Making Money Online

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Making money online is a goal of many bloggers and website owner/publishers. How easy is it and what tools do you need to get the cash rolling in? First of all you need a good site, one that gets under people’s skin and they have to visit your site every week or preferably everyday. Unique visits can give a site good numbers for a day, return visits give your site real growth.

Affiliate programs, such as Amazon.com’s Associates Program, provided the first ways for early solo and small Web publishers to make a few bucks on their websites. In these programs, an online retailer will pay you, the publisher, a percentage on sales made after customers click through from your website to the retailer’s site. Links can include traditional banner ads, search forms and links to individual products.

Because you only earn money when sales are made, affiliate programs will work best for you if your site’s readers are consistently looking to make high-priced purchases — for example, if you run a product review site.

If you’re interested in affiliate program, browse through merchant directories like Commission Junction and LinkShare to find retailers that offer products that fit your site’s topic and audience.

Once registered with a merchant’s program, you can create an ad or product link on your site using a snippet of Web code downloaded from the retailer. Some merchants go further and allow you to create virtual storefronts that match the design of your site, but where the retailer still handles all the inventory and commerce. Be careful setting up such arrangements — unless you want customers coming to you for return and refund questions instead of to the retailer.

You’ll want to note what percentage of a sale the retailer pays back to you, as well as the length of time after a sale that you get credit for the purchase. Some retailers limit credit to sales made on the initial click-through, but others will give credit for any sales made within a day or so. Also, some retailers will pay a commission on purchases you personally make after clicking your own links; others may kick you out of the program for doing that. Check a retailer’s affiliate agreement and shop around for what you consider the best deal before putting links on your site.

Many publishers have found that links to individual products return more commissions than banner ads going to a retailer’s home page. But the additional money those links earn might not be enough to justify the extra time that selecting and maintaining them requires.

How Much Traffic Do You Need?

With advertising, the more readers you have and page views you serve, the more money you can make.  But how much traffic do you need to make a living from your website?

To make $36,500 a year, you’d need to earn $100 a day on your site (plus whatever expenses you incur). Let’s assume your site is attractive to advertisers and earns $10 in ad revenue for every thousand page views. That would mean you’d need to serve 10,000 page views a day to meet this target. (And more if your site earns less than $10 per thousand page views.)

How can you attract that much traffic? If you are writing one article a day on subjects that will be out of date within 24 hours, it’s going to be tough. You’ll need to attract nearly 10,000 views each day for that’s day article, since few people will bother reading your old, out-of-date work. If you write a fair number of “evergreen” features, which keep attracting page views long after they are written, you’ll find the task much easier. If your site naturally deals with “perishable” news content, at least publish each day’s new news to the same URL, overwriting or pushing down the old content, so that URL can build the in-bound links and search engine traffic that will help you attract new readers you need each day.

Reader-contributed content can also help you meet your page view goals. Well-managed, thoughtfully organized discussion boards and wikis can add dozens of new content pages a day to your site, with much less effort on your part than writing that many original articles.

HOW TO MAKE MONEY ON LINE

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Holte Ender

Holte Ender will always try to see your point of view, but sometimes it is hard to stick his head that far up his @$$.
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13 years ago

“I own the joint so I can drink and throw stuff if I want.” Let’s just say, I am LMAO. Well said, Mike. Personally I am grateful that you and Holte have made available to me a medium through which I can do the very thing that brings me the most personal gratification on a consistent basis, and get some feedback. Right, it is a web magazine. Telling people that I write for a web magazine sounds much sexier than saying I am a blogger, which sounds too damn much like a booger.

Reply to  C.H. McDermott
13 years ago

LOL! Thanks man…:-) 🙂

Admin
13 years ago

I’m not sure about “blogs” but I know that web magazines such as The Huffington Post make millions. There are any number of sites that make enough to cover their costs and make a profit otherwise they wouldn’t be in business (see BR under News and Information). I don’t think they are doing it for their health.

I employ advertising on MMA because I have absolutely no problem making enough money to mitigate the expense of operating a web magazine. At the moment we are a long way from making money.

For the curious here is our asset/liability statement since March 23, 2010:

Assets: .49 cents from Google ads
Liabilities: $4,236.22
Contributions from friends: $400

In my opinion MMA has some of the best writers and the best content out there, especially for a brand new web magazine. We are not a blog. In less than 65 days of operation our numbers are approaching 5K a day. The vast majority of “blogs” don’t even come close to that. A scant six weeks ago we were thrilled to see 500 views a day.

My goal is to make enough to cover expenses and then make enough to redesign the site once we hit 10K a day. I don’t want anyone to think that I want to make money to put in my pocket. I want to make enough to keep building MMA so someday we will rival The Huffington Post. Once we reach that point all of those who remain loyal will be putting money in their pockets while having fun at the same time.

Finally both Holte and I work over 12 hours a day (each) on MMA. There is more going on behind the scenes than you know. The volume of visitors is directly related to how hard each and every one of us (all of us) works. Our little web magazine would not be where it is without the hard work of each and every writer and contributor.

In conclusion know that the extraordinary contributions of our writers are not soon forgotten. The friendships that grow from our unique relationships are beyond value. I am proud of our little cyber-home and most thankful for your friendships. I sense that if something happened to one of us all of us would be at the ready.

Sorry for the rant but what the hell – I own the joint so I can drink and throw stuff if I want 🙂 Notice I didn’t say “shit.” That would be a violation of my own comment policy 🙂

13 years ago

That’s pretty good money except that you are probably earning about $1.98 an hour.

13 years ago

I never really thought that there was any money in this unless you are the host server or you are a portal in some way, where everybody goes to launch like google.

Or if you are selling a service like Amazon, E-Bay, or Porn.

But I guess there is a lot to be made….

Reply to  Holte Ender
13 years ago

I always thought it would be neat to get a WI-FI wireless camera with a GPS, hooked up to a car battery that would last for a couple of months or so.

Then put the whole thing in a hot air balloon and send it up in the air. Sort of like the old message in a bottle thing but you could view it anytime on the internet.

Be cool to see where it landed up at.
(ya ya I know, what a geek…)

13 years ago

Ah, very interesting.

13 years ago

To make $36,500 a year, you’d need to earn $100 a day on your site

I would never put ads on my blog, but I’m curious — does anyone ever actually make anything like that kind of money from an ordinary blog?

13 years ago

That all sounds like too much work and preparation. But I think I’ve found my own gold mine. I just saw an ad in the paper; if I send in $100 to a P.O. box, they’re gonna show me how I can make thousands of dollars a week, stuffing envelopes at home in my spare time.

This is fantastic. I’m gonna be RICH!!!

Admin
13 years ago

Everything goes back to the wallet.

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