Website Building Guide Part 5: Ways To Make Money With Your Website

This is the 5th and final part of the Website Building guide for beginners, if this is the first thing your reading from this guide Then I suggest you go to the How to Build a Website for Beginners page and start from the beginning. In this final guide I'll cover the 5 ways to make money with your website or blog, the list is organized by how I first started to make money online to where I am now.
So lets get right into

1. Contexual Advertising

This is how I first started making money online, and this is where 90% of you will start. Basically contextual advertising is where a advertising network places text or image base ads on your site and they pay whenever someone clicks on any of the adds, or they pay you according to CPM which stands for Cost Per every Thousand Impressions, which basically means they pay you a certain amount for every thousand hits your website receives.  CPM is the standard measuring metric in the advertising industry.
One of the most popular contextual advertising services is Google Adsense, people have literally made millions of dollars with this program and for the first 2 years of my business this was my main source of income. Later on I started using services like Adbrite (use to be good, they suck now), BlogAds (Don't get me started), Kontera (They suck ass), Vibrant Media, & InfoLinks (They're awesome).

2. Affiliate Marketing

According to Wikipedia: Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as ‘retailer' or ‘brand'), the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher (also known as ‘the affiliate'), and the customer. The market has grown in complexity to warrant a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third party vendors.

Affiliate Marketing aka performance based marketing is the second way I started making money online, I always knew about it but unlike contextual advertising where you simply place ads on your site and get paid for clicks, this takes more effort but in most cases you'll make ten times the income you could with contextual advertising. In the performance marketing space I make most of my money promoting ringtones offers, as well as web hosting but they're literally thousands of affiliate offers out there that could possibly be a good fit for your site. Unfortunately it's going to take more than this one paragraph to explain the ins and outs of affiliate marketing, that's a whole other article all together.

3. Direct Advertising

Direct advertising is where a webmaster (that would be you) sells ad space on his or her website directly to an advertiser (no middle man), usually most websites don't start out making money this way because this method requires your site to be well established and have a substantial amount of traffic. On my site iHipHopMusic.com, it wasn't until I started getting of 700,000 unique visitors a month did I start attracting advertisers to my site. Direct advertising can make you the most money when it comes to advertising, because you have full control over how much you get paid.
This is now how I make most of my money online now, this method requires allot more work than contextual advertising or affiliate marketing and if you don't know what your doing you could end up loosing money. I wrote a very in depth article on How To Sell Advertising On Your WordPress Blog or Website.

4. Subscriptions

Making money with a subscription / membership based product or service is one of the best ways to make money online, as long as you have a product or service that truly adds value to your users then your set. Running a membership website is my latest venture into making money online, with my site Mixtapes.tv. Now here's how I add value with this service, downloading mixtapes online is very easy and you can do at a bunch of different places, so why would they pay on on site to do it?
They won't, so what I do is offer this service for free with a bunch of extra features to make the service more useful than other services – once I've done that then I go even further by offering some more advanced features that users find to be very convenient and are willing to part ways with a small fee for them, usually these features should be unique to your service but it's not always necessary though you should always aim to be unique. This is how I've managed to have 500 users paying me $5.99 per month on a site that's less than 2 years old. This is what you would called Freemium (Free + Premium) business model.

5. Sell A Product

I'll be honest with you, I have yet to make any money online selling my own product (Not counting my membership site), I simply haven't come up with a product I think is worth selling. I'm not just going to create a bullshit product because it's going to put money in my pocket, it has to be something I would use my self.
That being said this is the number one way to make money online, it's the number one way to make money period. It's the most profitable because you have control of everything. When you have your own product, you can advertise on Google Adwords which will display your ads on websites displaying Gooogle Adsense contextual advertising. You can start your own affiliate program and have affiliate marketers promoting your product via affiliate marketing. In addition you can also advertise on websites via direct advertising.
See how it's all connected? This is also the same with selling a subscription based service. In most cases 1,2 a&3 lead back to 4 & 5 to purchase some sort of product or service.
That my friend is how you get er done….
This wraps up the Beginners Guide to Website Building for creating a profitable website, but it's not done yet – check out more useful articles on the site.
Thanks for reading.
Part 1: How To Start A Website Or Blog
Part 2: How To Setup A Blog Or Website Without Technical Skills
Part 3: Publishing Your Content To World
Part 4: How To Get Traffic To Your Website
Part 5: Ways To Make Money With Your Website