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.

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?"

I recently wrote an article about it on my other blog, Now G Net, but thought I’d share these thoughts and info with this blog readers as well. The article mainly discusses what are the advantages and the disadvantages of having 1 OR many websites. Both “techniques”, if we can call it like that, have their up and down sides. That post also went up on Pixel2Life and Tutorialized, so I guess it was not that a bad article.

While writing I was mainly inspired by my personal experience, and how which technique played to my benefit. Like many, I started off with a small “starting capital”, if we can it a “capital” anyway, and slowly developed a network of websites. First I only had once website and it had advantages (which I discuss in my article), but after a while, when I decided to expand my little empire I realized I need more, much more websites, and moreover I need to “throttle” the subjects to avoid making a messed up huge site that can’t possibly get targeted visitors due to been too busy. This is why this blog is separated from my other blogs and websites.
You can read the entire, very comprehensive overview of the online strategy HERE. Here is a small summery…

My personal opinion? I’d say make a few sites, and make them different. There is no point in making 10 stall sites about articles with similar layout, structure and more or less identical content, because if your visitor did not like the first site, he wont find the others any useful as well, while if he did like it, he will stick with the site he visited first, bookmark it and won’t look further. Some people find bright layouts to be irritating, others love it. Some websites’ content are more targeted to the older audience while others are mostly visited by teens, and if you have a wide variety of website, you can play wise with your traffic and make the maximum out of it, for both yours and visitor’s benefit.

Read the full overview of making 1 website vs. 100 websites .

Although some of you may think that promoting a blog is same as promoting a website, we - the bloggers, know the difference. Bloggers have more opportunities to promote, although this article will try to focus on “website” in a more general sense.
Sometime, when your website has little traffic, it is not necessarily because of bad SEO or poor promotion, sometimes it’s the small mistakes webmasters make while developing a site, which keep causing long-term damage. Here are some of the common mistakes and how to avoid them to maximize continuous traffic…

1. Keywords in URL’s. This means, the title of each page and the URL itself should contain some of the essential keywords which can potentially draw traffic from SE to your website. Blogs can easily modify the permalinks to titles, and webmasters of regular website should just give each file the appropriate name, for example “searchenginesoptimization.html” is better than “page273.html”, from Search Engines’ point of view.

2. Size (of other sites) does not matter. Don’t neglect small traffic generators; having said that, I do not advice you to buy massive links from small websites that send you a few visitors a day (although for some of you that is already a lot), but if you have an opportunity to get a link from a relatively small site with relevant theme, do not waste the opportunity. Don’t forget that any webmaster is dreaming to see his site getting recognition, and will do his best to promote it, so any link from a “small” site can potentially become a link from a “big” site, in a few months. Just have faith and hope other webmasters will do the job for you.

3. Size (of your site) matters. Yes, it’s good to have a big… website. You can brag, you can gain world’s domination… OK, serious now: the bigger is your website, the more potential it has. One hundred articles will naturally cover a wider variety of keywords and miscellaneous keywords “joints”, rather than one article. Also, it can potentially interest more visitors from different countries and cultures, as again - your guest is likely to find something interesting for himself after browsing one hundred topics, which may not happen if you only have a few measly articles.

Read More from "Give your website’s traffic Nine Lives"

Most of you probably know of about this very well-known tool - Blog Juice Calculator. It calculates how important is your blog compared to others on the internet, based on your Technorati Ranking (i.e. hos many blogs listed in Technorati link to you), Alexa and number of backlinks from Bloglines.

When this blog was launched it probably was 0.0, but I do not know as I did not check. In the beginning of March, I checked and our “Blog juice” was 0.2. Rather depressive if you see how much most of other web journals have… anyway, I started to work on promotion, mainly it came thanks to the freely offers WordPress themes - Lorelei Bliss 2.0 and DarkLight.

