If you have a website that provides free content or a free service, but have no idea how to generate an income with your site, then the information presented here will interest you. It is possible to make money with any website, even if all you have is a personal webpage. We will outline each of the different marketing opportunities available to you as a webmaster so that you can implement a plan to profit off your content-driven website.

The simplest way to make money with your website is by displaying affiliate programs, strategically placed on your webpage where people will see them and be enticed to click on them. An affiliate program is a program whereby you, the affiliate, display a banner advertising the products or services of another company. If someone clicks on that banner and then purchases something from that other company, you will be paid a commission on that sale.

There are literally thousands of affiliate programs available to you. Major corporations such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble have affiliate opportunities, as do smaller online businesses such as insurance quoting websites and internet dating services. I recommend that you perform a search on Google for affiliate programs and sign up for as many as you possibly can. You should rotate different banners on to your website each day of the week, and then stick with those that generate the most income for you. Try a bunch of different affiliate programs and see what works.

Another way you can make money with your site is by displaying pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements on your webpage. You need to sign up with companies that deliver PPC ads. Nextag has a pay-per-click program, as do several ad delivery services such as Adrevolver. Google Adsense is probably the most popular pay-per-click advertisement service on the internet, and you should definitely sign up with them.

It is also possible to make some significant ad revenue from your site by actually charging companies a fee to advertise on your website. For this to happen, your website has to establish itself as receiving a lot of high quality traffic. If you have a website that gets thousands of hits per day, you need to have statistics that prove it so that you can justify someone paying a fee to advertise on your website. The more popular your site is, the more you can charge.

Probably the best way to make money with your content site is by signing up for a dealer program, which is a little different from an affiliate program. With a dealer program, you actually add a webpage to your own site that is tailored to fit the look and feel of your own website, but you are actually selling the products or services of another company, who processes the orders and then pays you a commission.

A dealer program is a more effective way to make money than an affiliate program because as an affiliate, all you do is place a banner on your website, and when someone clicks on it they are redirected to the website of the other company, and if they do not make a purchase after clicking on the banner, then you will not receive a commission, even if they return to that website a few days later and order something. With a dealer program, the products or services of the other company are actually sold directly through your own website, so that you are in total control of the sale. Meanwhile, the parent company does all the order processing and shipping, etc. You can just sit back and collect your money.


I hope this information will help you implement a strategy to make money with your free content site. Sometimes, it is easier to make money with a website that provides nothing but free information than it is with an actual business. However, the products or services that you advertise or offer on your site should be somehow related to the information you are providing. If your site provides information about obtaining a mortgage, then your site should have affiliate banners or quote request forms for mortgage brokers or financial institutions. If you have programming tutorials on your site, then you should have offers for software or tech gadgets. Just make sure there is some sort of a correlation between what kind of information your site provides and what you are advertising. This will increase your chances of turning your content into cash.

About the author:
Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com , a service that helps programmers make free HTML forms.

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