Since Feb 2005 I have been experimenting with making a little income from websites. Not by working on them and building them for people which is one of my proper sources of income, but by actually building sites for myself that then generate an income.

Now, before you get excited, Im not making loads, in fact the sites are only just paying their way, but I thought Id tell you about them as there is certainly potential in the techniques. In fact, quite a few people are making small fortunes using these techniques and a small minority are making HUGE fortunes from it.

At the end of the day the techniques really all boil down to placing advertisements on your website, but there are several different ways to go about this. The two I have been using are affiliate associations and Pay Per Click Advertising. I have also in the past few days started using a new scheme which is in effect a combination of the two.

Affiliate Associations There are lots of online businesses offering affiliate associations that you can sign up to. Once signed up you can place links to products offered by these businesses on your website and if people click on the link and subsequently buy the product you can earn some commission from the sale. One of the first companies to use this marketing technique and one of the most successful affiliate programs is that offered by Amazon. Amazon allows you to place links to individual products on your website so that you can recommend products to your websites visitors. You can also add automatically generated links that Amazon update with bestsellers, new releases etc. If a visitor to your site clicks on these affiliate links and subsequently buys a product from Amazon you will earn commission for referring them to Amazon. Commission rates vary from around 4% to 7.5%.

I have tried taking this a step further by setting up online affiliate stores such as Web Design Books. This website uses a set of scripts to obtain product information direct from the Amazon database and present it in the form of affiliate links arranged by category within an online store. The advantage of using such a script is that the information is kept up to date with the Amazon database so once set up the store is in effect maintenance free You should be able to just sit back and watch the money roll in. Of course, it isnt quite that easy. In order to make any money from it you really must put a lot of time and effort into promoting your new web affiliate store. Without any visitors you arent going to make any commission, and this is where the hard work comes in. Those people that have the time and expertise to promote their affiliate store can and do make a decent living from them.

There are plenty of other affiliate schemes, I have set up an affiliate website selling website templates. There are also sites such as Affiliate Window that allow you to set up affiliate associations with large numbers of affiliate schemes and manage them all from one centralised location.

Overall affiliate schemes can and do work, but in order to make any money from them you have to actually generate sales through your website.

Pay Per Click Advertising Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is similar to affiliate schemes as you place adverts on your website, but you get paid everytime someone clicks on the advert regardless of whether they subsequently buy something. The grand-daddy of all PPC schemes at the moment is Google Adsense. The beauty of this scheme is that it is context-sensitive. As a web master all you have to do is place some code from Google on your website and it will automatically work out what the topic of that page is and serve relevant adverts to your web-page. Hopefully these adverts will be of interest to your websites visitors and they will click on them earning you a small revenue each time they do. The amount you actually earn depends upon the advert and how much the advertiser has bid to get their advert onto your website.

I have implemented Google Adsense adverts on my Windsurfing, kitesurfing and surfing website and after a slow start and some tweaking with the positioning they do generate a little bit of income each day. Certainly not enough to make much difference to my annual income from real work, but they at least cover the cost of hosting for the website which was before costing me a fair bit to run.

Of course, if you have an extremely popular website or lots of them, then there is no reason why contextual adverts such as those offered by the Google Adsense program shouldnt generate you a nice little income.

Interactive Merchandising Ive recently started experimenting with a system provided by Chitika called eMiniMalls. These are in effect a combination between Affiliate Marketing and PPC marketing. This system can be contextual in the same way as Google Adsense adverts or can be based on your own set if keywords. (Note: Adsense terms and conditions state that you cant use other contextual adverts on the same page so if used in conjunction with Adsense, Chitika eMiniMalls must be set up in non-contextual mode). Revenue is earned on a pay-per-click basis.

So far success with these has been limited, but I think that is because all the products and best deals are American based with prices in US Dollars, whereas the sites I have placed them on are UK biased. Chitika are currently working on setting up UK merchants though so watch this space.

Summary Overall, it is definitely possible to make money from your websites. A popular site should bring in a steady trickle of cash and maybe pay for the hosting and domain name. But, with a little bit of effort, several websites and lots of promotion to bring traffic to your sites you could make a living out of it. Good Luck and Happy Money-Making!