3 Basic Ways To Monetize Your Website

Basic Ways To Monetize Your Website:

This article assumes that your website is content or community based, as apposed to product or service based.

What follows is a short list of methods you can use to monetize your website.
You should note that any of these methods use should be complementary to yuor website, for example, if you have a webiste about all the latest and greatest dog collars, you wouldn't want to advertise a hair growth solution (Unless by some minute chance it happened to be for bald dogs), as your website visitors wont buy it and are likely to think less of you for showing them something that is way off the mark for why they came to your site in the first place.

A better product that you could comfortably promote would be dog toys, as it's directly related to your audience's interests and in doesn't conflict with the content of your website.

Contextual Advertising:

I've put this one at the top for the simple fact that it's the easiest and quickest to set up, and is most commonly used.
Conextual advertising (Google Adsense for example) automatically places ads on your website in a location of your choosing (i.e. wherever you place their ad code), the ad provider will scan the webpage, and place ads that are directly related to the content of your webpage, kind of like an automated advertisement search engine.

You might not like the idea of some unknown entity placing ads on your website, but the truth is that for most contextual advertising companies, you'll be provided with a very high degree of controll over which ads appear on your website.

For example let's pretend that xyzDogCollars.com has started placing ads with the content network who you happen to be displaying ads for on your website?
Not a problem, if you know in advance who you don't want to be able to advertise on your website, then quite simply type in their url into the control panel you'll be given access to, and no ads for that website will ever darken your website again.
Even if you don't know in advance who you don't want to appear on your website, this is not a problem, look at your website at the ads that are appearing, if you see something you don't like, write down the address, type it into your control panel like before, and hey presto, that website will also no longer be able to advertise on your website.

The old way of doing this was to have people ask if they could advertise on your website, you manage it, and hope they stick around for the next month, if not, you'll have to hunt around for someone else, in the mean time you're website is earning $0.
Many people still do this, and it's actually not such a bad thing to do this as a compliment to your other monetization efforts, but relying on it solely will take up too much time to be worth it, unless you happen to have a large website where people are willing to pay a lot of money for advertising space with you, in which case, go for it!

So as you can see, allowing contextual ads on your website should in theory free up plenty of time for you to do what you do best, create content and manage your community.

Sponsored Links:

Sponsored links are simply links that people pay to have placed on your website. They can be contextual (Which Google Adsense can also handle), or they can be non contextual, i.e. you tell a link selling company what the content of your website is about (Usually through a crude dropdown system of a limited number of categories), and they place ads in a predetermined location (Normally of your choosing - via some ad code).
An alternative to the above 2 options, you could opt to sell links to people who have requested them, that way you know exactly what you're getting and can ensure that it's as complimentary as possible.

The advantage is that it takes up less screen real estate and can be automated (If you want it to be).
The downside is that if you take the automated, non-contextual route, you're going to find it difficult to tell if the link is actually relevant without going to the website. The search engine results are entirely based on relevance, as soon as your website appears less relevant (By linking to websites that are not highly relevant to yours) you could see a drop in rankings.

Not too long ago google dropped a website called text link ads from their index, this makes me a little biased towards not using non-contextual links, unless you're hand picking them yourself.

Affiliate Programs:

Last but not least we have affiliate programs.
These can get you a pretty nice income, however it's much more difficult to implement and maintain. The reason for this is the in most cases, simply slapping up a link to the website isn't enough, as most pay per sale rather than per click on per 1,000 impressions, this means that you'll have to put in some effort to pre-sell someone on the idea of the product, and then show them where they can go get it.
The best way to use these is to create product reviews, make sure your review is accurate, don't bother writing a review for any old product saying how great it is if it's not, if you do, you'll quickly lose any credibility you had.
Again, the rule of thumb is to pick products that will compliment your website content and be of interest to your audience.

Clickbank is a fairly popular affiliate network, most of the products there work via pay per sale.

I hope you've found this article helpful in making a start, in another article I will go into more depth and give specific reviews for websites and services that fall into the categories above.