How Do Websites Make Money - How To Get An Income from your Website

Many people are not aware of the fact that websites can make money even if they don’t sell any product or service. Websites can and do make money every day for thousands of people all over the world. The basic principle is very straightforward - the main income comes from adverts on the website and from referrals of products sold by other sites. Most people use Google Adsense to get adverts on their website, as this is the most straightforward way of doing it. You get paid every time someone clicks on an advert on your site.

The beauty of Adsense is that you do not have to find any advertisers or raise invoices and chase payments for separate companies or any of that stuff. You place a bit of code on your page and Google will feed adverts to it which are directly related to the subject of your page. This is important because people are far more likely to click on an advert that relates to what they are looking for. All this happens automatically and if the subject of your page changes, so will the subject of your adverts. The income you get comes from advertisers placing bids for certain keywords, so the income you get will vary depending on how competitive the keywords relating to your site are. Your income per click can vary enormously from less than one cent to several dollars.

What if no-one clicks on any adverts? The short answer is that you get no income, but the real point here is that they will click, provided you have a steady stream of visitors. The adverts are relevant to your page, so provided the visitors you get are also looking for something your page is connected with, a certain number of them will click on adverts.

It is no good expecting every person who lands on your site to click on an advert, or even one in five. The number of people that click on an advert as a proportion of the number of pages viewed is known as a click through rate. A reasonable rate would be between one and five percent. So on average for every 100 pages viewed you might get two or three clicks. Given this information, you will begin to see how important the volume of traffic you get to your site can be.

Without visitors to a website, there is no income. It is as simple as that. So for a website to make money from advertising there must be a steady stream of visitors. The easiest way to do this without paying for them (placing adverts yourself) is through search engine traffic. This is a free source of visitors and is an area that must be cracked if any reasonable income is to be gained from your website.

That leads us directly to the design of your website and search engine optimization. Getting these things right are the key to getting a high volume of free traffic to your site. If your site is built from the start with an understanding of search engine optimization, and you promote it in the appropriate way, you are sure to get visitors. Once you have a good supply of visitors you will definitely get an income, but the traffic must come first.