hill of cash

How to Monetize your Web Site

The word Monetize is 'web-speak' to describe the process of making money out of your website.

Advertisements or Ads

Some people do not like to see ads on a site but they do help to pay the bills!

All ads earn in proportion to the amount of visitors you can attract to your website whether the basis for payment is CPM (just to view the ad a thousand times), CPC (paid when the visitors Click on the ad) or CPA (paid when the visitor has carried out an Action like buying or joining something)

Google Adsense - the best. Google were the first to master the art of changing their ads to reflect the contents of the web page and the geographic location of the visitor. Google are quite critical about the quality and subject of your website to allow their ads to be shown in the first place and then very strict on how the ads are used. This protects their advertisers.

Never, ever, click on Adsense ads on your own page! Never pay (even indirectly) for clicks. You will be banned. So read the Terms and Conditions very carefully to avoid being removed from the Google Index.

Google do not allow me to publish my stats or proof of earnings but they have paid me a lot of money over the years, every month without fail, and now in my own currency as well which avoids bank charges. The minimum accrued before payment is $100.

Adbrite - Various sized banners and also ads linked to your video clips and photographs. Advertisers bid for the ads shown on your pages and earnings can then be very good. Excellent payers - here is a recent email notification of my earnings for a month. Minimum payout $50

Clicksor - Banners, Pop-under Ads, Inline Text Link, search box, etc. Payout at $50 min by various methods including PayPal.

Chitika - Pay per Click (CPC) ads that can run on the same page as Adsense ads. Low minimum payout of $10 to your PayPal account.

Affiliate Schemes

You join a company as an affiliate and advertise their products on your site. When your visitors buy the product you earn commission.

I earn a modest sum each month through individual companies like Amazon and DownTownHost (one of my website hosting companies) and also through Affiliate Websites who run affiliate schemes on behalf of hundreds of companies selling thousands of products.

RegNow (Digital River) is one such Affiliate Website which represents software publishers. The range is so large there will be more than one item of software to match the content of almost any web site. Again, payment is prompt and regular each month on earnings over $100 .

represent European companies and Commission Junction those mainly in North America.

Your Shopping Cart.

If you have your own products to sell then you need to have a 'Shopping Cart' software setup on your web site for your visitors to select the products and enter their details for delivery and have means for receiving their payment.

Most hosting companies have their own 'Shopping Cart' program available on their servers for installation on your pages and can provide help setting it up.

Payment is the difficult part to set up on your 'shop'. There has been such a massive increase in Internet credit card fraud that, naturally enough, the security has been tightened.

The easiest ways are to use Payment Gateways like PayPal, Google Checkout or Amazon aStore to handle the credit card transactions on your behalf - for a fee.

Once your turnover has reached a certain amount you may approach your bank to open a Merchant Account and take 'Customer Not Present' payments from their credit card. I have this facility set up for one of my websites and it involves a lot of work and delays in receiving payment and is subject to minimum charges each month as well as for each transaction. You need to be past a certain monthly turnover before it is worth it. Conditions vary from bank to bank and country.

Paid Links

Once your website has become popular and has a respectable Google Page Rank of 4 or over and an Alexa page rank under 100,000 then you can charge a fee for a link to another site from your pages. This backlink boosts their website status and for that boost, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies will pay $20 to $80 a month to enhance the page rank of their clients with a link on your site.

It is best to place links as text in context on your page rather than a link to a gambling site on a cooking page, for instance, though in truth, some of my cooking could be considered a gamble!

How to Get Referrals

Put a referral text link on your page to a website where you are an earning member. The site may have a separate page for you to join as an affiliate with banners and text links with your reference identity added into the required HTML code to place on your site.
You may also pay other sites to show your referral banners to thousands of surfers.

When a visitor to your site clicks on the text link or banner and joins that site as a new member, you are recorded as the affiliate who referred your visitor to them.

For that referral you will earn a small amount based on all the earnings of that new member. They do not earn any less - the referral earnings are paid by the website.

Some sites have a referral program that pay several levels deep. This means that your referral may in turn refer others. When the second level referrer earns money you will get a tiny percentage of their earnings as well as your first level referrer.

You will see examples of this on sites where each referral has ten referrals under them and each one of those has another ten ref's and so on and on seven layers deep and you earn thousands of dollars!

Well that never happens. Visitors may join a site on your recommendation and work for a while and then become inactive. On some sites I have over 2,500 referrals but only a few hundred are active at any one time.

However, if you are able to get new referrals each day through advertising on your website then they replace those that drop out and your earnings can be good.