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.

Ok, this post is yet again made due to continuous requests from people (uuhm like two or three in total) who are interested to know how much this blog earns and from what. First of all, it’s new, it was only launched in December 2006 and was not heavily monetized right from the start, as my main aim was to get it ranked good and have a high PageRank, so I actually started to work on the material side of it only 2 months ago. Hence, at present, this is how it works for me (I refer to toptut.com’s revenue only).

Google Adsense - my most beloved source, you can see I put it in “we use and recommend” box. With the present design the ads are allover the place (by the way, you can read the blog without ads through the feed, if you subscribe), so I am hoping for increasing the revenue (up until last week it was only a text banner at the end of each post). Roughly speaking, so far (this April) it was making about 1,10$ a day.

Text Link Ads - another money making program I strongly recommend to use. Unlike Adsense, it won’t take up much space as these are “just” text links. I made 22,50$ this month from 3 text links ads sold on this site and 50$ from 2 new publishers I referred, so let us say, compared to Adsense, TLA occupies little space and bring bigger revenue.

ReviewMe - this month one review was sponsored by an advertiser at ReviewMe and put 30$ in my little porcelain piggie.

Adbrite - I don’t use it “full time” on this blog, no interstitials ads, no inline ads, no banners. There is only one text link ad that has been sold here (I mean I only provide space for one text link advert) and it was sold with 0,10 $ CPM. Since I only put it here 2 days ago, and the ad was sold yesterday for 3 ad companies, I still have no clue how much will it bring me, so let’s leave it open for now.

BlogsVertise - As unbelievable as it sounds, they are one of my main revenue sources. They work on a basis of offering you to review sponsors or place text links. They either assign you a task or you can grab one every day (!), if you want. As been lazy I don’t track the tasks and only choose from offers they send me by email, naturally I decline most of them (low paying and irrelevant) so from the very few I did pick, I made 68,50$ this month.

Direct Ad Sales- I don’t do it often as I have no time and it’s a lot of hassle updating the website’s code. It’s far easier for me to sign up with network-based-ads that will do the job for me looking for advertisers and displaying ads though .xml or java file. However, some offers just came by to me and I did accept. This month ad space on this blog was sold for, if i am not mistaken, 20$, which is dramatically less than last month because like I just said, I do not look for it anymore.
How much do I spend on toptut.com?

Read More from "How does toptut.com make money?"

Normally, I’d say - yes, definitely. In today’s life you can’t make much waiting tables, cleaning shelves in a supermarket or sitting in someone’s office, answering calls and afraid to arrive 5 minutes late to your work in the morning. Average job brings average income, which leads to an average standard of life. However, unfortunately, not everyone is able to reach this “average” job as it mainly requires a college or university degree, which as we know not easy to get, not due to lack of brain but rather due to lack of founds. Personally, I wanted to study in university and get a degree in psychology (as I only have my college degree in Social Science) but these plans were stopped by a five figures sum which stood between me and uni’s gates. Before you shed a tear - don’t worry, I do not regret it anymore

So, if you want to make big money and reach to a high standard of life, you need either to start your own business (which is, once again - a huge initial investment, in most of the cases) or be truly, and I mean it - *t r u l y* brilliant, and set up a corporation with minimum material investment and maximum brain work, recreate the success of Bill Gates, Michael Dell, or someone else, but try not to invent something that has already been invented, and I am sorry to discourage you, but most of the things a human mind can think of, has already been brought to light in this way or another. It really won’t be easy to get your photo published in Forbes without massive business creativity and some mind-blowing market model.

Yes, it’s pretty disappointing, you need to be extra smart with unbeatable ambitions, strong nerves, starting capital and preferably located in the USA where the market dominates the world. However, this all applies to real life, not Internet. Over here, in the cyber world, the rules are different. So many housekeepers are making huge money out of the invisible cyber channels, without any degree or extraordinary abilities. Of course, in order to start your online business and milk impressive revenue, you do need brain, but a lot less than in real life, and - no one cares how old are you, what’s your education level and where you are from. Nothing is relevant except for what you can actually produce and put online.
Read More from "Do I need brilliant brain to make a lot of money?"

What can be better than to make money when you sleep? For example Adsense - check your balance before sleep, make up in the morning and see how nicely the number grew up while you were snoring, just like a classical bamboo tree. There are only 2 categories of people who can make money while sleeping - webmasters with monetized websites, or big company / factories owners that go to sleep while the workers continue their job and the “machine” keeps rolling. However, while opening a factory is definitely not something you can do with minimum effort, expenses and time - opening a site is THE solution.

