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How can my website make money?

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Summary: Making a little money from your website isn't all that hard, however making lots of money requires a lot of hard work.

I want to have my own website, effectively doing it for free by hosting ads. What kinds of ads will support paying for my website?

Using a website to make money, even if only to support itself, is not an uncommon desire. That's the original question:

Making money on your website is actually pretty easy.

However making lots of money requires work.

There are many, many programs for website advertising. One of the easiest and now one of the most common is Google's Adsense. Adsense, and its companion program Adwords (for advertisers), are the plain-text ads you see on many websites. The giveaway? The phrase "Ads by Goooooogle" above or below the block of ads.

Adsense is easy to sign up for, and once approved will display ads targeted to the page that the ads are displayed on. Adsense is a PPC or "Pay Per Click" system - meaning that the site displaying ads gets paid when a visitor clicks on one of the ads. The actual amount paid varies based on many factors.

There are other approaches including affiliate programs allowing you to advertise and sell items on your site, making a percentage of each sale. Amazon and eBay both have programs as do many other retailers - the keywords to look for in investigating these sites is an "affiliate" or "associate" program.

One caution: advertising and affiliate programs are all well and good, but there's really a bigger issue that prevents most websites from really making a lot of money: traffic. All the advertising in the world is pointless if no one visits your site and if no one sees the ads or buys the products. Traffic generation is well beyond the scope of this article, but there are lots of resources on the internet that can help.

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Article C2281 - February 13, 2005

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Recent Comments
23 Comments

Joel Comm really telling everything in that book. but I still find that everything you need to success in Adsense is SEO.

Posted by: Norhafidz at October 14, 2008 2:04 PM

This is a good question
There is this little thing which i am using
Here is the link, try it out, it may work for you
http://www.yavrim.com/check/

Posted by: Aki at November 2, 2008 3:18 PM

which is best ,affiliate programs or adsense

Posted by: francis at November 7, 2008 3:55 AM

Maybe you could try pay-per-play it works for me. They pay me to put a 5 second audio advertise (free) on my website.

http://www.sellingppp.com/a.cgi?ppp=1233112577

Posted by: Gaston at January 14, 2009 8:30 PM
Turning off comments as this article appears to have become a magnet for very questionable "make money on the internet" schemes.
- Leo
16-Jan-2009
Posted by: Leo at January 16, 2009 10:50 AM

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