Make money with your Website

You want to make money by putting banner ads on your website, good idea! I'll tell you how to make a profit right here. First, you need a website, this makes you a "publisher" Then you need traffic on your site Sign up with advertisers to put ads on your site Watch the money roll in!

Sounds simple, and it is. Sounds easy, but it's not!

Should you build a website first or examine the ads first? If you don't already have a site, look at all the banner ads you can while you surf the web. Think about how you would design a webpage to fit the ads. This site is not designed that way, I made the site first and later added the ads. You can put most sites into one or the other of these catagories. Many sites are designed only to make money from "for pay" links, they usually have little or no content, they just hope to catch the occasional surfer. On the other hand, sites like Sailing Texas are there for a reason, to provide information or a service, not just to make a place to sell ads!

To help your site succeed, make it fast, really fast. 50% of web users are still on dial up modems! This site is slow at times because of all the photos, but photos are good! I keep the file sizes as small as possible by keeping picture size small and changing the color depth to 256 colors. Reducing to 72 dots per inch helps too. Big files means more bandwidth used by your site, which costs you money. When your site starts getting a lot of traffic, the extra bandwidth costs can eat up all your income! But more important, people will leave if the page loads too slow.

For your site to be successful, it should provide a service. Usually information or entertainment. There are many sites that will tell you how to make a good website, so I'm not going to go into that here. But I will say that for you to get a lot of traffic, you need some INFORMATION on it. People want information, that is why they're on the web! You probably know a lot about something, if you can make a site that will make that knowledge available to others, they will use it. One way to success is to make a new page for your website, with CONTENT, every day. Some say if you do this for one year you will be a success.

So, this page has information, how to make money on the web. It holds what I have learned about advertising. Since I'm learning all the time, this page is different than it was a month ago, and will be different in another month.

Three main catagories for profits are available, Search engines that pay Being an "associate" Banner ads Google Adsense

Search engines,

I tried Search Traffic, place their search box on your site and they pay 6 cents per use. You put a search box like the one to the right on your site and when someone uses it AND clicks through to one of the search results, you get 6 cents. It sorta works, it's simple, and you don't need a lot of traffic to sign up. Unfortunately, people don't use it! It gives results based on who will pay them 12 cents per click, and I'm removing it from my site. It seems to be a good company, with good reporting, and I've not seen complaints about not being paid. Just that it isn't paying me enough on my site to pay for the bandwidth. Others have success with it.