Today's free installment from our forthcoming Internet Marketing ebook is from the section 'Monetising your web content'. When released, this Internet Marketing handbook will be given away free for the first 30 days. If you would like to pre-order a free copy of the e-book now, email us as seo@foursquareinnovations.co.uk

Monetising your web content

In this section we cut straight to the chase, and cover some means of making money online. You will find this particularly useful, if you are not selling your own products or services on the Internet but are looking for some opportunities to make some extra cash from home or from a home business. You will find that these sources of online cash can be exploited more effectively if you read beyond this section and get to grips with the task of promoting your website.

You should be aware that get rich quick Internet schemes generally don’t work, and that time and effort is involved in making money on the Internet. Any online article or advert promising you a 6 figure income, or untold riches from the Internet is most probably a scam. However, if you are willing to put the work in, and the research in, your income will increase as you go along and you can make good money and a worthwhile residual income when offset against the amount of time that you need to put in. Think in terms of revenue streams – something you put work into now could still be making you money 6 months, a year or even five years down the line.

Making Money with Adsense

Probably the most common way to turn a website into cash is to serve up Google Adsense adverts on your website or blog. Adsense provides smart ads which will usually match fairly closely the theme of your website.

Adsense these days is getting rather sophisticated, and as well as the conventional Adsense ads for content, you can also use Adsense advertising with RSS feeds, mobile content and YouTube, as well as making money out of putting a Google search box on your website (Adsense for search).

https://www.google.com/adsense/

In order to make a decent amount of money with Adsense you really need to find out what the top paying key phrases might be, i.e. those that Google Adwords users are bidding most highly upon.

You can research potential Adsense payouts using a tool such as SEO for FireFox which has a traffic estimator feature which will also give you an estimated Adwords Cost Per Click on any given Adwords keyword. You can download SEO for Firefox here: http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

There is also a very useful list of top paying Adsense keywords here: http://makemoneyseotips.blogspot.com/2008/07/free-high-adsense-keywords-listget-lots.html

Making money with Affiliate Marketing

With Affiliate marketing you place banner link ads and text link ads on your website and every time a sale is made as a result of somebody clicking on your link you will receive commission.

Find advertisers related to the subject matter of your website and display their banner ads and text ads on your website.

Some affiliate marketing programs that you might try include some of the more popular ones such as

http://www.clickbank.com/index.html

http://uk.cj.com/

here is also a categorised affiliate program directory here: http://www.top-affiliate.com/

Pay per post

If you have your own blog, many companies will pay you to blog on content of their choice. There are plenty of brokers out there who will give you a choice of subjects to write upon, and you can get paid for it.

Blogvertise will pay you £12.00 for every 100 words you put into a positive review of one of its customers.

PerPerPost will hook you up with many advertisers who will pay you to blog about them: http://payperpost.com/bloggers/get-paid-to-blog.html

Warning: There are risks involved in pay per post, and some bloggers have reported being penalised by Google. However, if you are being paid to promote something, then cover yourself and nofollow any links that you give to your clients. See this 2007 article for instance: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/12/payperpost

Drop ship

Drop Shipping allows you to sell other people’s products from your website as a retailer, while letting your Drop Ship company worry about the order taking, administration and the shipping. Each time a sale is made through your website you will receive a commission payment, based on the difference between the wholesale price of the product and the retail price which you sold it for.

Some drop shippers will provide you with a ready-to-go sales platform or ecommerce system. In order to achieve your potential, you will need to customise this and tailor the content extensively, so that you can find your niche and stand out from others using the same system. This will also help you to avoid search engines duplicate content penalties and help to get you found on the search engines.

One of the major advantages of drop shipping is that you usually need no upfront cash to get started selling products online.

You can learn a lot about the pros and cons of drop shipping on the Drop Ship forum: http://dropshipforum.co.uk/

Other ways to make money on the Internet

Third party sites where you can create pages and make money:

1. Squidoo gives Adsense revenue share on your squid pages: http://www.squidoo.com/



2. http://www.syncone.net/ - this is a social bookmarking site that allows you to add affiliate marketing and Adsense on your page.



3. eHow will pay you for writing articles telling people how to do something (US residents only). Payouts are based on the amount of traffic your article generates and upon the quality of the content: http://www.ehow.com/



4. You could also add a price comparison service to your website or blog. PriceRunner will also give you a small payout for every click through they get to their price comparison website. You can set this up through Commission Junction (see the Affliate Marketing section): http://www.pricerunner.co.uk/



5. Sell your digital photographs to stock photography websites. Stock photography websites that will buy your images include http://www.stockphotography.co.uk/ and http://www.photographersdirect.com but there are plenty more. Check their terms and conditions, since some require a minimum number of photos, and others have stringent quality guidelines while others are more lenient.



6. Write an ebook and sell it, just like this one – you can do this through paypal or even through download.com: http://www.download.com/

For a more comprehensive guide to making money online have a look at this article: http://www.experienced-people.co.uk/1042-top-ways-of-making-money-online/

Tip: One of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to start making money online is to start up your own blog through WordPress or Google Blogger, both of which are free and require almost no technical knowledge to set up. Then you can integrate Adsense, affiliate marketing and even some paid for posts on there and start making some money almost instantly.

One of the best strategies here is to write about what you know, and monetise things that you do in your every day life. So if you eat out a lot, maybe start a restaurant review blog, or if you enjoy skiing or golfing write a blog based around that. You could start a blog about places you have visited or even concentrating on your own town, city or suburb – the possibilities are endless. The trick is though to make it easy for yourself and write about something you know, and or participate in, since this will save you a lot of time and energy researching.

Tip: Build up as many revenue streams as you can. The more sources of revenue you have giving you a payout every month, the better insulated you will be from any downturn in day-to-day business i.e. those times when numbers of new on-off customers are less than usual, or when you lose customers. Moreover, with multiple channels of revenue you avoid the risk that many less versatile businesses face of struggling when their major revenue source underperforms or dies off. Take Ford as an example, they were playing a zero-sum game whereby their survival depended on people buying cars. This was a fifty/fifty bet which they would always lose eventually over a long enough timeframe, because people either buy enough cars to keep you in business or they don’t, and once they don’t your business is over, unless you have multiple streams of revenue.

You should also always be on the look out for more revenue streams so that your business grows reliably and steadily.