Money making ideas for webmasters

Making an income from a hobby is an appealing prospect for most people and if you have your own website it may be easier for you than most. Have you spent time building up popularity, site visits and social buzz? Then why not earn some money from all your hard work?

There are a variety of ways that webmasters can use their website to make money, but here our top 5 methods:

Exclusive Content

Some webmasters offer part of their content for free and charge a fee to access certain parts of their website, exclusive content and tools. This could include guides, eBooks and videos on niche topics, private forums, networking opportunities or even one to one discussions and coaching.

To encourage users to sign up for a membership you will have to find an appealing angle that will make the fee worthwhile. For instance, successful websites such as SEOMoz, SEO Blackhat assist with SEO professionals by offering search marketing advice, professional tools and the opportunity to discuss SEO within forums.

Banner Advertising

Selling advertising space for banner ads is one of the most lucrative ways of making money through your website. You may be familiar with banner ads - rectangular promotional images which appear on a variety of websites and vary in appearance and content. Their main function is the same; once they are clicked on they will take the user to a site or to a specific page which is relevant to the advertisement.

Firstly you will have to generate a substantial amount of traffic to your site to interest an advertiser. Once you have gained an interest there are some variants which will inform how much you can charge for advertising space:

• The amount of traffic your site receives.
• The industry/niche of your site and your site visitors.
• The placement/size of the advertising space.

Text Link Ads

A text link is a hyperlink which usually sends a user to another online document, such as a webpage, PDF file or video. Other websites can pay you to link back to their website by using a text link, this can be within a review, an informational article or a plain advertisement. Some websites will pay you a set monthly fee, but others will even pay you on a pay per click basis – make sure to confirm this when arranging payment.

You can use text links to advertise your own site too. A popular way of doing this is via article marketing; publishing information articles which contain links back to your website, or to specific, relevant pages within your website which can help increase traffic to your site. The more niche your information article is, the more targeted your traffic will be.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular advertising techniques used on the internet. This practice consists of a merchant who is willing to let others (affiliates) sell their products in exchange for a percentage commission or some other form of reward. Merchants can send potential customers to affiliate sites by also promoting their services via banners, text links or product reviews.

Not sure where to start? It is possibly to join affiliate marketplaces and networks where you can search for merchants to market with, as well as read up on a wealth of articles on this type of marketing.

You can also use the general public to help with your marketing; there are many different types of affiliate websites such as reward sites where users are rewarded in cash of gifts for the completion of an offer and the referral of others to your website.

Sponsored Reviews

If you own a blog you can publish reviews of products, services and businesses which contain advertisements and links back to their site. When an advertiser has a product or service which they want to promote online via content marketing, they may want to create blogger buzz to help spread the word through the internet. The advertiser can write their own article and pay you to post this on your blog, or they may require you to write the blog article for them containing content and links which you choose, as long as it is kept positive.