What do you actually need? A good domain name for a start, as having your own name guarantees you will never lose traffic + it looks a lot more respectable. You can start off with a free host and a decent free web layout if you cannot make your own and get the business going. Of course it’s time consuming, it will eat up many hours, but believe me it’s worth it. After all, how hard is this job? Sitting in your socks at your desk, drinking coffee and writing some content for your blog readers of website visitors? Hard manual labor? I don’t think so.

Choosing marketing strategy.

This is the most important and most essential step - choosing HOW will you monetize your website. If you choose the wrong strategy - no harm, unless we count in the loss of time, disappointment and low / lack income for longer then expected. Before you start getting creative - face one fact: online marketing has been prospering for years now, many blooming years and all the possible and impossible ways to make money online has been invented by now. There is a very slim chance that you will manage to come up with some ground breaking strategy, which will change the world’s perception on Marketing. So, don’t re-invent the wheel, a good and smoothly rolling wheel has already been invented, tested and successfully produced before you, all you need is to take the model and apply to your site. After all, there are not all that many ways to make money online, however the countless are the sources.

Wasting time and working out everything by yourself, testing it all on your skin, is yet another good way to throw the time away and lose precious energy. Go to some big forums, ask for help, or ask friends - how do they make money? What affiliate program pays and which did never paid them? What ads bring good revenue and which are useless? You really don’t need to go by the trial and error path. Find a successful website that is similar to yours in both niche and layout. See how other successful website owners implemented Adsense, AdBrite and other other income streams on their websites. See also, WHAT do they actually use? For example blogs rarely use Adbrite, because I can say from personal experience that it does not pay out to keep a huge square for ads that might never be purchased while contextual ads like AdSense will generate a massive income depending on your keywords.

All or nothing?

Many people tend to think that since they have already employed one type of ads, what they earn from it reflects their website’s potential revenue. No, it does not. You can combine as many income streams as you wish, see what works best for your site’s layout, niche and traffic. I personally never tried Amazon and eBay affiliate programs, neither Chikita eMini, because all my websites are freebies oriented, and it’s a lot easier to make a freebies seeker to click on an advert, rather than make him buy a laptop for only 700$. Study your traffic, perhaps if most of your traffic comes from a particular country you might want to take advantage of it? Whatever you decide, my point is - do not rely on one income opportunity solemnly. If one did not work for you, it does not mean your site is crap and it’s time to shut it down. Try as many options as you can.

I will give you an example. For the past 1,5 years I was “faithful” to Adsense and did not even try anything else. Of course not forgetting that up until recently competitive ads were not allowed together with Google (they still prohibited for YPN), but still and all I was very narrow minded. A couple of weeks ago I was introduced to Text Links Ads and ReviewMe. Both sites are run by the same owner, and I got 4 links sold at TLA within 2 weeks and one very nice review offer from RM last week so I can only but hope this will double itself text month. Text Links Ads has just covered my annual hosting fee for this blog in mere 2 weeks of absolutely passive participation (once you install the script you really need not worry about anything anymore) and if I’d not have tried, I could miss this opportunity.

Most important is to be open minded yet cautious to new offers, ideas and revenue streams. Experiment with design, ads position and colours, and see what works best for you.

A several weeks ago I started to look for miscellaneous alternatives to the most commonly spread ads network - Adsense. I asked in forums and read up on blogs of those who I trust and value and realized that there is a damn easy way to make money from small, almost tiny text links. This program is especially good if you have a several websites with different niches.

You have probably heard of it before - I am talking about Text Link Ads, which is a great way to Monetize Your Site

Advantages:

1. Compatible with Google Adsense and can be used together on same page.
2. Extremely elegant looking links, these are “just” text links, u decide on a color and font size, no “sponsored by” add-ons or huge ads space required to be occupied.
3. Payment can be done by both PayPal and cheques.
4. You can make money even off your blog’s feeds / RSS.
5. You may get between 5$ to 300$ per link a month, and sell up to 10 links on a website. (the price depends on factors such as Alexa rank, Page Rank, Traffic, volume, and NICHE.)

It’s not another spam / scam site, you can read a lot of positive feedback on TLA (Text Links Ads)

on DigitalPoint Forums. Another advantage is that just like me, you will be earning 25$ for each person you referred to Text Link Ads. In order to qualify for an affiliate payment, a referred

publisher must install the advertising script on their site for seven days. At this time the referral will appear in the affiliate’s account.

> SIGN UP HERE <

Paid to post community is becoming a trend recently, most people ask themselves, why to post for free, while in many forums you can get paid for it. There are normally 3 types of paid to post communities.

First, those who have a fixed rate for posts and pay by paypal or any other online payment method. The price varies from 1 cents, up to 20 cents, depending on the size of the board and admin’s pocket.

Second are the “shared revenue” communities, where a member can input his AdSense code into a specified field in his cPanel, then when he makes a new thread or replies the last, there are 50% of chances for his Adsense ads to show up.

