How you can make money from your website

For a website to make money, it needs to sell something. Right? Well, yes and no. Your website can sell a product or service, and it can also sell the opportunity for another business to connect with the visitors who browse it.

Just like a billboard on a busy road, your website is in a prime position to reach passers-by. In this case, it could be used by businesses to showcase their brands.

Think about how news sites make money. The more traffic they have, the more ads they get, and the more money they make. It is not just media organisations or major brands that take advantage of this business model. Many small business owners and hobbyists are capitalising on the opportunity.

Anyone with a website can start making money by signing up on Google’s AdSense, which places text or image ads on a site and then pays the site’s owner each time someone clicks on the ads. These Ads are matched to each site’s content, so that browsers who are already interested in topics related to the product or service can be reached.

Everyday Nigerians who have signed up websites to pursue hobbies or share their passions with others are now finding new unexpected new career path through AdSense. I recently heard of a lady who started her website to share news and ideas about craft projects. In a short period of time, she found that her posts were shared by many others, who were interested in her posts and could not just ignore them.

Her husband suggested that she should consider signing up for Google’s AdSense of making money from her site’s loyal audience. While she never intended to generate revenue from her site, she now makes $500 per week from AdSense to support her regular incomes.

Every time someone clicks on one of the ads on her website, she makes money. The more people visit the site, the higher more clicks the ads get. That translates to more money for her.

Other business-savvy entrepreneurs have built their entire businesses on this model. Peter Fiasco, a 30-year-old Melbourne entrepreneur who quit his paid job to pursue a personal business, unveiled a global employment classified site called jobsearchusa.org from his lounge room. Traffic to Peter’s website boomed in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. Now, jobsearchusa.org attracts some 10,000 unique visitors each day. One year after first opening his site to AdSense, Peter is getting an annual turnover in the realm of $1m.

As a website owner, this means you don’t have to worry about visitors being shown irrelevant ads. If your website is all about pet-care then AdSense or any other online advertising service you choose will place an ad for pet accommodation services.

Likewise, if your website focuses on healthy eating recipes, then an ad for personal training would be appropriate to show someone who is searching your site for helpful tips to lose weight. The ad is targeted to the content which the user is already reading, so it is unobtrusive, informative and relevant.

Website owners still have control over the type of ads which appear. This is particularly useful to make sure that Ads work with your site’s aesthetics. The types of restrictions you can place on advs include being able to choose text ads or image ads or both, the colours of the ads, the design template and even the position of the ads on your website. In addition to ensuring the ads suit your site design, experimenting with changes in the colours and placement of ads can drastically impact the revenue which the ads generate.

The beauty is that the better your website is, the more money you’re likely to make. Advertisers tend to pay more to advertise on sites with lots of ‘eyeballs’ and to capture the attention of a niche audience which is highly-engaged in a particular topic.

Think about your own browsing behaviour. If you don’t bookmark your favourite sites, you’ll most certainly visit the same ones regularly; whether it’s your local tv guide or a weather forecasting service. This kind of loyalty and engagement with a particular area of interest means that website owners with highly-focused content also have a strong proposition for advertisers.

So whether you’re a serious business or a hobbyist who wouldn’t mind making some extra money on the side, online advertising services are clever ways of connecting your website’s audience with interested advertisers.