Earning money on the Internet

Making money out of visitors’ generated traffic on a web site has always been the target of good web designers. Until a few years ago, the one and only way of accomplishing this was using the web site to directly sell goods or services to visitors.

This basic concept of monetization (e-commerce) has lately evolved, so that now we have at our disposal tools and informatics’ systems which can get profits out of visitors who just browse the site. Making money through internet is the new frontier, but this is achievable only by means of a professional and strategic approach to the web project.

How to make money on internet

The concept is extremely straightforward. The earning is generated by the “clicks” user do within the web site. Each click is, or could be, a gain. It is sufficient to promote external sources (no matter the kind) and to redirect user’s traffic to those. Profits can be made with different methods.

• A simple click on a link (pay-per-click)
  
• User subscription to the linked site (pay-per-action)
  
• Purchase of goods/services offered by linked site (pay-per-sale)
  

These sponsored resources might be graphically displayed as banners, images or text and usually relevant HTML code is provided by the affiliated site, even if, when able to, one can define its own tags. Earnings vary depending on the agreement signed with the sponsored site.

What to do

This sponsoring system is usually referred to as “Referral program" or  “Affiliate Program” (this is a list of the best affiliate program for sites an blogs). Subscription to this kind of programs is generally free of charge and can be done on-line.

Once subscribed, you’ll be provided with a list of sites offering different kind of goods or services. It will then depend on you the choice of those to insert in your site. The best affiliate program is AdSense and it let you earn money when users click on the ads. Registration it's free.

How to do it

First of all, one has to realize that the profit made with internet traffic must not be project’s target, but only an informative structure aimed to guarantee a money return for the maintenance of a site which should have its own and specific purpose. Moreover, a good knowledge of network dynamics id needed. The actual outcome of an “Affiliate Program” depends on how many people click on the suggested resources.

Well, there are detailed statistics on the subject. If we take into account the ratio between number of resource displays and number of clicks on it (displays/click), we get a critical value named CTR. With such data, is possible to generically quantify the affiliation programme outcome level and the consequent gain:

• CTR< 2: Insufficient
• 2 < CTR< 4: Sufficient
• 4< CTR< 8: Good
• CTR> 8: Very good

How much is one likely to earn? Easy: that depends on how many pages are displayed, or better, on how many times a sponsored page is displayed. If, for instance, you already have a web page with an average of 5000 displays a month, you may be sure that sponsoring a resource on that page means a CTR ranging from 2 to 4, that is you can expect the page to be clicked monthly from 25 to 150 times.

Strategies

In order to make some profit, therefore, one has to work on two main points:

• ClickTrought Rate
  • Only use sponsors strictly related to site subject
  • Put sponsors in the right position
  • Use sponsors as a complement to page content
• Increase in visitors
  • Use search engines
  • Improve information quality in the site
  • Use a correct and optimized HTML syntax