Your website may be a source of income that you can use to your advantage. Often it’s not appropriate or desirable to do so, however for some people, the desire to generate revenue from your website can be quite compelling. Below are 5 ways to generate income from your site.
- Banner advertising
- Clickable Links
- Affiliations
- Direct Sales
- Charge a fee for site access/membership
Banner advertising is one of the most popular and effective ways to maximize profits without much investment of time or resources. There are Third Party applications like Adbrite, and Xigla Software's Absolute Banner Manager that permit you to run a campaign to place advertisements on your site. These programs are advertisement rotation systems that allow you to choose advertizing zones, designate the different ads to display in those zones, and determine the frequency of the ad rotations. The programs also keep track of the number of clicks each ad receives, and provide helpful reports that you can use to keep your advertisers informed. It’s a lot easier and profitable than you might think.
Clickable links are also popular; Google has a program called Google AdSense that places Google advertisers on your site and you simply take a percentage of the click-through revenues. This is really effective on websites with a high volume of viewers. One disadvantage to using this type of revenue-generator is that if people click on the Google ads, they are directed away from your website. For that reason, it is important to be vigilant about the placement of the ads, to make sure that you aren't losing valuable customers to the Google advertisers. If you have ever followed a link to a page that looks like a mini search engine (such as www.vinesellers.com), you have probably found one type of "Pay-Per-Click" advertising campaign, in which the entire site is advertisements. Notice that there is no content other than ads from GoDaddy. These are websites set solely to profit from Pay-Per-Click advertising.
Affiliations are nothing new, and while websites have streamlined the process, many businesses will pay for leads/sales that you direct to their sites. These can be in the form of a “spiff”, or discounts to the referrer. A classic example is the domain name reseller market. Not all companies can be certified registrars but you can become a reseller that registers domains for other people. By reselling, companies can skim a percentage of the sale, get a spiff or discounted services as a referral.
Direct sales, or selling products from your website through a shopping cart or Paypal, is not for everyone. You must beware of the hidden costs of retail. If you have a brick-n-mortar shop selling widgets, the easy leap is to sell the same products online. This can work really well, but can be as much work as opening a second business. Just because you have a website doesn't mean that people will find it. An online retail store needs more than a great website, it also mandates a strong marketing campaign. With billions of websites online, something has to direct people to your store other than "word of mouth". If you are confident in the marketing of your product, online sales can be a great way to reach clients all over the world, and your online store never closes.
Fee based membership websites are those that require users to pay for a membership in order to access content. This only works if you have content that people want or must have. Publications such as The New York Times and Associated Press have used this with great success, most likely because they have a large number of people that find their content important enough to buy. Generally these models work best with syndicated content (content generated from other sources and published in one place), so that it is plentiful and constantly being updated.
In conclusion, take advantage of the web as a way to send you revenue. It’s not as hard as you might think and depending on the number of people that visit your website, adding one or more of these revenue generators to your site can be quite profitable. Having access to a knowledgable web development company, such as Mindfly, can help you determine which methods will be best for your business.
