Money Making
Welcome to the Money Making section of the site. All the methods of earning an extra income listed are genuine and most have been tried by myself at one time or another. For now I am listing the methods I've used to generate an extra income from websites.
Earning an income from a website
I make some money, about £40 a month, from websites and I've put together a simple guide as to how this can be achieved
Earning an income online from a website or blog really isn't as difficult as you might think. I've been doing this myself for a couple of years now and the following guide will give you an insight into how it can be achieved.
You don't need to be very technical to do it but you do need to remember that there are no guarantees - you wont necessarily earn anything from doing it but the risks are low so why not give it a go?
The main thing you need is a good idea and the willingness to learn. There are so much information and help available online that if you get stuck at any stage you can always get assistance, don't be shy to ask!
Time - about half a day to get a simple site up and running, probably a few days or even weeks if it's more complicated. You can start to earn small sums fairly quickly but it will take a few months for more lucrative advertising deals to come through.
Cost - Although you can get free domain names and hosting I'd recommend buying your own domain (costs about £5-£20 if you shop around, usually this covers the domain for a couple of years) and decent hosting is anything from £5 a month upwards. I pay £15 a month for my hosting but it's a reseller account so I can host many sites without paying any more.
I've had about five different webhosts (this is the company that hosts your website) over the years and there's nothing more annoying than when your site is down. With my current host I've only ever had one outage and that lasted about half an hour, so I am happy to pay a small premium for this level of service. My current host is 34SP.com and they offer a referral system - I get a small discount off my hosting for everyone I refer to them so please use the links below if you want to sign up. If you don't want to give me any credit then just use the direct link above.
You'll need to have thought of a domain name, see below for some tips and the cheapest hosting option will probably be fine to start with, you can always upgrade later if you need more space/bandwidth etc.
The first thing you need to have is an idea for a website - this is the crucial point as a good idea will generate interest and that in turn will lead to more visitors and more people wanting to advertise on your site. If you want to start a site but don't have any good ideas then please send me a message as I have loads of ideas but lack the time to realise them.
Once you have the idea formulated, you can decide on your domain name. This is also important as it will have an influence on how visible your site is, in terms of search engine rankings for example.
Think about what potential visitors will type into search engines and use those key words in your domain name if you can but try to keep it short, memorable and to the point. Dotcom domains tend to be more popular and they also cost more to buy as well but I am not sure if they are any more advantageous than .net or .co.uk etc
It's probably easier to buy your domain from the company you want to host with as you wont have to bother transferring the domain then but it will cost slightly more to do this. Have a look on the net for a good hosting company or message me if you want a recommendation. Once you've got your idea, domain and hosting it usually takes a few days for the domain to become active but you can still work on your idea during that time.
Dotcom domains tend to cost more than .co.uk etc, you might pay around £20 for a dotcom domain, for 2 years so it averages out at less than a pound a month, a .co.uk domain might cost half that.
Here's the tricky bit - while you don't need to know a "language", such as HTML, PHP etc it does help. There are a lot of tutorials on the net that are free and good resources and really HTML is pretty simple to learn. You could always get a free template for your site and edit that and doing so really is pretty simple.
I usually just use Notepad to edit my websites but there are free programs available to do the job if you want, or you can use the control panel provided by your host if you want. "BlueFish" is a pretty good free text editor if you want to try that one, just to a websearch to find where you can download it.
Rather than having to spend time building a site from scratch, I use templates nowadays as it is much quicker and easier to do - if you go to http://www.styleshout.com/ you can see some examples, there are loads of sites offering templates for free and most only ask you leave a link on the site back to them.
If you use a template another advantage is you can easily see how the code works and so you can easily edit it and add your own content. For example if you go to my site here: http://www.allbrowsergames.com/ if you wanted the change the paragraph with the text "All Browser Games is now online...." you could just search for it in Notepad etc and change it to whatever you wanted.
Once you've got your site up and running, how do you get the income from it?
I'd recommend initially using an affiliate such as Google Adsense - these don't pay much, probably just a few pence a day to begin with, but you will at least get something straight away pretty much. There are a lot of these kind of affiliates so it's worth searching around and trying a few out as they do vary in how much they pay.
I'd recommend putting a link on your site so people can email you asking about advertising. You can charge whatever you like for adverts but I'd recommend starting at around £5 a month for a link, you can increase this as you get more people wanting to advertise. If you put your email address online you risk getting spam, there are ways around this, the easiest is probably just to create an email address just for these advertising enquiries.
How much should you charge? I'd start off by just asking for a few pounds and then gradually increasing the amount. Most of my advertisers pay around £10 a month for a simple text link placed on my homepages. If your site is very busy you can charge more and advertisers will pay more for banner adverts etc.
The key to building an income is having a site that is either busy, or in my case, has a fairly good Page Rank - you can check the Page Rank of sites here: http://www.checkpagerank.net/
In order to get a busy site, or one with a good page rank you need to have a site that people want to visit, so it needs to be interesting, easy to use/read and ideally have something unique about it. If you regularly update the content of the site that will help make your visitors want to come back again which is also a good thing.
I'll continue to add to and refine this guide when I get a chance but in the meantime please let me know if you have any questions or feedback etc.
I'm always looking to work in collaboration with people on projects so if interested in this please contact me.
