Getting a website or blog to generate traffic is an already really hard task, but having it generating revenue is an even harder goal to achieve. Regardless of the chosen way to get a website’s monetization, there are some prerequisites that should be taken into account: the amount of traffic that is received by the website and the quality of its content are just a couple of examples.

Assuming we are dealing with a fairly established website or blog, with a generous amount of visitors and good content, there are several ways to generate some revenue from it. It may not be much, as the amounts always depend on the site and the owner’s goals, but it can be a steady and regular way to retrieve some money.

Ads/Publicity

One of the most immediate and used ways of making money with a website are ads, which basically are paid publicity for products or companies. This a preferred method by the owners, because it is easy to place, setup and control, but also for advertisers, because this way they can control where their ads will go live, which means they get to choose the sites that easily suit their public targets.

There are several ways to adhere to this method. Publishers can negotiate directly with potential advertisers, setting up all the conditions like the size of the banner(s), the amount of time they will be on, the prices, and so on. Alternatively, publishers can use services that directly provide this service, like the well-known Google Adsense or Skyscraper.

Affiliate Marketing

Especially useful for websites and blogs based on product reviews, affiliate marketing can actually prove to be a very interesting monetization option. In this type of market, a given business rewards the publisher (affiliate) for each costumer that goes to the business’s website using the unique affiliate’s link provided by the publisher.

Multiple well-known businesses have affiliate marketing programs available, such as Amazon or eBay. In order to take full advantage of this method, publishers should make their content relevant to a specific business they are affiliated with or, alternatively, choose the business affiliation that better suits the content already present in their sites.

Pay Per View Content

This third method can be a bit risky but, for established websites/blogs with good and strong content, as well as a big public and lots of visits, it can prove to be worth it. If content is really good, then people will, most likely, be willing to pay for it, and some top tier news sources are already doing this.

Pay per view is, just like in the original television model, a monetization method where visitors cannot access specific content unless they pay. That payment can come in different ways, like paying a small amount to access an article or paying a bit more for a broader membership, but the idea is that users pay for what they want to see.

Publishers can setup such a method on their own, or rely on services like Bitmonet, that provide an important help in this setup.

Selling the Website

While this may sound crazy for some people, selling a website can actually be lucrative, depending on the site. Of course, a bigger and more popular website will generate more interest than a smaller one and, therefore, will sell for a larger sum. Much like what happens with startup companies and apps, there is a somewhat active market for buying and selling websites that everyone should be paying attention to.