Make money from your website

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.