How to make money by making a website

Do you need to make some extra money? Like the idea of a recurring source of income? Here's some important information about how to make money by making a website.

Whether you make money by making a website, a blog or just a few Hubpages, you'll soon find out that making some extra money is easier than you thought.

If you don't have your own website and want to try out online money making and article marketing then Hubpages is a great place to start. It's free to join Hubpages, and you can write on pretty much any topic.

Having a Hubpages account is a great way to start your Internet Marketing career. You'll learn about how to attract visitors to your web pages, and how to make money from your web pages.

Because Hubpages is such a popular site it's quite easy to write pages that start earning money in their first week. I have written pages on this site that have made over $20 since I published them in February 2010, and they're still making money week after week.

To make money from Hubpages you need a Google AdSense account. These are free and easy to apply for, especially if you're in the United States, Canada or the UK. My brother got an AdSense account in one day, and he doesn't even have a website!

You can also make money in other ways. The Amazon.com affiliate scheme is a great way to learn affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing gives you money if people buy stuff from your web pages. All you need to do is write an interesting web page about something that Amazon sells, and you can make some extra money from your Hubpages.

Look at my Cute Hello Kitty Plushies page - if someone visits this web page then buys a Hello Kitty plushie or anything else from Amazon that same day then I get commission on that sale. Sometimes if a visitor goes on a shopping spree at Amazon then you'll end up getting commission on all kinds of things they buy at the same time! Christmas is an especially good time to make money from Amazon.com.

Once you get more experience you can try other affiliate schemes that make money from selling other products and services. ClickBank is very popular - you can market people's eBooks, software and other digital products and get to keep up to 75% of the items's price for yourself! ClickBank has been really good to me on Hubpages, and I have made some extra money by selling my own eBook as well as writing about other people's eBooks.

Once you get a lot of visitors to your pages you can also apply for a Kontera account - this puts extra advertising in your Hubpages, and you can make a bit more money from your pages.

Get a free guide to Hubpages!

If you sign up to Hubpages using my own link then I'll send you a free guide to making money on Hubpages. All you need to do is sign up using this link, write 10 hubs, and I'll send you the guide for free!

It's pretty easy to start your own website. Basically to start making money from your own website all you really need is an idea for the site's subject. It's best to write about something you know a lot about. Even better is to write something that not too many other people know a lot about. If you want to make money then a website in the health, relationships or money niches can do very well. These are competitive areas though, so it is hard to get visitors due to the fact that there is a lot of competition.

If you have enough website visitors then a website about anything can make money. Look at Danny Choo. His website (dannychoo.com) is about Japanese toys, collectibles, DVDs and other stuff you wouldn't think would be very lucrative to write about. But the guy has made so much money from his site that he gave up his day job to write for his website. Now he even has his own company and his own employees!

A website can start off small. My own personal website (www.brettb.com) started with just 5 pages back in 1999. It now has 250 pages and well over 1,000 visitors every day! The website makes a useful 2nd income from advertising. It also makes much more money by selling my own software products. As you get more experienced at making money from websites you'll learn that offering a product for sale can be the best way to make money. Making products doesn't always require programming experience or other specialist knowledge. eBooks are fairly easy to write and they often sell for more than a printed book will cost in a book store!

Site directories (portals) are a very nice type of money making micro-website. They were very popular early in the last decade. Surprisingly I don’t see so many being created today. If you find a good niche to write about then this type of site can make quite a bit of money.

I set up my software documentation portal (www.softwaredocumentation.info) in 2007. It’s quite a small niche in the computer software topic, but advertising revenue is quite good because it’s targeting people looking to buy or get information about something (in this case software). If you can write web pages that attract people looking to buy things then you can attract premium high paying adverts to your pages. Your visitors are also much more likely to click on your adverts if they want to buy something rather than just browse your site.

My software site has around 150 pages of content. All I had to do was think of some topics in the software niche, then write about a few popular software products in each topic. The entire site is just one ASP.NET page with all the content in a database. This type of site is quite easy to program if you can write PHP, ASP or another web scripting language, or you can buy an off the shelf solution. Alternatively you could just write all the pages yourself. I don't have to change the content on the site very often, and most of the pages are unchanged since I wrote them in 2007.

If you don't want a website, then how about a blog?

A blog is a type of website where you make regular postings. For best results it's a good idea to restrict your blog to just a single niche. Ideally choose something you know something about and will enjoy blogging about. I made a blog for my software site - it's at documentationtools.blogspot.com.

You can sign up for a free blog at many sites, the most popular are Blogger (like I used) and the various sites that host WordPress. Blogger is generally a bit easier to get started with, whereas WordPress is more popular with people wanting to make money from their own blogs.

It's best to make regular postings to your blog. If you have a Blogger blog then you'll find it's really straightforward to add advertising to your blog. Through Google's AdSense programme all you have to do is tell Blogger where to put AdSense adverts on your blog, and adverts showing products related to your blog's contents will show up! So if you write a blog about skiing, you'll see all kinds of adverts for skis, skiiing vacations, skiwear, that kind of stuff.

If your blog gets popular then you'll probably get a few people following your blog. This is a great way to build up a mailing list in a particular topic area. As your Internet money making experience grows, you'll find that having a blog with loads of followers in a particular niche makes it really easy to make money.

Once you become familiar with making websites, then why not build websites for other people? Maybe your friends and family would love a website? How about small businesses in your local area? As you learn more you'll find that your expertise in making websites becomes very popular.

You'll soon find it's quite easy to make a bit of money writing websites for other people. Alternatively why not build them a website in return for a cut of their future profits?

Websites become ever easier to build as you get better at it and learn shortcuts for making good money making websites.

Alternatively why not sell your websites? If you build a good website and want some money in a hurry, then you'll find there are loads of places you can sell your website in return for cash! The best site for selling your site is flippa. If your website is making money then you might be surprised at how much it is worth.

I hope you've enjoyed these tips about how to make money by making a website. If you have any comments or suggestions then leave your thoughts below! If you liked this article then please use the green VOTE UP button below.

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