There are a variety of ways to make money from traffic to your website, which can be divided into direct and indirect methods.
Direct methods include:
- Subscriptions– Sites that provide specialized content, expert advice, or specialized services (such as appointments) often charge visitors a monthly or annual membership fee to generate income.
- Dirty– Many ecommerce sites, like Amazon, monetize their online presence by generating product sales that are flagged for profit.
- Donations and tip jarsVisitors are encouraged to make voluntary donations if they like the content on a site, an increasingly popular idea on busy blogs.
- Premium content– In this model, a reasonable portion of a website is provided free to visitors and premium or exclusive content is available to paid subscribers. In some cases, forums, marketplaces, additional software, and job boards may be offered for a premium.
- Sell the site– Some webmasters use domains to build content and traffic, increasing visitor traffic and PageRank, and then sell the entire site to monetize their work.
Indirect methods are more common and include:
- CPC Advertising– By placing ad blocks from networks like Google AdSense, websites receive a portion of the pay-per-click fee when visitors click on the ads. The advertiser pays for the click at no charge to the visitor.
- CPM AdvertisingSimilar to CPC advertising, but the publisher is paid by the number of times the ad is shown (called impressions), rather than by the number of clicks.
- Affiliate Links– On review sites and those that specialize in niche content, they promote third-party products as affiliates and receive a percentage of the sale as a commission. In this model, the owner of the third-party product generally pays an affiliate network and the affiliate, at no direct cost to the visitor.
- Direct banner advertising– Some sites sell ad space directly to buyers, eliminating any “middle man” in the transaction. This method is the most used by sites with very high levels of traffic, which is necessary to attract advertisers.
- Business promotion– The vast majority of companies use websites to attract customers to their main line of work. Organizations, from pizza parlors to consultants, treat their websites as another marketing channel to attract potential buyers.
There are many other ways to generate income from your site, but the common theme in most methods is that you need to have a good amount of traffic to see profitable results.