How to Monetize Your Website and Earn Money from Your Content

If you publish content on the internet, you've most likely looked into how to monetize that content and earn a profit. Sure, it's nice to know that people read your blog. But at some point, you've got to consider the fact that you're investing time and you ought to get something back for that.

How do you do this? Advertising.

Google AdSense - Clicks = Cash

The standard go-to source for advertising for most publishers and bloggers is Google AdSense.

It's simple to set up, there are no real requirements in order to be approved, and you don't need to worry about promoting or selling a product. Google finds links to information that it deems relevant to your content, and when a user clicks on that link you get a chunk of the change.

Can this be profitable? Sure. Some people make hundreds of dollars a month - even thousands for the really successful publishers - but others are lucky to scrape together a few bucks.

Why? Some sites just aren't going to encourage a lot of click-throughs on advertising. If your users don't click the links, you won't get any money. So you should start thinking about an alternative...

Convert Traffic Directly Into Profit

AdSense pays you on a per click basis. There are other advertising groups that will pay you based purely on traffic - on the number of impressions that the ad is displayed.

Some of the larger ad networks require you to meet traffic standards, which are pretty high (especially for newer blogs). Luckily, there's at least one quality network that you can join if you're not already doing a booming business.

AdsDaq is an advertising network that matches publishers with advertisers looking to sell ads based on a number of impressions. You set a price (let's say $1.00 per thousand page views), and the AdsDaq code will automatically place an ad if it can. Otherwise, it will load a backup ad - like a standard AdSense advertisement.

I've had pretty good luck with a $1.00 asking price - about 50% fill rate. In other words, about 50% of the time that a user loads my site, I'm earning revenue. No need to worry about click-through rates and how to encourage (trick?) people into clicking on the links.

Earn Cash from Your Pagerank

Another method to raise revenue is to profit directly from your site or blog's popularity - it's Google PageRank.

There are a number of services that allow you to sell ad space on your site in the form of text links. One such example is TNX.net.

With TNX, you submit your site to the system and include a snippet of PHP in your template. Once the TNX system has placed a link on your page (and each page will receive different links), it will automatically load. Otherwise, nothing will appear.

The TNX system spiders your page (like a search engine bot), and it will continue to add new links as you publish new content.

For new sites, this will not be very profitable. There just isn't much of a market for PageRank 0 links. Once you get a small amount of popularity though - even a PageRank of 1 or 2 - you'll be able to make a decent profit.

I tested TNX out on one of my old sites over the course of eight months or so. The site peaked at a PageRank of 2 - at which point I stopped updating it - and I still reported earning a substantial amount of money from TNX ($50/month).

A system like TNX - or one of its main competitors, TLA - is a great way to convert your SEO efforts into pure profit.

Start Advertising. Start Profiting.

If you're publishing content on the web, there's a way for you to monetize it. If Google AdSense isn't working out for you, you should experiment with some other systems.

Some - like AdsDaq - are great for high-traffic-low-clickthrough sites. With AdsDaq, traffic directly converts into profit.

For sites that have a lot of popularity but not as much traffic, try selling Text Links. It may be frowned upon by Google, but it's a surefire way to convert your site or blog's PageRank into cold hard cash.