How to make money online
There are only a few ways to make money online in 2016 and each has its strengths and weaknesses. What we have found while researching this topic is that most of the articles published around it are either very old, very shallow and ambiguous, or both. We’re not interested in publishing shallow or outdated content so we have spent some time learning about the pros and cons of the various options. Here is what we have found.
Selling Drives More Revenue Per Website Than Advertising
If you have a product or service to sell you’ll have a better chance of making money than if you just publish a Website that exists on advertising. This Website is a hobby site. I wish we could spend more time on it but we are proud of the articles we have published here. Nonetheless this site does not earn enough traffic to generate much advertising income.
Although you may not have the expertise and resources necessary to become a retailer who sells thousands of products for manufacturers, you could try to set up an affiliate reviews Website. This is a hybrid of advertising and selling because you select the products you review and feature them in whatever context you wish. You just don’t get to set the price or manage the delivery conditions.
If you write you can sell ebooks. Our research indicates that a small percentage of ebook publishers make a substantial living. They do this by publishing several ebooks a month. If you can produce that much content that people find worthwhile you should be able to make some money.
You can also sell consulting services. Turn your expertise into advice that people are willing to pay for. The problem here, however, is that you must market your expertise without giving it away. Many consultants publish case studies illustrating how they have solved problems. This is a pretty good way to show people you have the chops to help them improve their business or personal life.
Other things people sell include old items that they can list on auction Websites, home-made items they can sell in custom marketplaces and auction Websites, online tutorials, and music.
We don’t much like the online tutorials market. We have found a number of companies selling courses that teach you how to make money selling courses. We believe the only people who will make money in this industry are the ones selling the courses teaching you how to make money selling online courses.
Not All Advertising Programs Work As Well As They Are Promoted
Sooner or later you think about placing advertising on your Website. This can be in the form of affiliate links, where you are paid a commission on whatever the merchant sells, or it can be in the form of display advertising where you are either paid on a per-click basis or for every 1,000 views of ads.
Online advertising does not pay much and mobile advertising pays even less than advertising shown to your desktop PC visitors. We have discussed the woes of the online advertising world in the past. There are benefits to advertising that still make sense to this day, for both advertisers and publishers. The keys to advertising success lie in volume and targeting.
Targeted advertising takes two forms. You either place an advertisement on a site that matches the topic of the ad or you use an interest-based advertising network that shows ads to people based on the kinds of content they have been looking at recently. As a Website owner you can create content that you feel will be a good match for the kinds of ads you want to show to your visitors. You can’t do much about those interest-based ads, except to decide whether to participate in the interest-based network or not.
Google’s AdSense program is the most popular among Website publishers and advertisers alike. AdSense has a reputation for paying more than other advertising programs. This is because more Websites carry AdSense than carry other types of ads and therefore more advertisers use Google’s ad network. But AdSense publishers rarely get the best ads, which the advertisers usually only show to Google’s own visitors. The majority of Google Advertisers do not permit Google to show their ads on the AdSense network.
Many people have complained about being banned by Google AdSense without explanation. The AdSense program has published program policies that its publishers are expected to follow. People may knowingly or unknowingly violate these policies. Some of the most common mistakes are clicking on the ads, placing too many ads on the page, placing ads on inappropriate pages, or disguising the ads to look like the main content. You should make a sincere effort to learn and understand the program policies and abide by them.
You won’t make much money from AdSense unless you have a lot of traffic. How much traffic you need depends on what kind of content you have. The publishers who make great money from AdSense are reluctant to explain which articles produce the best results for them. Be wary of “experts” who tell you how to make money with AdSense. If they are really sharing their secrets they are cutting their own throats. But most articles offering advice on how to make money with AdSense are just selling tools and classes.
If you cannot use Google AdSense you will find there are dozens of alternatives. None of them pay as well as Google AdSense in the niches that AdSense accepts but there are other topics where you may make more money. For example, gambling Websites make money by promoting online casinos. You are not permitted to run AdSense on these kinds of Website.
One non-gambling network we investigated was Chitika. You hear about Chitika quite often. There are thousands of blogs that tell you that Chitika is a great way to make money. So we signed up for the program and tested it. We found after a few thousand views on different types of content that Chitika was not reporting any clicks. With AdSense we would have seen at least a few clicks.
Upon further investigation we found only two blog posts where people explained their dissatisfaction with the Chitika program. They felt there were too few advertisers, too little click traffic, and too many “false” clicks (clicks for which they did not get paid). Maybe Chitika is better at filtering the bad clicks now and that is why they reported so few. By the way, these bad clicks come from software called botnets that roam the Web clicking on every link they can find, including advertising links. AdSense deducts fees for false clicks, too.
If Chitika pays so little why are there so many blog articles promoting the network? We concluded that Chitika’s referral program is responsible for the huge wasteland of misleading articles about the service. We do believe some small percentage of people make money from Chitika but very, very few of them share the topics that make money. And most of the Chitika articles we could find are now several years old. We think that means a lot of people tried to make money by promoting Chitika but could not even make money that way.
How Affiliate Advertising Differs from Display Advertising
Display advertising networks like AdSense and Chitika decide which ads are shown on your Website and how much you are paid for them. These ads may or may not be relevant to your content. Google is very good about matching ads to content but we have found that sometimes their network just doesn’t have a good match. Advertisers constantly review the performance of their ads and they may change the requirements of their campaigns every month. That advertiser who paid you big bucks last month may no longer want to show ads on your site because even though your visitors clicked through they did not buy enough to justify the expense of advertising.
It probably has less to do with the quality of your Website and more to do with the randomness of advertising campaigns in general. Don’t take it personally.
What you can do, however, is sign up with a general affiliate service like CJ Affiliate by Conversant or Avantlink. They represent many different merchants and allow you to browse their inventories. You apply to join each merchant’s program. Some merchants automatically accept you. Others reject you quickly. Still, these kinds of middle man services make it easy to find merchants you can promote to your visitors.
You won’t make a lot of money on most of these relationships. You have to experiment to find a good match. It helps if you write great (honest and sincere) product reviews. Don’t just tell people to go buy some product “because it’s great”. If you have really used the product then share your experiences. Even if you don’t like the product someone else may appreciate it more than you do.
You can choose merchants who pay better than others. You can choose ads that work better than others. You can decide how many ads to show on your pages and what formats they will be. In short, as the affiliate publisher you have control over the kinds of ads you show on your Website.
There are Three Kinds of Affiliate Ads
You’ll come across all sorts of acronyms in the Web advertising world. I cannot explain them all here but I will share a few terms.
CPA stands for “cost per action”. This is a flat fee, sometimes called a “bounty”, that the merchant pays to you for any customer they signup through your affiliate link. Some affiliate programs require that the customer actually buy something. Some affiliate programs are so confident in their ability to convert free tryout users to paying customers they will pay you small bounties for people who sign up for free.
RevShare stands for “a share of the revenue” or a commission-based program. Say you place a link to an Amazon product on your page and someone clicks through to Amazon. When they buy something within a short time frame (about 24 hours) Amazon will pay you a small commission from the sale. In the gambling world many casinos pay you a portion of how much the players lose, if you refer them. But they will deduct how much the casinos lose if the players win.
CPM stands for “cost per mille” or “cost per thousand”. In other words, this is how much you are paid for every 1,000 views of an ad. The advertising community is now trying to measure “active view” and “active view viewable” statistics so you may not be paid for views that their systems think were not actually seen by real people.
CPM advertising is sometimes called “display advertising” but any ads that consist of an image that is shown to users may also be called “display advertising” even if they only pay for clicks, actions, or sales.