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.