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Danial Scocco from DailyBlogTips put together a great article - 28 Ways to Make Money with Your Website.

You might think you’ve read all the advice before, however it’s necessary that blog trainers continue to publish these articles to update the status of how you can profit online with a website. Plus of course, some of these ideas are new to beginners and we all know how important it is to help beginners.

What Methods Are Best?

To help augment Daniel’s suggestions, I’m going to dissect some of the points and talk about how truly profitable each method is based on my own experience, from online research and from what I have garnered from conversations with other people who use these methods. Hopefully this will help you decide which methods are worth chasing.

While I love lists of ways to make money, what I really love are stories from people who actually test the methods and provide feedback from their results. So, let’s get to it!

PPC Advertising Networks

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is a confusing label. I often think PPC advertising is the type where you go and buy ads to drive traffic to your site, not the other way around - a way to make money from a site. Regardless, in this case we are talking about Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher network and other third party advertising brokers that pay you each time someone clicks a link in an ad you place on your site.

Google AdSense works great on some sites, terrible on others. As a general guide, sites that pull ample search engine traffic, therefore a constant stream of new users, do well with AdSense and similar programs.

The system works because every day people are searching online for information, your website shows up in search results, visitor goes to your site, perhaps finds the answer they were looking for - or not, and then ideally clicks away via an AdSense link so you get paid.

I don’t know about you, but that just seems like a flawed business model, especially so because it’s usually Google delivering the search results (the traffic to your site) and also delivering the ads on your site (the AdSense). That’s an unhealthy reliance on one company for both your traffic and your income. You also drive people away from your site, which is fine if your site exists purely to do so, but I much prefer business models that depend on attracting attention and keeping it long term, not driving it away as soon as you get it.

For many sites AdSense doesn’t work because their audience is a repeat visitor, who generally do not click ad links as often because they are over exposed to them (thus inducing ad-blindness), though this is highly dependent on the niche you target.

If your readers know what AdSense is and looks like, chances are they won’t click and mentally block ads out whenever visiting your site. However, I’d say a good majority of web users still do not realize that an AdSense ad is actually an ad, and will happily click away, so a repeat audience that is not “AdSense savvy” may be profitable.

AdSense did not perform well on this site, nor has any other contextual ad network I have tested, however I still run AdSense on a couple of my sites. It’s great when you don’t have the time or resources or motivation to test other methods, however I think you will find nearly all big earning sites have moved beyond AdSense. There’s just more money to be made using other techniques, though doesn’t necessarily mean you have to exclude it.

I view AdSense as a good tool for bloggers who don’t want to worry about maximizing income through other methods and just want what they can get with AdSense and spend their time on the website itself. AdSense and the other PPC ad networks are good starting points because of ease of use, however as all top online money earners realize, it’s not the best way to profit from a website. Test it, optimize it, but never rely solely on it.

CPM Advertising Networks

CPM is oldschool. Charging per 1000 visitors went out a long time ago as far as I am concerned. I have not charged for advertising using this method or used CPM brokers on my sites for a long time because they rarely pay high enough to make it worth while.

I tested CPM on a forum based site a long time ago and it underperformed compared to charging a monthly fee. As Daniel states, you really need high volume to make this work. Most of the bloggers and website owners I know and train are not hosting sites with massive amounts of page impressions, which is why I recommend staying clear of CPM.

If you are a Yahoo sized website, or close to it, then CPM might work. Somehow I doubt there are many webmasters with websites that large reading this article, and if they are, they probably don’t need my help with monetization.

Direct Banner Advertising

Banners are oldschool too, however we are talking about a medium here and not a way of pricing advertising. Banners can be priced using any method you like and when used with a pay per month or year or any time period system work very well, even on smaller sites.

I use banner advertising on nearly all my sites and sell directly to advertisers myself. I charge anywhere from $50 to $250 per month for blocks of banners and attract advertises using a well structured advertise page and leverage the existing traffic going to the sites to find sponsors.

This is a method I strongly recommend you implement on your blog or website as soon as you crack 100 visitors a day, or if you can hold out, 500 visitors a day. Install OpenAds, set up some adzones, create an advertise page and write a post saying you have advertising positions available.

