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Making Money on The Web
Since Feb 2005 I have been experimenting with making a little
income from websites. Not by working on them and building them
for people which is one of my 'proper' sources of income, but by
actually building sites for myself that then generate an income.
Now, before you get excited, I'm not making loads, in fact the
sites are only just paying their way, but I thought I'd tell you
about them as there is certainly potential in the techniques. In
fact, quite a few people are making small fortunes using these
techniques and a small minority are making HUGE fortunes from it.
At the end of the day the techniques really all boil down to
placing advertisements on your website, but there are several
different ways to go about this. The two I have been using are
affiliate assoications and Pay Per Click
Advertising. I have also in the past few days started using
a new scheme which is in effect a combination of the two.
Affiliate Associations There are lots of online
businesses offering affiliate associations that you can sign up
to. Once signed up you can place links to products offered by
these businesses on your website and if people click on the link
and subsequently buy the product you can earn some commission
from the sale. One of the first companies to use this marketing
technique and one of the most successful affiliate programs is
that offered by Amazon. The box to the left is an example of
just one of the links that the Amazon Affiliate program can
serve. As you can see, you can link to individual products as a
way of recommending them to your websites visitors, or you can
add automatically generated links to your site that Amazon
update with bestsellers, new releases etc. If a visitor to your
site clicks on this link and then buys a product from Amazon you
will earn commission for referring them to Amazon. Commission
rates vary from around 4% to 7.5%.
I have tried taking this a step further by setting up online
'affiliate stores' such as 'Web Design Books'.
This website uses a set of scripts to obtain product information
direct from the Amazon database and present it in the form of
affiliate links arranged by category within an online store. The
advantage of using such a script is that the information is kept
up to date with the Amazon database so once set up the store is
in effect maintenance free... You should be able to just sit
back and watch the money roll in. Of course, it isn't quite that
easy. In order to make any money from it you really must put a
lot of time and effort into promoting your new web affiliate
store. Without any visitors you aren't going to make any
commission, and this is where the hard work comes in. Those
people that have the time and expertise to promote their
affiliate store can and do make a decent living from them.
Unfortunately I don't have the time to invest in such promotion
so my store sits there making the odd sell now and then... Maybe
one day I'll have some time to make more of the site.
There are plenty of other affiliate schemes, I have set up an
affiliate website selling website
templates, which again makes the odd sell now and then.
There are also sites that allow you to set up affiliate
associations with large numbers of affiliate schemes and manage
them all from one centralised location (I have tried this but
have as yet made nothing from it).
Overall affiliate schemes can and do work, but in order to make
any money from them you have to actually generate sales through
your website.
Pay Per Click Advertising Pay Per Click (PPC) advertsing
is similar to affiliate schemes as you place adverts on your
website, but you get paid everytime someone clicks on the advert
regardless of whether they subsequently buy something. The
grand-daddy of all PPC schemes at the moment is Google Adsense.
The beauty of this scheme is that it is context-sensitive. As a
web master all you have to do is place some code from Google on
your website and it will automatically work out what the topic
of that page is and serve relevant adverts to your web-page.
Hopefully these adverts will be of interest to your website's
visitors and they will click on them earning you a small revenue
each time they do. The amount you actually earn depends upon the
advert and how much the advertiser has bid to get their advert
to the top of the list.
I have implemented Google Adsense adverts on my Windsurfing,
kitesurfing and surfing website and after a slow start and
some tweaking with the positioning they do generate a little bit
of income each day. Certainly not enough to make much difference
to my annual income from real work, but they at least cover the
cost of hosting for the website which was before costing me a
fair bit to run.
Of course, if you have an extremely popular website or lots of
them, then there is no reason why contextual adverts such as
those offered by the Google Adsense program shouldn't generate
you a nice little income.
Interactive Merchandising I've recently started
experimenting with a system provided by Chitika called eMiniMalls. These are in effect a combination between
Affiliate Marketing and PPC marketing. This system can be
contextual in the same way as Google Adsense adverts or can be
based on your own set if keywords. (Note: Adsense terms and
conditions state that you can't use other contextual adverts on
the same page so if used in conjunction with Adsense, Chitika
'eMiniMalls' must be set up in non-contextual mode). The example
to above shows a Chitika eMiniMall which should be showing a
product along with the description of the product and the best
deals for places to buy that product. Revenue is earned on a
pay-per-click basis.
So far success with these has been limited, but I think that is
because all the products and best deals are American based with
prices in US Dollars, whereas the sites I have placed them on
are UK biased.
Overall, it is definitely possible to make money from your
websites. A popular site should bring in a steady trickle of
cash and maybe pay for the hosting and domain name. But, with a
little bit of effort, several websites and lots of promotion to
bring traffic to your sites you could make a living out of
it.... I'm still a VERY VERY long way off that and shall for the
time being at least have to continue to work in order to keep
the wolf from the door. But who knows, the income I do make from
them may one day at least go someway to helping my family lead a
'simple life of luxury'.
About the author:
Alan Cole runs http://www.pixelwave.co.uk, a one-person web
design studio. His aim is to provide cost effective website
design production and maintenance by offering professional web
solutions that stand out from the crowd. Increasingly his work
involves website promotion and Search Engine Optimisation as
well as training courses on all aspects of web design and
promotion.
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