Earn Money Online | Earn Money From Your Own Website

I had started a website four years back without knowing where the money would flow in. My only investment was time and I was quite motivated to bring up the content for my website. My site did top the results in various search engines but I was still struggling to convert the traffic (visitors to a site) into serious cash. During that period, I thought the only way was to put up the commission basis ads which pay webmasters only the share of the sale that happens through a visitor’s action. One needs to be very lucky and at the same time have huge traffic to get such ads work. The other option was the Google AdSense which has some stringent policies and needed to be used with a lot of care. Well in this post I would like to share certain basic information about making money from a website.

Before all that, let me tell you that I am writing this mainly for the sake of upcoming Indian bloggers and site owners. So I will stick with the Indian Rupee wherever possible. This article however will be handy for any website coming from any country as the basics are the same wherever you are.

In these last four years, there has been a rapid increase in the Online Advertising Networks. These Networks have been providing Webmasters (who are called as Publishers) the various models of Ad inventory. Some of the most common models are the CPC, CPM and the CPA. I shall give a brief info about all the three models here.

For getting more revenue, the mantra is to gather more traffic and at the same time to strategically have the right kind of advertisement placements. Webmasters do need to experiment a lot with different banner sizes and positions of advertisements on their pages and come to know which style suits them well. Anyway, back to the three general Ad models:

CPC: This stands for a Cost per Click ad. The CPC kind of ad model is loved by my most of the publishers. When a visitor to your site happens to click on a graphic/textual banner of this model, then you get a fixed rate for the visitor action. This fixed rate can vary according to the campaign. For instance, publishers are paid higher rates for NRI Campaigns say 10-14 Rs per click compared to the India-targeted campaigns that can be around 2.50-6Rs. My guess is that even an advertising agency would like this sort of CPC model but the advertisers could be slightly pensive, especially the medium size ones.

The CPC model has an element of suspense I guess for the advertiser. He wouldn’t be sure as to how quickly his budget can get exhausted. The bigger advertisers who have plenty of money perhaps go for a time-based period and end up paying for all the clicks that are generated during that period say 1-month or 3-months or whatever.

CPM: This kind of model stands for Cost per Thousand Impressions. To be more precise, a publisher gets paid a fixed rate (again according to the specific campaign) for showing 1000 UNIQUE impressions of the Ad banner. This is irrespective of whether a user clicks the banner or not which is quite a good thing for the publisher. But strangely I notice that the revenue generated out from CPM ends up almost the same as CPC! Probably this applies for the medium size websites. I can give a bottom line though and that is – Sites with heavy traffic benefit hugely from this CPM model where every single unique impression counts! The usual rates that I have encountered for the CPM is 15Rs or so and for NRI Campaigns, it could well be 60Rs!

CPA: CPA stands for the Cost per Action model. A similar model to this is the CPL model which means Cost per Lead. Well these are the ads that suck if you are a publisher! You might give tonnes of impressions to those wonderfully attractive banners and you can generate a few hundred clicks but all that costs to a big ZERO if you didn’t have any luck. This type of ad model requires the user to not only click the damn Ad but also end up buying something on the advertiser’s site through his credit card!

A slightly better model from the CPA is the CPL which requires the user to click the ad and mostly fill up a big form and sort of register himself or providing some essential details in the advertiser site. As I keep saying one needs to be very lucky to make all these happen as a publisher! Only yesterday I was discussing this with one of my colleagues who asked me “who has the time to fill up these forms?” But of course if you have a lot of inventory on your site, then it’s a NO LOSS situation in keeping one of these banners. This model can work at times when the Ads are relevant to the topic of your website.

Paid Text Links: Well the above are the three regular models found in the online industry. There is one more Ad Model which isn’t a main stream one but can be handy in being a second alternative source of income for publishers. It is the Paid Text Link model which is offered by very few Ad networks in the entire world. I have been a big fan of this model but unfortunately it is fading away because of the strict rules of Google. Okay before that I need to brief what it is actually. Well there is something called the Google Page Rank which is measured on a scale of 0 to 10 for every site. The higher the rank, the higher are the chances of a website in getting the top listing for various search terms. So new websites tend to climb up the ladder quickly by buying Text Links for a period of time say 1-month, 2-months etc on the already established websites that have good Page ranks and other factors like thousands of webpages indexed in various search engines etc.

As a publisher if somebody decides to buy a text link on your homepage or sitewide or for a few number of webpages, then you get paid a fixed amount of money every month. It doesn’t matter if your user clicks the Text link or not, you stand to get an amount end of the month! Isn’t that cool? It feels as if you are renting your house to somebody and the great thing is that they pay you decent amounts for just a word or two! A Link Broker does the sales, payments, providing reporting, publishing interfaces to both the advertiser and the publisher. I am afraid this model seems to be disappearing with Google blacklisting websites that sell Links on their sites!

Well this should be enough from me in this post; I shall come up with some more stuff relating to this topic in the near future like giving information about the various AD networks…