If that doesn’t work to attract sponsors, go find other sites that target the same audience as you and see who sponsors them. Generally sponsors like to spread their campaign across many sites, so if they sponsor competing or complimentary sites to your own, they may be interested in throwing some money your way too. You never know until you ask.

Text Link Ads

Let me be the first (not!) to say that text link ads are dying. Google did a great job at discouraging the practice for the purposes of search engine optimization, although some still sell links and pass on ranking juice, while others sell links with nofollow applied to adhere to Google’s guidelines.

Am I making money from text links still? Yes I am. Do I make as much as I did before the Google PR slap? No I do not. Will I continue to sell text links? Yes, as long as their are buyers.

The simple fact is text links will still sell because some webmasters don’t give a hoot about Google and some advertisers have no idea what nofollow is. As long as there are buyers and sellers, there will be commerce.

In your case, you have the option to be a seller, so it doesn’t hurt to try. I recommend applying nofollow to the links if your PageRank points and Google search results are important to you (and for most website owners the latter definitely is and the former remains relevant, as much as we may not want it to be). Make text links available, be honest about your use of nofollow if you apply it and see if you get any takers.

Affiliate Marketing

This cheque (go aussie spelling!) pretty much sums up my opinion and results with affiliate marketing -

Affiliate marketing is a beautiful way to make money from a website, however there is an element to it that is similar to AdSense that I don’t like - you drive traffic away from your site.

Smart affiliates capture their leads and then promote affiliate products, but this is something that many website owners and bloggers still do not do.

In my opinion, affiliate income should be the icing on the cake of a business model that is entirely sustainable without the affiliate income.

One outcome of a business model that builds a way to communicate with an audience and foster a relationship with that audience (essentially what all good businesses do), is the creation of a distribution channel to market affiliate products whenever you so choose to.

To clarify, I have built a blog and an email list to primarily sell my own products (although it didn’t start out that way), but I can use them to also market affiliate items. With assets that have the attention of people you may choose to promote affiliate products and thus enjoy lucrative “bonuses” above and beyond selling the core service or product your business produces. Whether you decide to do this is up to you, but it sure is nice to have the option.

Some webmasters focus on affiliate income as their core model and the best make a ridiculous amount of money doing so - way more than I do (my friend Nikhil in Sydney sells affiliate products and pockets around $4000 A DAY profit). Your passion in this case has to be profit creation, in other words, you love building the systems that make money. If your passion and creativity lie elsewhere, you may have trouble getting up every day just to look at spreadsheets and keyword click-through rates.

Monetization Widgets

WidgetBucks is the only tool in this class of monetization method that Daniel came up with that I have actually used, and well, it sucked.

However I hear reports - Darren for one - that it can be profitable, especially on product focused sites.

Without enough credible data to draw from, I can’t really offer any advice beyond saying to test it. My hunch though is that, like AdSense, this is a lazy-man’s option for monetizing a website that won’t beat other methods like selling direct advertising if you have the traffic. It might go well in your advertising mix, but I doubt it will be the biggest earner for any webmaster who takes the time to test against other options. No doubt there are a few examples out there that can prove me wrong.

Sponsored Reviews

I’ve gone completely off sponsored reviews. To be honest, I never really liked them and the biggest drive for me was the money (and I’m starting to care A LOT less about the money). It was a struggle to try and write about something I really wasn’t that interested in, but I knew I had to at least create an article that was interesting, or risk losing readers.

I think it is acceptable for people to do paid reviews with disclosure, but most bloggers do not have the traffic to make it a very high paying gig. Writing a tiny article for $25 will not make you rich, nor will it build your blog traffic because the content will suck. Writing a well thought out and entertaining review for $50, which takes three hours to complete, is still not that appealing unless you love the subject matter or were going to review the product or website anyway.

Sponsored reviews are probably something only a few bloggers, like John Chow, can justify doing on a regular basis.

John is an entertainer. He can write a review and his audience will increase rather than unsubscribe and he gets paid big cash to do so because of how large his audience is. As long as he continues to enjoy writing reviews (or find people to write them for him) and doesn’t drown his site in too many, it’s a formula that is, well okay - it’s still just a high paying writing gig. Remember John will not blog forever (no one will) and the money will stop when the reviews are no longer written.