After 3 weeks the ranking climbed up to 1.5 1.8, 2.3  2.6 (updated on April 9th May 2nd), which is our todays number and the aim by the end of April to reach 2.3. Is it possible? We will see in 4 weeks! Current rank (will update this bi-weekly):

EDIT: Reached 2.3 on April 9th, so now the goal could be cheekily raised higher for the end of the month… How about 2.5?

EDIT May 2nd: Yet another goal is achieved, I was hopping for 2,5 by the end of the month and achieved 2.6. Well, it’s ok, I know.. I am the best

My previously released WordPress theme, Lorelei Bliss 2.0, was followed by absolutely unexpected positive feedback, I honestly couldn’t foresee so many people contacting me and thanking me for that layout, and that is only within something like 3 days…wow, I can’t wait to see what will be after 3 months… Oh, anyway, back to Earth!

This is my second WordPress theme, compatible with the latest version of WordPress, comes with pre-installed widgets. 3 Columns, fixed width optimized for 1024*768 resolution or higher.

NON-sponsored themes are offered for a download for a limited period of time. This theme is no longer available for a download.

DarkLight Free WordPress theme Terms of Use:

1. This WordPress Theme was released for free under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License, therefore please do not remove the credits and links to loreleiwebdesign.com and Toptut.com at the footer of the template.
2. You may offer this template on other websites for a free download, as long as the credits are reserved intact. Please do not hotlink the download to our server.
3. Should you have any questions regarding the Terms on Use, please contact me at lorelei@loreleiweb.com
4. Much as I’d love to help everyone, I am sorry but due to very busy schelude with my other websites and blogs, I am unable to provide personal support with regards to installation or modification of the theme. If you wish, however, to receive assistance, please feel free to discuss it in Lorelei Web Forum

I often stumble across very professionally looking blogs, that appear to be successful and respectable, and then I see what puts me off the most in any website: “If you like our site, support us and make a donation!”. Or it’s just this nice blue PayPal’s button with puppy eyes saying “Donate”.

I honestly understand webmasters who overflow the site / blog with ads, hoping to milk the maximum from each visitor / hit. I might not be a big fan of sites dominated by adverts, but still - the webmaster is making money, he invests some work and in a respectful way gets it in return. But donations? Whats the point in paying for a decent host, getting a top level domain, designing your site, giving some marketing advice and at the same time sit on the floor waiting for handouts..?

What amazes me is that many online marketing pro’s actually recommend using the donations button as a way to monetize your site. Washington Post, Steve Pavlina, ShoeMoney and many others, suggest donations as one of the top 5 ways to make money with your site, blog or forum. I personally see no difference between online and offline donations. In your office, on your working desk, will you put a cup with a small note on it - “if you like my work, donate me”?

Yay, after breaking my head with WordPress Theme coding, I finally got there, here is my first ever WordPress theme - Lorelei Bliss 2.0. I must say, as arrogant as it may sound, I love the result… The theme is widget ready, although I must confess I pulled the widgets from a few other free themes put it together, modified… but it works, and it’s all that counts! Code mostly based on Earthling theme by mandaringmusings.com
Specs: 3 Columns, Fixed width, Widgets ready, optimized for 1024*768 resolution, best viewed on 17″ or 19″ monitors.
Lorelei Bliss 2.0 Free WordPress theme Terms of Use:

1. This WordPress Theme was released for free under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License, therefore please do not remove the credits and links to loreleiwebdesign.com and Toptut.com at the footer of the template.
2. You may offer this template on other websites for a free download, as long as the credits are reserved intact. Please do not hotlink the download to our server.
3. Should you have any questions regarding the Terms on Use, please contact me at lorelei@loreleiweb.com
4. Much as I’d love to help everyone, I am sorry but due to very busy schelude with my other websites and blogs, I am unable to provide personal support with regards to installation or modification of the theme. If you wish, however, to receive assistance, please feel free to discuss it in Lorelei Web Forum

NON-sponsored themes are offered for a download for a limited period of time. This theme is no longer available for a download.