How to Make Money from Your Website Using Advertising
You have managed to get your website to that magical point
where you have established popularity, traffic, loyalty and a
community of fans. Your site contains a wealth of information,
resources and services that you provide free because that's just
the kind of person you are. You may not have intended to make
money from your site but now that you have an audience you
realise that it's possible, or perhaps you have to start
thinking about generating income because your costs to manage
the site have increased and it's starting to hurt.
You have been diligent over the years to build up your community
and wonder how to go about making some revenue by leveraging
this audience (as the marketers would say, you want to
monetise your site). Maybe you have some big dreams and
plan to one day generate advertising income from your new web
project. This is a very common plan for online business given
people tend to expect information and services to be free.
Advertising may be one of the only revenue generation strategies
available to you.
How much traffic do I have to have to make money?
In my experience once you have about 500-1000 unique visitors
per day to your site *at least* before you can start to make
real money. You can make chimps change from day one from your 50
hits, but this article is targeted at those that have a larger
audience, or perhaps are constructing a business plan (either
real or in your head) and would like to know how to go about
monetising your website. If you get more then 1000 unique
visitors a day chances are you already make money from your site
(if not you should be!) but my points are still relevant.
As per usual I will illustrate my article using real world
examples from what I did to make money. Over about five years I
managed a hobby site that started off as a very local site
focusing on people in my area that played the game Magic: The
Gathering. I wrote reports and did news coverage for the game.
Later I expanded the site to Australia and eventually opened it
to the world although it remained mostly Australian with a good
chunk of Asians and New Zealanders.
Banner programs
At around the time I was getting 500 unique visitors a day I
decided to start playing with advertising methods. This was
before the advent of Google Adsense (more on this later) but
there were many banner programs available that paid either on
cost per click (CPC) or per impression basis. An impression is a
banner being displayed to a user once, a click is someone
clicking the banner and visiting the site being advertised.
These networks act as a middle man between business that want to
advertise and people like me that have an audience and want to
make some money by displaying banners. Unfortunately these
programs display banners that often don