When you started your website, what was your goal? It was probably either to market a service or product, or to provide information about one of your passions. Unless you were well ahead of the game, you probably didn’t start a website with the sole purpose of making money through clicks.

But that’s exactly what you can do when you monetize a website. Of course, you also need to have a smart website marketing plan in order to send more visitors to your site and thus make more money through it.

Before you put the cart before the horse, though, you need to have a website to market in the first place. There are a few main ways that people generate money online in legal, moral, and ethical ways:

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate marketing is the art of selling other people’s products. There are thousands of products out there in virtually every niche that you, as an Internet marketer, can sell to the people who come to your site or blog.

The great thing about affiliate marketing is that it’s easy and cheap. Just set up a blog or website, drive traffic to it, and every so often throw out a link to a product that your viewers can buy. The whole process can be amazingly cheap depending on your methods of driving traffic to your site or blog.

You can do product round-ups where you let people know about cool products in different categories, or in-depth reviews on specific products.

Google Adsense

Google will pay you to put their ads on your website. Some people generate thousands and thousands of dollars through just Google Adsense. In my opinion, this is a little bit harder way of making money than affiliate marketing though it just as cheap to do. One downside is that you do not necessarily have control over the ads that Google will display on your website. A lot has to do with the user’s browsing history. But on the other hand, these targeted ads make people more likely to click on them, and those clicks generate income for you.

E-Commerce Stores

This is probably the most well-known online money maker because it works about the same as the real world. If you have even just one product, you can sell it online. Some of the best products these days seem to be informational products because they do not require any inventory, shipping, or complicated business legalities (well, at least not as much as a store). You can sell downloads for an in-depth white paper on a topic you know well. You can sell coaching services. You can even sell WordPress themes if you’re a coder and designer.

All three of these methods are being used to generate thousands upon thousands of dollars online. They all require a website and they all require driving traffic to that website through a marketing plan. Contact us for assistance at any stage of the way. If you want it done right from the very beginning, be sure to call today!