Make money without placing any ads at all

Well, there are quite a few ways to monetize your website; you can make money off AdSense, Adbrite, or any other contextual ads, you can implement the elegant looking text link ads, or go with affiliate marketing and sales. Whichever way you choose, you will find yourself freeing more and more space for “sponsored” links and banners, which take up a lot of “pixels”, and let’s face it - make the site look a bit ugly. Not all of them, but if you want to make good money off the adverts, you have to free enough space for placing them, and not only that, but also placing them right under visitor’s nose, otherwise they will not be clicked. That is, even without mentioning the most irritating (yet good paying) type of ads such as interstitial and pop ups.

So, what if you want a perfectly looking, clean site? A serious presentation of your work online (articles, essays, writing, literature, service, whatever), without been classed as a commercial site by the visitors? (who will judge the appearance of your website by the amount of adverts on it). There is very skillful way to do it - Sponsored Search. You just hit the spot by placing this useful function at the upper corner of your website. You will be surprised to see how many people use the search box every day. Don’t forget, visitors are lazy, and no matter how flawless your navigation is, any visitor will always prefer to shorten the process by typing the desired keyword in the search box and letting the cut edge technology do the work. It just saves time, navigating through the jungle of your content.
The “trick” with sponsored search is, you have to place it above your content, where anyone, upon opening your website, will see it. Placing it at the footer or at the bottom of left navigation menu won’t do you any good because the visitor will face the content and then will start browsing around. Search function just loses it’s basic function: to help one to find what he wants, fast.

How sponsored search works? Very simple. All you need to do, if you have not done already, is to sign up with Google Adsense (you can see their link at the top of this page in “We recommend” box). Once you signed up and got you account approved, you will have the option of making money by referrals (currently advocating FireFox, AdSense and Adwords), displaying contextual ads (which is what you see on the right column here, though they come in various formants, and, finally - sponsored search. Since this topic is concentrated on how you can make money without ads, we will choose the sponsored search function only.
I had a search box on one of my websites, which I sticked in a rather forsaken corner and used to think for many month that sponsored search is totally useless waste of space and I kept it there just for visitors to search the site, yet out of 500 unique visitors a day, I hardly got one search query. Then, I read on someone’s blog about the wonder’s of Search function, and how much that blogger was making with it additionally to the ads, so I looked closer at his layout and realized that the top position of the site - the top navigation bar, is a big search window with a nice and juicy “go” button, that I bet no one could refuse pressing on. Neither did it.

This blog, as you can see, have the Search box in a rather respectable position and the amount of queries is huge. Not all of them lead to clicks, but the leitmotif of this article is - if you place the search box under your visitors very nose they will use it. And if they already use it, why not to make money with it..?
Other advantages of sponsored search.

1. Get clicks on ads not related to your site subject. Through the search function, your visitors may come across an advert which is not relevant to your content. For instance, if they look for “WordPress themes” and you only offer “Blogger layouts”, with sponsored search they will most definitely find what they want and hopefully even click on the featured results to proceed further, while regular crawl of your website will just show zero results and make the visitor leave empty handed.
2. Customize the look. With Google AdSense search, you can fully customize the page on which the search results will be displayed, which means you can create a similar look to your website, even using your own logo (clickable, leading to wherever you want it to lead), which will complement your site’s design and in no way imply your are making money off your highly respectable site.

Hope this gives you yet another idea for monetizing your website wisely.