For the average webmaster or blogger, I suggest steering clear of paid reviews unless you go giddy over the subject matter or you are desperate for the money. As I tell my students in Blog Mastermind, sometimes the fact that you make some money, even if it is a sponsored review, is motivation enough to keep doing it, at least for the short term.

Sponsors for Single Columns or Events

I’ve never invited sponsorship for a once off event so I won’t go into depth on this one, but I think it has merit.

Most sites are undermonetized. Mine is. I could commit to doing a weekly podcast instead of a “whenever I feel like it” podcast and attract sponsors for it. I could do a regular video tutorial using camtasia and preface it with a sponsor message.

There are always new ways to make money if you look at all the different ways people pay attention. Where there is attention, there is profit potential. Whether you want to put your energy there is another question.

Premium Content and Membership/Mentoring Sites

Now we are talking. These techniques can be the basis of a Real Internet Business. They work because you produce value and can sell that value over and over again. There are a lot of ingredients you need to get right to position yourself to launch a membership site, or a mentoring program or a premium content area, but once you have an asset that actually satisfies people, sound marketing can take you very far - much father than any of the other monetization methods mentioned thus far.

That last paragraph shouldn’t be read as a blanket statement that applies to all situations. There are blogs and sites out there that do great with advertising models and/or a subscription model simply wouldn’t work. However, for the average blogger or small time website owner, a real opportunity exists to sell premium resources and is usually a quicker path to stable income, compared to growing your site to a hundred thousand unique visitors a month to cash in on AdSense.

Most bloggers do not look beyond advertising as a means to monetize, so sadly there are very few case studies besides the really big players, to show whether this methodology works (if you have a case study to tell, please reply in comments or a blog post of your own).

There’s another reason there are so few examples - it’s hard to pull off. You need a critical mass of audience, marketing savvy, technological resources and good copy. The average blogger or website owner do not meet these conditions.

I expect over time more people will take steps towards selling premium and membership site content, but there’s a lot of learning ahead of them if they want to be successful at it. And yes, I’m still learning and stumbling along to success with this method myself.

Selling the Website

I’m glad Daniel mentioned this option. A lot of people understand the opportunity that exists to flip websites as a way to make money. Here’s just a few of the articles I’ve produced over the years on the subject -

• How To Buy A Website And Flip It For Profit
• How I Generate $1675 Per Month Passive Income From Buying Websites
• How To Leverage Blog Income To Build A Web Property Portfolio
• Buying and Selling Websites The Ed Dale Way

What many website owners don’t think about is what I wrote about a long time ago in this post - You may never make real money until you sell your business. I wrote that article back in August 2005, and you know what - it still holds true.

If webmasters and bloggers treat their sites like businesses, then they won’t focus so much on how much or how little they make today, but what they can eventually make tomorrow. With an attitude of investing for the future, bloggers can forgo taking profits today to grow their asset and then when times comes to sell, walk away with a really big check (gotta mix up my spellings).

This means that revenues from advertising income are not spent on frivolous things, but instead you spend profits to produce more assets. Create resources for your readers, get a membership site set up or pay a copywriter to produce a really good sales page. Pay a freelancer to write more content, produce a series of videos or audios, or buy traffic from pay per click or Stumbleupon. The options for reinvestment are many.

Daniel touched upon this topic in an advanced lesson he produced for Blog Mastermind, where he reviewed the Harvest vs. Growth mentality of blogging. I also alluded to the idea of selling your blog as your primary profit strategy in my series on Blogging As A Sustainable Business Model Series, because - and this applies to you too - you will not want to write to your blog forever.

It’s almost a certainty at some point you will want to cease any involvement with your website whatsoever. At this time you either simply stop and walk away, or you sell or give your website to someone else.

More Ideas For Profiting From Your Website

Daniel covers more opportunities in his post, so if you haven’t already, go read his article - 28 Ways to Make Money with Your Website.

Just remember, despite all the options available, for most of us we can only realistically expect to successfully implement a few of them. The time and energy required to test and maintain any one monetization technique is enough to keep one webmaster or blogger very busy. If you attempt to do it all on your own expect to work longer than full time hours. If you really want to profit big, you need to bring on help so you can test multiple methods and manage multiple projects.

Yaro Starak
Not Testing Everything