If you have a blog or website that is getting traffic then you may be looking to make money from that traffic.  There are many different ways to make money online with a website or blog. I am not a guru or even an expert, but I’d like to share some of the things I’ve learned, which I think is some pretty good knowledge to have starting out in any kind of online business.

How to Make Money Online: Pay Per Click Advertising.

You may have heard of Google Adsense, which is a huge advertising network online.  In fact, it probably is the most popular one online for a few reasons.  It is rather simple to sign up and it couldn’t be easier to start using.  All you have to do once you sign up (besides adhering to the Terms of Service) is put a few lines of javascript code onto your website where you want the advertisements to show.  Ads will show up on your pages and will be contextually relevant, meaning they will be (or should be) related to the content published on your website.  This advertising platform is popular and a lot of people do quite well with it.  It is a pay-per-click ad network, which means that when someone clicks on an ad on your page, you get paid anywhere from $.01 to $10.00, although as you can imagine, the ten dollar clicks are hard to get.  But that doesn’t mean you can’t get them.

Many people start with this network because it is simple to get started, but as I mentioned, it isn’t necessarily easy to make money with it.  Your website needs to have a lot of daily visitors in order to receive a lot of clicks.  One thing you want to keep in mind is that the advertisements displayed on your site will be related to what you write about.  So, if you write about electronics you may earn more than if you write book reviews.  The reason is that a high end stereo system has a higher profit margin than a paperback book, so an advertiser is willing to pay more for a click to a page selling that product.  This last “rule” applies to most online advertising programs and is something to think about as you plan to monetize your website.

Chitika is another ad network that you might consider using as a way of making money with your site.  It is similar to Adsense in some respects, but also very different.  Many people actually use the two programs together on the same webpages as a way of complementing each other.  The easiest way to start using Chitika is by creating Chitika Premium ad units (which only work from traffic from the US and Canada).  This kind of ad is not contextually relevant, but rather, behaviorally targeted.  This means that the advertisements displayed are related to the keywords that a visitor to your site uses to find your site.  In other words, they are based on the search terms someone put into a search engine that led them to your website.  This is good because the visitors who see the ads displayed on your site are more targeted by the ad, making them more likely to click them.  Chitika Premium works on a pay per click model.  Learn more about how Chitika works.

Pay per click programs might work well for you if you receive a lot of traffic from a click-happy audience, but you might also want to consider affiliate marketing.  Affiliate marketing is advertising a product on your website in return for receiving a percentage of the sale amount.  This is typically a lot larger than what you may make with other programs, but keep in mind that it is harder to get someone to actually purchase something in contrast to convincing them to click an ad, which is basically just selling their attention for a few moments or minutes.  Affiliate marketing is really a different animal and the people who are very successful with this kind of online sales often create email lists, know the importance of copywriting and sales pages, and have knowledge of other less basic sales tactics.  But if there is a product that fits in really well with what you write about, it is definitely worth it to create a link to it from your home page or display a banner ad.  What might work better is writing a review of the product and posting it on your website.

How to Make Money Online: In-Text Advertising

Have you ever come across a website or blog posting that has a word or a phrase underlines by two blue or green lines?  When you hover over the text, a box pops up with a link to a product.  This is another form of internet advertising that many people are starting to use as a way to add to their online earnings.  If you display this type of ad on you website, you get paid per click.  Two companies that run this kind of service are Kontera and InfoLinks.

It is fairly easy to implement this kind of ad to your website–all you have to do is put a few lines of code into the template of your site.  Results with this kind of advertising is very mixed.  The amount of money you earn really depends on what “niche” you write in, but even then, from my experience, results vary wildly from one day to the next.  I wouldn’t really even consider this type of ad if you are just getting started.

How to Make Money Online: Affiliate Marketing.

Two popular affiliate networks are Clickbank and Commission Junction.  Clickbank has hundreds maybe thousands of digital products that you can choose from and immediately display links to.  If someone purchases a given product through your link, you receive a certain amount of payment.  This is a very easy way to get started with affiliate marketing because you can find products you may be able to sell and you don’t have to wait for approval from the creator or the website.

Commission Junction is another affiliate marketing network that is different from Clickbank in many ways, but one of the biggest differences is that they have a lot of well-known name brands with products that you can try to sell.  Most of the companies require approval before you can display ads for their products, which means they look at what websites you own in order to determine if you will be a good fit for their program.  For some, you will be automatically approved.CJ is also very easy to use, that is to say, it’s easy to implement, not always easy to make money with.  Once you are accepted by a chosen company, you gain access to their “creative”: banners and links that may help you sell the product or promote the company.  You actually have quite a bit of latitude in how you display their ads.  You may want to put a banner ad at the top of the page or in the sidebar and just see what happens, or you may want to include links within your articles and posts.

Some companies that work with CJ are Blockbuster Online, Zappos, Citibank Credit Cards, and hundreds of other companies, many of which you probably recognize.  Internet marketing is a tricky business, but there are thousands of ways to make money at it if you learn how to do it.  It just takes a little time to learn about the internet sales environment.  If you like to test out different methods of selling and don’t mind constantly tweaking your websites in order to optimize them for the best sales, then you will do fine in internet marketing and affiliate sales.

Another way to become an affiliate is to work directly with a company that specializes in one business that you can plug your traffic stream into.  One such company is LeadFlash, which specializes in payday loan leads.  This is a very smart route to go because the more you can “niche down” or make the thing your selling as targeted as possible, the more sales you will be able to make.

How Do I Start to Make Money Online?

The best way to start making money online is by building an audience.  So how do you build an audience?  One way to do this is by creating quality content.  Well-written posts will not only attract people to your website, but they will also bring the same people back.  And when people are impressed with your work or it is useful to them, they may want to share it with their friends and save it to social networking websites.  Word of mouth can really help your site grow.  Think about the three or four websites that you visit every single week.  What are the owners and writers of these sites doing that brings you back?  Figure that out and do your best to replicate it.  When you land on a website, you often know within a few seconds whether or not you “trust” the site you are on.  If you don’t trust the site you are on or relate to it in some way, you’re not going to stick around very long.

The most successful sales people look at their products and sales strategies with the purchaser in mind, not from their own point of view.  You are trying to make money by selling something or want to promote a product that you like, but you need to evaluate why someone would want to buy it.  What need does it fill?  What is the conversation you need to start in order to present the product in the right way?  Who are you talking to?  Who is the person who is going to buy this product?  This is why it helps you immensely to sell a product (or write a blog with pay per click ads) related to something you are familiar with or better yet a product that you yourself would buy.  That way you can easily relate to other people who want to buy it.

Creating great content and then promoting it will help you gain an audience and will slowly (or quickly if you’re lucky) move your site up in the search engine rankings.  The higher your site pops up in Google, Yahoo, MSN, or Ask, the more traffic you’ll get.  This brings me back to the first point I made in this article: you need traffic in order to make money online.