If you are good on what you doing, your website has quality unique content and you are generating good amount of traffic – most likely you will not have problems finding advertiser to pay you directly for ad space.
For majority of new websites it’s not the case and the most common website monetization tactic is inserting Pay-Per-Click advertisement feeds (like Adsense, YPN, Kontera) or banners from affiliate networks. Now your earnings will be determined by how many people click on your ads.

Can you make money with PayPerClick ads? Lets take a deeper look…

It will depend a lot on the theme (or niche) of your website. For popular competitive niche there will be a lot of advertisers bidding for the keywords and paying higher price per click to be in the top spot. In this case every click may earn you few dollars. For less popular subjects competition will be much lower and earnings per click could be just a few cents.

Second determining factor for making money from PayPerClick ads would be placement those ads in high visible spots but in the same time not affecting visitors browsing experience. If it’s a text links – ALWAYS adjust colors to match main theme of the website.
I am not going to go into details about proper ad placements – there are tons of tips and recommendations on each and every ad network.

Let’s get back to the main subject – how theme of the website affects amount of money you may potentially earn… For you to get paid people have to click on your ads. Who is most likely to click on those ads or content links? People who doesn’t know that it is an ad or not aware (or don’t care) that you are getting paid for those clicks. The worst possible category of visitors in the view of bringing you any kind of commissions are WEBMASTERS! No matter how perfect you place ads on the website and blend it in with the rest of the content – they will see them and will go extra mile not to click on it (even if they are very interested in this advertisement).
In other words less tech savvy is the visitor – more likely he will click on the banner or text link.

Next time you get an idea for a new website keep in mind these little tips:

- make sure there is a large potential market in this niche. Do some Google search for related keywords and see how many results there are.

- check few search results pages deep and pay attention how many different advertisers you see in the sponsored boxes: more often you see the same ads – less advertisers are bidding for these search terms and less money you will get paid per click…

- try to target less tech savvy people (kids, women…) and STAY AWAY from anything webmaster related!

The main advantage of having directory within your blog or site – it provides additional relevant content and gives your visitors more reasons to stay on the website longer. Properly structured and well maintained directory may also bring extra traffic that otherwise you probably would not get… Another plus of having directory – it can generate additional and very significant revenues.

About a year ago whole business with directories was taken to the extreme when people were starting low quality obvious link farms by thousands. To prevent manipulation of search results Google has changed theirs approach to indexing and evaluating pages. Large part of those made-on-the-fly directories was removed from Google index and left to die…

For directory to succeed – it has to provide QUALITY content to it’s visitors. And by “visitors” I mean people who came to your site looking for resources, not webmasters who want to submit websites to your directory. For example I was checking traffic sources for my World Web Directory and saw that many search terms which brought visitors were related to individual pages that I have optimized for every listing. I described in more details how to improve quality of directory on my Directory Resources blog.

How do you make money with directory? If you can maintain high quality, free of junk directory, especially if it’s highly targeted narrow niche – people will gladly to pay for inclusion. Higher the traffic and more competitive niche – higher the price you may charge for submissions.

The biggest mistake many directory owners make – they concentrate on the webmasters who submit their sites and accept many low quality resources as long as people are ready to pay. I repeat one more time – your goal is to provide high quality content to your visitors, even if you have to refuse some money. In the long run it will pay of handsomely…

As I mentioned before, there are many pre-made scripts available to power up directory but from my own experiense I would highly recommend eSyndicat Directory Software. It’s a powerful, highly customizable script which can be used as a stand-alone directory or you can build whole portal with it. There is a free version with less features available to try it out but you should definitely go for the Pro version (only $75 with unlimited life time upgrades).

So… here it is – another potential revenue stream for you – Web Directory.

Let’s say you are an expert or at least very competent in some kind of field like writing, programming, design or something else web related. You should be able to find a client for your skill very easy on one of the active webmasters forums like Digital Point or UK Webmasters World.

There are thousands of people constantly visiting those forums to find some answers or outsource some work that they are don’t have time or knowledge to do themselves.

It is essential to be a member of active high traffic forums to market your services and also to promote websites. Creating and maintaining good name in webmasters community is much more important for online business than off line one since information on the net is spreading with the speed of light…

Sometimes it worth to do some work for free in exchange for feedback or review of your services. This will benefit you in the long run and potentially bring in more business. People are less likely to use someone who just joined the forum, have zero i-Trader points and have none or very little useful posts on the subject… If you’ve been around for a while and participated in the discussions related to the field you tryind to sell services for – there is a very good chance someone may hire you.

You should create some kind of website, even free one with the Blogger just for the sole purpose of collecting feedbacks from your happy customers, having a list of your services with estimated prices and may be portfolio of completed projects or sample articles (if you offer design or writing services).

Finding quick customers through forums is mostly for the quick cheap projects, because usually there is a high competition for those customers. You may be forced to offer much lower price that usual just to get that quick cash. But if you have time or (like I said in the beginning of my post) simply need money fast – this is a way to go…

You never know – one of those quick customers may turn out to be a good paying long term one in the future if he is happy with your service now…

I will call it Blog Income Stream.

Probably easiest and fastest option to get started with new blog is to use free Blogger account from Google.

Why Blogger? The answer is simple – it’s easy, it’s fast, and most important – it’s free! Wouldn’t you like someone offering you fully equipped store to use rent free? That’s exactly what Blogger gives you – fully featured online store.
You still want to personalize the blog to make it unique and attractive to the visitors. Building online business image and brand recognition probably even more important that for a regular off line business.

There are many other portals that offer free blogs as subdomains on their servers, but if you decided to go with “free” blog option I would suggest to stick with Blogger or WordPress hosted blogs.

Sure there are more professional options like using your own domain name, hosting servers, more advanced publishing software (like Subrion CMS for example), but you can get back to these options after you get initial presence on the web and become more comfortable with working on your blog.

Now most important questions:

- Can you make money with blog? – The answer is Yes!
- Will you make money with your blog? – It’s entirely up to you…

There are tons of advertisements who promise to make you an Internet Millionaire working few hours a week – forget about it!
As any new business your new online business (and that is exactly what your blog will be – online business) requires hard work and dedication.

Lets use the same example I was giving before – the store. In the beginning your blog is like a little newsstand on the middle of nowhere with no customers and empty shelfs.
Your goal is to turn it into a Designers store on the Park Avenue in New York City…

The competition is very high and new blogs are started every second. Only few of them will survive and prosper. Will yours be one of them?