Third is a more general type of “paid communities”, as the member do not get a direct monetary payment, but are provided with miscellaneous goods in exchange for their participation, such as free (quality) web hosting, domain names, etc.

It’s up to you, what types of communities to join. I personally tried them all, but can’t come up with a good and overall review, as I was not participating equally in all of them, some grabbed my attention and I stayed just for fun, then even became a moderator of the board, while in others I have 150+ posts and can’t really tell how profitable is the business. I will start off with my personal experience though and hope it will be useful for you.

Paid to post communities that pay on a fixed rate are a great way to make fast money, especially if the minimum post count and word count is not too big. 10 cents per post of about 30 words would be a decent deal. Mostly you will find such offers in other big forums, such as DigitalPoint.com, where new forums owners are looking to boost activity and pay people to join and participate in their board. Once the forum grows, the pate per post gets lower, and then normally been done away with completely. So if you are after such a forum, just look for related offers on other huge forums and carpe diem.

Shared revenue communities can boost your AdSense revenue, however, there are a few “but’s”. You need to have AdSense account, where minimum payout is 100$. If, for whatever reason, Adsense will ban you, this type of revenue will no longer exist for you, as Yahoo publisher and Adbride aren’t an alternative in this case. I joined 2 forums that share income with their members, but not out of greed, only because the forums happened to interest me. In one forum I have 150 posts and earnt… just don’t die from envy! - 5 cents. In the other forum I have about 100 posts, and joined the revenue account only on half way, made about 3$. Bottom line is that I’d not count on shared revenue board if money is all you are after, as you will need to post a lot just to get your ads displayed, then again, it will be in rotation of 50%, and then, go and hope that someone will click it. Notable forums in this category are Digital Point and Webmasters Talk
Last type are the forums that provide their members with hosting and domains, as this is the most common thing you get. Most forums do provide quality hosting without ads, some demand a link back to the forum, while others go further and provide ads supported hosting. If the hosting provided is ads supported, then you shouldn’t waste your time posting, there are tons of free hosts out there, some do not even place ads on your site. If, however, it’s a respectable and established website that indeed delivers what their promise and provide high quality professional hosting, you should consider giving it a go. Remember that average host will cost between 5$ and 10$, so as long as you don’t feel like overworking yourself for this monthly price, it’s ok. Some people do not have credit card or paypal,and cannot pay for online service because of it, so for them it will be the perfect solution. Same applies to domain names, which can be registered in exchange for particular amount of earnt points or “stars”. Notable forum that provides domain names and cash by paypal in exchange for point earnt for posting it HostBidder.com

This is more or less my coverage of paid to post communities. Of course if you don’t feel like selling out you can always join my forum - Lorelei Web Forum where the participation is free and volunteer. Hope this pours some light on the paid to post communities and on how you can earn money at home, enjoying talking to your friends.

Many people ask in forums and other blogs this eternal question: How much can I earn from Adsense? While someone would come and say he earns a few thousands of dollars monthly, others will complain about hardly managing to earn a few measly dollars.When

I started with Adsense, it was about a year and a half ago, after my first month I earned 2$. Yes two dollars. In order to be eligible to receive your first cheque, you need to generate 100$, so I was very eager to collect enough for my first payment after 4 years. It definitely did not look back then as if all the effort I put in my site (and I spend many months building it) was worth it. Back then, I also heard about someone complaining about his AdSense revenue, his main concern was that he earns “only” a few dollars daily. It seems like a dream to me back then…

Everybody in the world seemed to earn more than I did, and I couldn’t figure the reason. I decided to set myself what is called an “earnings challenge”. The goal was, the double the revenue for the next month. I know, it sounds ridiculous, setting myself a goal of earning 4$ in 30 days, but it was a challenge for me, and I made it! However, I decided that setting myself a daily goal is far better, in the end of the day I know what were my aim and was this aim achieved or not. If it was not - I need to work harder tomorrow to make up for the day that has passed.

Over a year has passed, and now I do understand the concern of that guy who made only a few dollars a day, it really is a problem when you reach a certain PR, steady traffic and standard.

Let’s say an average salary in your area is 2000$. This might not be something mind blowing, but earning from Adsense is still far better than to work in a factory or wait tables. So, 2k is the goal. 2k, divided by 30 working days turns to be 65$, which is your daily aim. I know what you are thinking now - “eh, easy for you to say, ma`am!”. No, it is not easy, we all start somewhere. After all, 65$ is just 65 clicks, each of which is worth 1$. While this is a bit too good to be true, lets be more down to earth and say that this is 325 clicks, 13 cents each. That’s a pretty low payment per click, means you might need even less, if you go though all the ‘Smart Pricing Optimization’, filter MFA (Made For Adsense) websites etc.

Set a reasonable goal and go for it… Good Luck!