisements
– you sell ads on your site directly to advertisers. It’s pretty simple, say, you have a juicy ad place at the sidebar that can be used as and ad place. You sell it at your own rates to anyone who is willing to buy it.
A very good article about direct advertisements can be found on the doshdosh blog
Contextual Ads
My personal favorite. You sign up for Google Adsense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, or Microsoft AdCenter, get a JavaScript code, put it on your website and voile you’ve got relevant advertisements on your website. Yeah, the ads are relevant most of the time, a special bot analyzes the content of your website and decides which ads should be shown on your site. Unlike the direct advertisements that pay for the time their ad is on your website, contextual ads pay per click. And the price of these click varies a lot depending on the theme of your resource. The most highly payed themes are: business, banks, credits, stock exchange, real estate etc. Kontera offers PPC ads that are displayed in the text of your content, an interesting solution
Affiliate Programs
Pretty simple. You sign up for an affiliate program, whether it’s Amazon associates or any other “we want you to drive buyers on our site’s” affiliate programs. After you register with programs of your selection you get a special ID, and you place informers or direct links that contain that ID of yours. If someone buys a product after visiting your link – you get 10-15% of the products price. Nice, eh? You can find affiliate programs through Clickbank, CJ, Paydotcom, etc.
Promotion
If you have a product of your own, you can promote it with your website. If you’re a blogger you can review other sites for money 😀 use this service – reviewme.com ;
There are numerous ways of legally monetizing your website, In time i will cover up the most major ones more specifically.
