3 Ways to Monetize Your Website or Blog

There are many website and blog owners out there who have a website that generates a fair amount of traffic and are not currently doing anything to monetize that traffic.  Of course the main purpose of a website is to provide valuable information on a subject you are interested in so you can educate those who are also interested.  However, what if you could also generate some pocket change from that traffic?

There are many different programs available to help you do such a thing.  Offering up real estate space on your website is a great way to generate money off of ad impressions as well as clicks on ads.  So here are three excellent and proven successful methods to generate income off of your website:

• ·        Banner Ads:  Banner ads are display (image) ads, which are usually positioned at the top of the web page.  Usually you generate income for each impression as well as each click through.  It can be easy to find advertisers or affiliate marketers who want to use that real estate on your website because the banner ad is displayed right in front of the user.
• ·        Affiliate Links:  This is another great way to generate some income off of your website.  Affiliate links are links placed on your website that market another product or service.  And if a user that was on your website, clicks on the affiliate link and ends up purchasing something you generate a certain percentage of commission from the sale.  The key in affiliate advertising is to choose products and services to market which are in the same interest category as the content on your website.  If a user is on your website to learn about a particular product or service, obviously you’ll want to choose an affiliate product or service that the user would be interested in.
• ·      Text Advertising:  Text advertising is another effective method of monetizing your website.  This involves displaying text ads in different areas of your website real estate with the hopes that visitors will click on the text ad and you’ll generate revenue off of each click.  Although it’s more difficult to get the visitor to click on the text ad compared to display advertising, you can generate more revenue through cost per click text ads.

Generating traffic to your website is not an easy, but once you get a particular amount of traffic you can begin to utilize display advertising to generate some income.  Of course the mort effort you put into driving traffic to your website such as utilizing social media channels and search engine optimization techniques, you will be able to drive even more traffic to your website and therefore, generate more revenue.

The key to getting as much organic traffic as possible is to work on your search engine optimization.  So you choose a specific amount of keywords and key phrases and work on getting your website to page 1 of all major search engines.  By doing this you have a large amount of traffic going to your website simply because you are on the first page of results.  To learn more about how you can monetize your website, check out LookSmart’s Advertising information section.