Many people dream of making money from a website, but have no idea how to go about it. The most common method is through the use of advertising. You are paid whenever a visitor to your site clicks on an ad which is displayed there. Pay-per-view advertising is also used, for which you are paid for each person viewing a page when the ad loads.

If you have an established website, you can take a look at the traffic you're already getting to determine what kinds of advertising are best suited to your current visitors. If you are setting up a website for the purposes of making money, you will go about it a bit differently.

Developing Your Site

If you're e starting a new website, you have a bit of freedom in targeting your audience. You can work backwards to some extent, choosing your advertising approach first and then building a site to support it and pull in visitors.

However, you should stick to topics about which you yourself are excited. You need to have that enthusiasm to keep your site updated and active, and your visitors will soon lose interest if you come across as uninteresting. You don't want to feel like maintaining the site is drudgery; it should be fun.

Choosing the Look

Your website needs to be attractive or you will defeat your purpose. No one wants to stay at a site which looks ugly and is hard to use. By no means should the site look like a page of ads with the content seeming to be an afterthought. Position your ads cleanly to the top, sides, and/or bottom of your page.

Include straightforward navigation on each page so your visitors can easily move forward, back, and to your home page. Use tagging and menus to help them find what they're looking for. Use images and videos to attract the eye and make your visitors want to hang around.

With more and more people using mobile web these days, you should have your site optimized for mobile so your fans can connect with you on the go, too.

Killer Content

If you're serious about making money with your website, you need more than people just visiting your site. You need them to stay and you need them to come back.

Blogging is the most direct way to go about producing content for your site. You should have a coherent topic, rather than being all over the place, unless your unique hook is your writing style. Choose something that you are going to be interested in writing about often and for the foreseeable future. Remember, keep it fun for yourself.

Your posts should go up on a regular schedule. Weekly is best, bi-weekly if you really don't have the time. Monthly is probably too infrequent for you to really develop a strong readership. If you have trouble getting out a weekly or bi-weekly post, consider working with a team or inviting guest bloggers to help you out.

Each post should end with a question. This encourages your visitors to stick around to comment, which makes them feel a part of your community. They are then more likely to come back and to tell their friends.

Search engine crawlers learn to come back more often to sites which update regularly, which will boost your ranking. Use of strong keywords and spreading external links, such as posting to social media when your posts go up, will also help your ranking, which in turn will bring more visitors to your site.

Sharing the Love

In addition to your loyal readers, you want to continually be getting new ones. This means spreading the word about your blog. You will do some of this yourself, but it's even better if your readers tell their friends.

Make it easy for them by including sharing buttons for the most popular social media sites. You can also install a plugin which automatically posts any comments to the commenter's social media page.

Be Patient, Be Organized

While it is possible to make a decent amount of money from a website, it's not something that happens overnight. So don't quit your day job right away. It's going to take some time for you to become established.

Just as with any business, you should have a clear plan about what kinds of advertising you will use, how you will promote your site, and what your goals and expectations are. This will make it much easier for you to visualize what you need to do to achieve those goals.

Schedule your activities, including spending time on marketing, interacting on social media, attending to your site, and reviewing your analytics. You don't have to do all these things every day, but you should do something every day. Make it a habit and you will be rewarded with greater gains.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is another frequently used method for making money on your website. Through these programs, you earn a commission when someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link. Affiliate programs exist for many online shopping websites, multi-level marketing organizations, and for various products. A Google search will turn up many possibilities for you to choose from.

Track Your Traffic

It's important for you to understand where your traffic is coming from. This will allow you to determine which of your marketing strategies is most successful, and will enable you to target your advertising more directly. The popular blogging platforms include analytics, and you can always use Google's powerful and customizable free tools to evaluate your site.

You will see how many visits your site has received daily and how those visitors got there. With this information, you will be able to focus your marketing efforts more narrowly to the places where your visitors are actually coming from, and develop improved strategies to attract attention where you haven't been doing as well.

Subscriptions

Another way to make money is to sell subscriptions to a private members area. The content and features there need to be genuinely premium or you're going to be processing a lot of refunds. Don't be greedy, either. Your goal should be to get a large number of subscribers each of whom pays a reasonable amount.

To figure out how much to charge, look at other sites with similar subscriptions to yours and make a judgment call. To encourage people to join, describe your price as a "special rate" or "limited-time discount," even if you don't plan to raise the price. This isn't really deceptive; after all, you could choose to raise the price at any time - but it does make people more likely to take advantage of your program.

Conclusion

It is possible to make money with a website, but it's not particularly easy. You need to be dedicated to keeping the site fresh, with compelling content, and use good marketing techniques to spread the word. Use your analytics to strengthen your approach. Stick to it and you will soon be making money!

Gideon J E is a successful online marketer and share his success secrets on his website.

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