How to Make Money Online

There are a number of strategies for making money online, with different approaches being a better fit for some people and businesses than others. For an overview to help you consider strategies for making money online that might work for you, read this article.

Related article: How Reliable is Your Web Host?

Selling

If you have a product that can be downloaded, like software, or shipped, like a mug, or bought at your storefront, or if you have a service that can be tendered over the web, accessed remotely by other means, or provided in person, then consider whether selling on the Internet would be a plus for your business. If it seems useful, you can set up an eCommerce site with access to features like catalog management, security, services for shopping carts and checkout, etc.

No product? Well, perhaps you can sell your opinion to a business like ReviewME (http://reviewme.com/) PayPerPost (http://payperpost.com/index.html), or SponsoredReviews (http://sponsoredreviews.com/). According to one site, one blogger earned almost $3,000 in one month from such reviews.

Advertising

Advertising is another way to make money online. You create sites—websites or blogs, for example—and sign up with a company like Google AdSense to put advertising links on your site. As your visitors click through, you get paid on a pay per click (PPC) basis. There are different types of ads available, with the three most common being:

• Banner ads—advertisements that are a standard 468 pixels x 60 pixels and generally appear at the top or bottom of web pages.
• pop-up ads—advertisements that display in a new browser window that steals the focus from the browser window you were looking at.
• text-based ads—text-based ads are notable for having no images

Affiliate Networks

Joining an affiliate network can be beneficial for you—because you gain income when they click through and purchase products—but also for your customers, whom you are providing with opportunities to learn about and purchase products that are likely to be of interest. You can affiliate with just one merchant or more than one.

Two of the affiliate networks you might wish to check first are LinkShare (http://www.linkshare.com) and Commission Junction (http://www.cj.com). Both have some major players as clients.

Domain Parking

Another way to make money online involves registering domain names and then parking it and allowing advertising to appear on the page. The pay-per-click ads provide you with income for which you don't have to do anything.

Donations

It's now become typical for bloggers and social networking pages to provide visitors with opportunities to make donations to the site owner. Sometimes this is clearly linked to a service being provided.

For example, a blogger has a site which s/he has attempted to monetize in a number of ways. Perhaps s/he provides useful information of some kind in his or her postings, has affiliated with makers of closely linked products, has AdSense ads that connect to his or her topic and wants a way to invite support from people who aren't into advertising links. The opportunity provided by a donation plug-in, perhaps one with a PayPal link, and an invitation to donate might just work. Both Blogger and WordPress have donation plug-ins available.

News Coverage

If you're more into information than straight advertising, you might be interested in Voxant Newsroom (http://thenewsroom.com), which provides an alternative approach to monetizing your website. What Voxant offers is a chance to add news content to your site as text, images, and video. Each type of information has an accompanying advertisement and you get credit for views/clicks as appropriate. The content sponsors include respected media outlets, like AP, the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, and Reuters. Other participants include MTV and CBS, as well as the National Basketball Association (NBA) and National Hockey League (NHL).

Related article: How Reliable is Your Web Host?