Monetize : Make Money Online : Adsense or Affiliates!

If you have a quality website, search engine optimized and attracting thousands, then you definitely have the scope of earning significant income online. Making money online is not a new phenomenon, and there are thousands of bloggers who earn millions of dollars this route. But how to make money online?

Make Money Online

There are many ways to make money online. While some programs demand self owned websites as a mandatory criterion, there are other options without this requirement too. But let’s focus on the former aspect, ie. ways to generate income using your website.

Three main ways to generate money using websites

  1. Sell Products.
  2. Sell Services.
  3. Display Ads.
Sell Products

Suppose you are a painter and you write in a painting blog, you can transform the same blog into a platform where you can sell your paintings. E-commerce integration is now easy, and the same idea can be used to sell any products like e-books, handicrafts, home appliances etc.

Sell Services

If you are an expert in any field, your website can be transformed into a consultation platform and you can charge fees for your expert opinion. Some suggestion include legal advice, tax consultation, SEO etc.

Display Ads

Advertisements are the most popular means of generating income online. You can either directly accept ads of companies or join any advertising networks. Google Adsense is an advertising program existing since 2003 which offers lot of flexibility for publishers. It offers contextual ads in different formats including text, image, rich media etc. The other major area of income generation of websites is in the form of affiliate programs. Affiliate programs differ from Cost Per Click (CPC) programs like Adsense as they offer commission based on Cost Per Action (CPA). Famous affiliates include Amazon Affiliate, Commission Junction etc.

Google Adsense in detail

Remember that a person can have only one adsense account. You need to have a high quality website with sufficient content to get your adsense application to be approved by Google. As your revenue will be based on cost-per-clicks (CPC) on the ads on your website, you should place ads so that you get maximum number of clicks. At the same time you should be careful not to click your own ads, as this may lead to termination of your account. Also there will be a ban on future participation in the program.

Before applying for Google Adsense, make sure that you have a large number of high quality pages and a large number of daily visitors. You can place a maximum of three ads per web page. Image ads tend to perform better than text ads. You will receive Google payments, once your account cross a threshold amount (usually 100$).

Advanced action items for your website

The value of your website increases day by day, if you work on it. Higher the value, the higher will be its market potential. Suggestion to increase the value of your website include the following.

  1. Branding : Focus on the branding aspect of your website. Develop it into a major brand.
  2. Incorporate new technologies into your website. Eg: PHP, MySQL etc.
  3. Make your website a Web Application.