Making Money With Your Site

Websites make money. You know they must, or there would not be so many out there. If you have a little hobby site that you enjoy, then you can begin to make money with it.

How much money do you want to make with your site? Well, that depends entirely on your site, of course, and your ambition. You may want to make enough money for the site to pay for itself. If you are paying a rough $10 annual registration fee and a $5 a month hosting fee, then your site will need to make roughly $6 a month for it to pay for itself.

That figure is definitely not much, and you can make that money without much effort. If you would like to make your hobby a little profitable, however, you can set a limit. Keep in mind that part of making money online is about drawing people to your site, and you may need advertising dollars to do that. At any rate, you should know how much you want to make in the long run as well as how much you think is reasonable to make at this point.

The first way to make money through your site is to add content-based ads to your site. Google ads are the most common although there are a few, smaller competitors out there. Yahoo and MSN are supposed to release similar versions in the near future. You will recognize these ads from sites you have visited. They are small and look like classified ads, but they say powered by Google at the bottom. As someone who will be displaying the ads, you will want to sign up for AdSense.

The basic concept is that people come to your site and see the ads. Google picks the ads automatically, and they are based on the content on your site. People will click the ads to see similar websites. When people click the ads, then you will make money. The money you make from each ad depends on the popularity of your topic and how much the person paid to have the ad published. For most topics, you cannot expect more than about 20 cents per click. While that does not seem like much, it will add up.

The second major way that you can make money from your site is to offer affiliate programs. If you have a hobby site, then you are not looking to invest in major affiliate marketing. The concept works this way. You would sign up with a merchant, such as Target or Amazon. You would get a way to link from your site to theirs. You would recommend a specific product and include a link.

When people click on the link on your site and buy something, you get a small commission. The commission may be only 5 percent or so of the sale price. As with the Google ads, the amount you make from an individual sale is not much, but it adds up over time. Again, if you are only trying to have your hobby pay for itself, then you will not need to make much each day to have the site make enough money.

Through content ads and affiliate marketing, you should be able to make a decent income. Over time, you can experiment with other ways of making money online. For example, you can work on a newsletter, which will promote the products for which you are an affiliate. You also can run your own ads to get people to your site. You can begin selling products that you have created or purchasing a reseller license from someone else to sell her or his products.

Making money with your website is not difficult. Making a significant amount of money with your website is far more complicated. For your purposes on a hobby site, though, your job is just to bring in a little dough. Hobbies are wonderful, but we find that we can enjoy them even more if they provide a little extra cash, even if we are just using that cash to add a little fun to our lives. Work on your hobby site, and you can be making money soon.

By Julia Mercer