Make money from your website

Why not use traffic to your website to pay for its costs - and maybe even a little more?

Although the cost of running a basic website has tumbled in recent years, there are still quite a few expenses associated with a place on the web.

For a start, there’s the software needed to create the site, fees for web hosting and domain name management every year or two, and other bits and bobs that can result in a bill worth the price of a nice meal and a good bottle of wine.

For no outlay, household names like Google and Amazon pay to place adverts, search boxes and other services on your site that can earn you money every time someone clicks on them. Interested? Then read on.

Traditionally, running adverts on a website has been something that only large companies could do, because it required a business structure to support it. It needed people to find advertisers, convince them that the site was able to deliver the right audience and sell the space; it needed others to prepare the ad and place it on the website so that it looked right; and it required someone to sort out the contractual and financial arrangements. That’s not the case anymore.

Realising that individual websites can reach the parts that large commercial websites sometimes can’t, intermediaries have sprung up that remove both the administrative burdens and the financial risks of carrying simple adverts on a small website.

Fishing for advert
It works like this. Say you run an angling website that looks at fishing equipment and techniques. Although the site gets a lot of visitors every month, it’s still a bit of a hobby and not worth trying to get adverts from fishing tackle manufacturers.

A company like Google will come along and say, “We know loads of companies that sell things to do with fishing. We’ll create the adverts to go on your site. When people click on them, they’ll go to the advertiser’s website, have a nose around and hopefully buy something. For every person that clicks the link on your site, we’ll charge the advertiser and split the money with you.”

The technology behind this is able to sift through a website or blog and pick up keywords and then deliver adverts that feature complementary products and services. In this way, a site that’s dedicated to Marvel comics from the ’60s and ’70s will get adverts from comic vendors, rather than cosmetics companies. Mostly it works well.

Alternatively, some companies encourage individual website owners to become what are called associates or affiliates – Amazon is a good example.

Sign up to become an associate and you can choose to link to a specific product on Amazon (useful for authors who want to make a few extra bob on book sales) or product categories that reflect the content of your site; soon Amazon will also be able to scan the contents of a website and deliver appropriate adverts automatically.

The advantages of this kind of advertising to individuals with small websites are clear. The site owners don’t sell anything, there’s no administration, they don’t have to collect the money – in theory, after signing up and collecting the code that generates the adverts, they don’t have to do anything but wait for the cheques to arrive.

In practice, sites need to be recording large numbers of traffic to start making money. Chitika for example, which places tab-based ‘eMinimalls’ on websites, reckons a site needs to be getting at least 10,000 page views a month before it’s worthwhile signing up.

Get with the program
Joining one of these programs typically involves reading some lengthy terms and conditions, and while most aren’t too complicated, they require careful reading to pick out the important items.

On some issues, for example, contracts are very specific – if a website owner tries overtly to encourage visitors to click on ads or does so themselves to increase the click count, the agreement will be terminated.

On the other hand, many companies are deliberately vague about the earnings that people who sign up are likely to achieve. Broadly speaking those who run a legitimate website with content they’d be happy for their mum to see and who aren’t trying to scam anyone will be very unfortunate not to fulfil any terms and conditions specified by companies.

So far as the legal situation goes, when it comes to displaying adverts from a third party, the water is pretty murky. It’s not made any clearer by the fact that because of the low levels of income, no-one’s going to pay for legal advice to find out a definitive position.

Simon Halberstam, head of Internet Law at legal firm Sprecher Grier Halberstam, believes that assuming reasonable care is taken, you’re unlikely to be held responsible for third-party content unless a visitor or another third party complains that an advert is, for example, offensive, defamatory or in breach of copyright.

At that point the website is ‘on notice’ and you need to have a policy in place to review the offending advert and, if necessary, remove it.

Sign up for profits
Let’s sign up to one of these advertising programs – Google’s Adsense is arguably still the most popular service of its kind. Go to www.google.com/adsense. Take the Quick Tour by clicking the link, then backtrack and select the Click Here to Apply button. This leads to a single-page form; potentially tricky parts of the form have a blue question mark, which links to the necessary explanatory information.

Applicants for the Adsense program have to agree to Google’s conditions. Click the details link in the Policies section and go through the rules; there’s nothing to cause alarm, but we’d urge you to read it.

Put ticks in all the boxes in the Policies section and then click the Submit Information button at the bottom. After that there’s a summary page where applicants can review and edit their personal information before clicking the Create Account button.

Next, Google sends out an email to the address with a live link. Clicking the link takes applicants to a verification page. This concludes the registration process and includes a number of useful Q&As about how Adsense works and the tax implications for making extra cash in this way

Google then needs to check and ‘crawl’ the site, gathering the information it needs to approve the application and deliver the correct type of adverts. There may be a short period where any adverts displayed are public service announcements from Google, but the real things will kick in soon enough.

Google then sends out a follow-up email approving the application and containing instructions for how to change the colours and layouts of the adverts. At the end, Google displays a window of programming code – click anywhere in the window to highlight what’s there, right-mouse click on it and choose Copy from the pop-up menu.

Open your website authoring program, and paste in the code where you’d like it to appear. This will vary depending on the program but there’s plenty of help on the Adsense website.

By the way, advertising and affiliate programs need traffic, so be sure to publicise it. Decide on a site description and type it into Notepad or something so that you can quickly cut and paste it in when submitting the website to search engines (see www.g oogle.com/addurl, for example).

Remember, it can take eight weeks for anything to show up. Web authoring programs usually include a way to add Meta tags to the site; they aren’t foolproof but they’re worth using. Stick the web address to the signature at the bottom of all emails, exchange links with sites that have suitable content, and most importantly, create good content that changes regularly.

What a load of wonga
Like most money schemes, this isn’t going to make anyone a fortune, but it’s quite possible to earn enough to make a website pay for itself. To start with, stick to household names like Amazon and Google, and look at Ebay’s AdContext service, which is going live soon. Another one to take a look at is the Yahoo Publisher Network, which is being tested at the moment.

Pitfalls
The main drawback to all of these programs is that they need visitors who like to click on adverts – if not, there’s very little money to be made. It’s also hard to work out how much some of them are likely to pay.

Google in particular is spectacularly vague about potential earnings, saying: “Although we don’t disclose the exact revenue share, our goal is to enable publishers to make as much or more than they could with other advertising networks.”

Amazon, on the other hand, paints a much clearer picture of what associates stand to earn.

Remember that although this is happening in the virtual world, the tax people will still require their cut of any money you make; visit www.hmrc.gov.uk where there’s plenty of tax-related advice.

Finally, some sites are rejected out of hand on the basis of poor navigation, inappropriate language, incompleteness, or sensitive content – as defined by the intermediary company that’s providing the adverts.

Adsense Keywords
Google sends adverts to websites based on the keywords it finds on the site - this is how a site about potatoes doesn’t end up with adverts for lawyers.

Each keyword has a value based on the amount an advertiser is prepared to pay Google to ship adverts to sites that include the keyword. Typically, for example, a lawyer will be prepared to pay more than a potato farmer.

This has resulted in lots of sites that clearly believe the best way to gen erate cash is to find the keywords that are worth the most and then build content around them. CyberWyre has a list at of the highest paying search terms.

Alternatively, use Google’s own Keyword Tool. However, we think the best way is to focus on creating a website with good content.

For more help, see
Chitika's mini malls

Ebay's competitor to Adsense

general eBay affiliate program and Yahoo's version thereof.