How To Make Money From Your Website For Free

Setting up a website can be a time consuming process if you are on a tight budget. You have to learn how to write the proper code, how to create and add your own graphics and then you have to spend even more time writing the content that will make it a place not only that visitors will want to visit, but will be impressed enough so that they will want to return, time and time again. Sound like a tall order and it is. Wouldn't it be nice if after expending all that time and effort you could turn your hard work into a profitable online business and earn some money from your website.

Well, to do that you're going to have to monetise your website. Let's look at a few ways of doing that for free, so even if you are on the tightest of budgets, you can still earn some respectable amounts of money for your troubles.

The first and probably the most important and lucrative way of earning money from your website is by using it to promote affiliate products that are relevant to the theme of your website. It's a fairly simple procedure to put up a "products" page where you can place your affiliate links and write some sales copy for each item you are promoting.

Before you can do that, of course, you'll need to be signed up to one or more affiliate programs.

So in keeping with the "make money from your website for free" theme, you really want to sign up with affiliate programs that are free to join. The top contender in that category has to be Clickbank. This has been around for a lot of years and has a solid reputation. Most affiliate marketers swear by Clickbank and it makes a lot of marketers a lot of money.

So Clickbank should be top of your list.

Once you join up, you have access to a whole marketplace of affiliate products that you can promote on your website. You should choose the products that fit in with your own niche, or theme of your site. In other words, if your website is all about dogs, you should find products relating to dogs. For example, there are lots of ebooks on how to train dogs, general ebooks about dogs and specific books about certain breeds. Those are the kinds of things you could promote to earn you some money.

For each product, Clickbank gives you a link to the seller's homepage. That's where you can get a lot information you can use to create your own sales copy for that item. You could even copy the cover of the ebook and use that as an eye-catching graphic. You also get what is called a "hoplink", which is your own affiliate link to that product. So when a visitor to your products page clicks your link to the vendor's sales page and subsequently buys the product, your hoplink is tracked y Clickbank and you get paid the commission for driving that customer to the vendor's site.

Clickbank then pays its affiliates twice monthly by cheque for all the sales they have accumulated over the previous two week period. That can add up to some serious money if done properly.

Another good affiliate site is PayDotCom. It operates in a similar way to clickbank, where you create your own affiliate link to products taken from their marketplace. The difference here is that PayDotCom pays their affiliates via PayPal, which may appeal to a wider group.

Another way of earning an income from your site is by having your own product to sell. This has distinctive advantages over affiliate marketing in that you get to keep one hundred percent of the profits. Your product can be anything that you can realistically sell to an huge internet marketplace who are willing to pull out their credit cards when they see something they want, need or desire.

So you could produce your own ebook which can be on a huge range of topics relating to your niche, from information books, manuals, "how to" books or even short stories right up to full blown novels. It's up to you to produce whatever you believe there is a market for and that will make money. You could also sell software that you have written, as long as you are the owner of that data. The beauty of selling a digital product like an ebook or software is that there is no shipping involved, so a buyer doen't have to spend any more money than the price of the product. A customer is directed to a download page once they have paid for the item and in minutes, they have the product they have purchased right there in front of them.

Other saleable items might include music CDs, if you are a musician or a member of a band that wants to promote your songs via your own website. The list of items you can sell online is limited only by your own knowledge, skill and imagination.

The only thing that you should be very much aware of is that you can't sell something that you don't own the rights to or can sell under licence from the owner. You don't want to end up being closed down for breeching copyright laws.

Yet another way of earning money from your website is by using a pay per click program like Google adsense. This is another free to join program where you are given a piece of html code by Google that you place on your website's pages. This code generates a block of small lineage ads, the size of which is chosen by you. Google uses an algorithm which works out, via your site's keywords, what niche your site fits into. It then produces ads that are relevant to that niche. Once they are displayed on your website's pages, curious visitors will click on them and be taken to the homepage of the advertiser and you get paid on a sliding scale for each time an ad is clicked.

There are pros and cons to adsense and programs like it.

The pros are obvious. You get paid for every time an ad is clicked by a visitor to your site. The more visitors you can attract, the more potential clicks you will generate and the more money you will earn. The amount of money you earn depends on Google and a secret algorithm they use to determine the rate of pay per click. It could be anything from a few cents to a dollar or more per click, depending on how much money the advertiser is paying and a lot of other factors known only to Google.

The cons are a little less obvious. The main one is that once a visitor to your site clicks an ad, they are taken away from your site and may not come back. So while you may have earned a few cents from the click, you may have potentially lost some dollars by not making an affiliate sale. Another downside to adsense is that you can be penalised if certain parties repeatedly click on your ads. That includes you, your family members and friends who want to "help you out".

The penalty is strict, harsh and final.

Google will simply close your account and withhold any money you may have earned up to that point. Worse, is that it's very difficult, if not impossible to get it back.

So there we have some free ways of earning money from your website. As long as you are generating enough traffic to your site, you stand a good chance that a fair proportion of those visitors will click on your links or ads and earn you some money to a greater or lesser degree, depending on how much the products they are clicking on sell for and how much commission you will receive, or in the case of pay per click, how much money each click is worth. The bottom line is that when the paycheque drops through your letterbox, or your PayPal account is credited with your commission, you'll know all your hard work has been worth it.