4 Ways To Make Money From Traffic To Your Website

In order to make money from your website you need to get plenty of traffic. But simply getting people to your website isn't enough - you then have to get them to spend their money. So it's important to understand two things - how to get traffic and how to generate a profit.

There are many ways of generating traffic and this can be confusing when you're just starting in online business. Briefly, there are two main types - free and paid. It's possible to get lots of free visitors to your site by implementing search engine optimisation (SEO) on your site. Put simply SEO is about getting your website ranked in a good position when someone searches for information related to your site. You will then get more clicks and more visitors. You can also get visitors by paying for services like Google AdWords. With this approach you need to generate more revenue so that you cover the advertising costs.

So, let's assume that you are getting visitors to your website. How do you make money from them? Here are some ways that you can use.

1. Sell your own products. These can be physical items that are shipped out to the customer or digital products e.g. e-books or MP3s that are downloaded from the internet. If you use this model you are responsible for all elements of the sales process but you retain all of the profits once you cover your costs. There are lots of service providers e.g. ClickbBank and 1ShoppingCart that make the process of selling online easy for you as a merchant.

2. Affiliate marketing. Many people start their online business journey using this route. You don't need your own product - you just recommend other peoples' products. So in effect you're the 'middle' person and you're not responsible for delivering products, customer service etc. As an affiliate you're given a tracking link which you use to direct people to the seller's website and you receive a commission for any sales that you make. There is a huge choice of products that you can promote and most affiliate programmes are free to join. If you plan to become an affiliate my advice would be to choose a topic that you're interested in and then create a website with lots of helpful content. You will then attract visitors who are interested in the topic to your site and you can recommend relevant products to them.

3. Advertising. Once your website is established and you're getting lots of visitors then you could make money from advertisements. There are various ways of doing this but one of the most popular is the pay per click model Google AdSense. Google places relevant ads on your website and you then get paid for each click on the ad. The amount will depend on how much the ad is costing the advertiser. You can maximise your AdSense revenue by getting more traffic, ensuring a good match between your visitors' interests and the ad and its placement on your pages.

4. Sell a service. You can offer all sorts of services online e.g. writing, consultancy, software development - the list is endless. If you have enough targeted traffic you can do this directly through your own website or you could link to a service like Elance.com or Guru.com. They allow you to bid for various projects and they will also manage all aspects of the project for you. It can be a great way of finding and building relationships with new clients.

So consider which of these methods suits you best and then take action to start making money from traffic.