Making money from your website

There are thousands of people creating new websites every day, some of them it is just a fun project, some more may make just any old site hoping to make a fortune from advertising through the many advertising opportunities available on the internet. Sadly most of those will either give up through lack of revenue or some will give up because they tried to cheat the system and were banned from an ad network.

I intend to make this site a guide to the hobbyist, those who want to cover costs of their yearly domain costs, monthly hosting costs  and those who can and will make big money online.

There are many ways you can make money with your website and I will attempt to cover the more reputable methods here. A word of caution though, before you sign up with any advertising company, please research the company, (the gurus at  geekvillage are very knowledgeable on the various ad companies). Carefully read the "Terms Of Service" of any company you sign up with and you can't go too far wrong. Not all sites will be accepted into all programs, but it would be hard to not find an advertising company that both suits your site and will accept your site.

You will come across a few xyzcompanysucks.com type websites, but they are usually started  by those who didn't follow the TOS. There will also be a few genuine gripes from the masses who were burned. Common sense should sort out who to believe.

Now let's look at some options for advertising

CPC - Probably one of the most popular methods of online advertising is CPC, or cost per click advertising. 

There are several popular performers in this area. The content targeted programs are the most popular at this time. Of this group would be the pioneer, google adsense. Not so closely followed by Clicksor, Adbrite and YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network- who only allow publishers from USA at present). If you don't want ads to clutter up your site, there are programs like Intellitxt, which will add an advertising link to keyword text on you site.

CPM - There are many high traffic sites that use CPM advertising (cost per thousand impressions). Some pay more than others, but you need to be careful which company you choose. Some of the companies are not too well known or reputable. You need to choose one where you can opt out of certain ads showing on your site. For example a family oriented website may be inundated with adult ads or other things not suitable for your targetted audience. I'll go though some of the more reputable companies as the site progresses 

CPA - This is a good form of advertising for "shopping online", type sites and/or those who cater to a particular audience. For example, the teen scene, fashion, art, books, adult, dating, computer components, banking, mortgages, real estate (well you get the picture, the list is endless). Some of the reputable companies that offer CPA (cost per aquisition) are www.cj.com and shareasale. Again I'll touch on these in greater detail later.