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Making Money
*Also See Famous Adnetworks and Affiliate Programs from the Past
*Also See Online Advertising Terminology
| The Internet unlike most other
mediums that exists offers a variety of ways to make
money for small businesses, internet entrepreneurs, and
even amateurs pationate about a given topic. One can make
money via advertising, selling your own product or
service, selling subscriptions for access to your content
or service, or gaining commissions off of selling other's
products or services or providing leads. But with
anything in life making money is never easy. Although one
can make money via any of the means mentioned above;
earning money from advertising is the most popular method
for small content oriented sites which make up the bulk
of what the internet is. To understand how money is made
now and what today's internet environement is like as far
as money making one has to have a vantage point on how
things used to be and how the internet still operates
today. Most small sites rely on ad networks and affiliate
networks to sell advertising for them on a CPC and CPM
basis even though the rates are quite low. A more in depth break down of methods to make money from an English Language website include: 1. CPM & CPC Above the Fold banner 2. Ad Networks Banner Below the Scroll 3. Popups and Popunders (provide standalone popups and popunders not bundled with banner) 4. Search Box and Pay Per Search Programs 5. CPM and CPC buttons, skyscrapers, and Text 6. Affiliate Programs Affiliate programs pay a website when a sale or a lead is generated from visitors referred to other sites. The major networks for affiliate programs are CJ, Linkshare, Befree among others. You can also use an affiliate site such as AffiliateTips.com to find and compare affiliate programs. There are also a variety of inhouse offered affiliate programs such as *Read More |
| 7. Direct Product Sales Software or Durable Merchandise Sales If a site is ecommerce related then it would be all about selling merchandise. A site can also acquire merchandise related to its theme and opt to sell it directly for higher profit margins as well. Designing an ecommerce site tends to be more complicated than a content-based site and you'll need to handle credit card processing through either a merchant account or a packaged ecommerce shopping cart. T-shirts, pins, hats, and other branded merchandise This would be to sell merchandise that appeals to a site's fans and sense of loyalty. Your own line of videos, books, audio CDs/tapes, or posters If people enjoy a website they might enjoy similar content in video format, or print, or via posters. These types of things can be sold to site visitor's too. 8. Paid Content or Subscriptions If a site has loyal visitors that love everything the site offers then perhaps offering extra content via subscriptions or per article fees might be another possible revenue stream. It is not wise to offer exclusively paid content as it is hard to get people to come to a site that they have to pay for to begin with. But by providing quality free content a portion of a site's visitors might can be enticed to be willing to pay for even more content or special articles or perhaps access to articles in a more timely fashion. If a site is great one can charge for many things without actually reducing the free content that is the heart of a site. One can charge for the privaledge of viewing a site without any ads at all. One can charge for access to special message boards or live online chat sessions with people of interest to a site's visitor. By making special message boards read only to non subscribers and chat sessions archived for non subscribers it is possible to provide paid content to regualar visitors in a slightly less attractive form. 9. Paid Syndication of Content If one has a site with lots of content that is going to be of use to the general public it may be possible to be paid by other sites to allow them to use portions of your content. Portals pay for search services, updated news feeds, and other things. If your site is of mass appeal maybe portals or news sites might be interested in carrying your content to help their visitor's stick around longer. Content syndication is also a possibility if your content is of a product oriented nature that can be used by ecommerce sites to help them have more content to increase their cusotmer retention and sales rates. 10. Asking for Donations Directly coming out to site visitors and asking for money to help maintain a site is a method of revenue generation that has gained popularity in the last year or two partly because of just how bad the online advertising market is. One can allow for donations to be paid by the Amazon Honor program or via paypal for simplicity or develop your own system of revenue collection. When accepting credit cards online per transaction fees of 25 cents to 50 cents make smaller donations unworkable so one should shoot for higher dollar amount donations than your handling and process fees at a minimum. 11. Tell a Friend Programs Tell a friend programs are programs that allow visitor's to a site to email their friends and tell them about your site. By doing this through an outside company, a tell a friend program can pay the webmaster of the site for ads shown to those who refer your site to a friend and for those that sign up for other commercial oriented email lists. 12. Email Newsletters and Coregistrations An email newsletter can serve as a way to lock in site visitors whom you can send ads to via email in the future. Also the sign up process for an email newsletter can be used to offer other email lists that can be signed up to. These other lists pay the referring webmaster when someone signs up for them and are known as coregistrations. |