Whether you're a blogger or just have a personal web site, you need to know something very important: With just a little bit of effort you can be making money from your web presence. It always amazes me the number of blogs I see that aren't taking advantage of some simple tactics to bring their owner some additional cash. I'm not saying you'll make thousands of dollars a month (although some people do), but even making $10-$20 a month can be a rewarding feeling. This article will introduce you to two of the most common ways of generating additional income from your web site: Pay Per Click (PPC) and Web Affiliates.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

The idea behind PPC is that your site will display ads or links for other web sites. If a visitor to your site clicks on one of the links you will get paid. There are many different PPC options out there, but by far the most common one is Google Adsense. The best part about PPC is that signing up to be a "publishers" (i.e,. one that publishes the ads on a site) is FREE! That's right, you can sign up for a Google Adsense account in just a few minutes and it costs you nothing. Once you sign up you can quickly use the online tools to generate some script code that you add to your web page(s). That's it. Then when a visitor comes to your site they will see context-relevant ads and links being displayed. If one of them catches their interest and they click on it you make money. The amount of money you make per click can vary greatly depending on the content of your site and the link clicked. I've gotten has little as a penny for a click and as much as $3.76 for a click! The great part about PPC is that you really only have a little initial setup time and then you just sit back and wait for the clicks to generate you money.

If you are a blogger and use Wordpress there are several plug-ins available that will allow you to display Google Adsense ads on your blog.

Web Affiliates

The other money generation option I want to present is web affiliates. The world of web affiliates is huge. It seems that almost every business on the Internet offers an affiliate program. An affiliate program is when the business allows other people to market their products or services. If you send them a customer that buys something then the business will pay you a portion of the money or a fixed fee. Just like with PPC, the great part about affiliate programs is that there is no cost to you.

When it comes to web affiliate programs you have two basic paths you can take. You can search out companies that seem to fit with the theme of your site and see if they offer an affiliate program, or you can sign up for an account (for no cost) with a large affiliate marketing company like Commission Junction, Clickbank, Share-a-Sale, and so on. There are certainly some difference between the affiliate companies I listed, but the common feature is that they have already found a bunch of companies with affiliate programs and they provide an easy way to search for what you want.

Once you've found a few companies of interest and established an affiliate relationship with them, you can get links and banners from them. You take the links and/or banners and add them to your web site. If a visitor to your site clicks on one of the links or banners and ultimately purchases something from the company, the company will pay you. This is different than PPC, which pays you just when the person clicks the link. The upside of affiliates is that when you do make money it can be quite a bit more. I have some affiliate relationships that pay over $30 for each new customer that comes from my site. Not bad for just displaying a link or banner!

Conclusion

I hope you found this information helpful and understand enough to get started making some extra money. It really isn't that difficult and you might as well try to make a few dollars from something you're already doing.

Ten years ago you could include a hit counter on your website and announce proudly that your site was doing "very well" as soon as the number reached 100,000. The current process is not nearly as simple or straightforward. The internet works in complicated ways that have evolved to solve a number of small problems. Consequently, concrete statistics are often difficult to obtain. If you believe the number of online visitors is a reliable indicator to gauge the popularity of your site or the potential sales of your product, you should consider the following:

1. Hit - Every time a user requests a file on your site (a page, not a picture or link to another site) it counts as a hit.

2. File - When a file or page is actually sent to the user, it counts as a file. Files normally outnumber hits, but neither is very useful in measuring traffic. Any IP can request all of the files on your page several times in one hour without any actual involvement from the user.

3. Impressions - This is a concept that has existed in advertising for many decades. For example, a 2-page magazine advertisement counts as one "showing of a creative concept". This equates to one impression every time a reader sees it. If your web page contains five small banners, you could have 10,000 page views, but 50,000 impressions.

4. Page Views - Almost everyone believe this is the most important traffic statistic. This term simply refers to the number of times any particular page has been viewed. This metric can be useful. However, values can often be over-inflated and should always be considered in conjunction with unique visits.

5. Visits & Unique Visits - A visit is simply logged every time a remote IP requests one of your pages for the first time in a timeout period. A unique visit is usually defined as "one visit per IP per day", regardless of timeouts.

The above are all very important metrics, but understanding them properly is key. The best way to decide how your site's traffic is performing is by creating a formula. If you know what you are doing, you can develop your own formula. However, there are plenty of effective formulas currently available. A basic idea of how to evaluate your traffic involves reviewing monthly averages, unique visits and page views. This will give you an idea regarding how many individuals visit your site, how many pages they view, and how long they remain.

A basic formula from MarketingExperiments.com would be:

C = 4M + 3V + 2(I-F) - 2A

This formula shows that conversions are a product of motivation (M), value (V) and then the friction (F) elements minus the incentives (I). This will help you determine how many customers are likely to purchase your product. However, you need all the values first! You can purchase online analytic tools or download them for an upfront or monthly fee. All of them can return useful data to a webmaster.

If you are not an expert webmaster, or you do not understand many of the technical intricacies of web traffic, you should download Google Analytics. This is one of Google's new free products, and all you require is a GMail account and a web site. The program provides easy to read analytic data in a web-based form for your website. This can make it easy to determine which metrics would be most useful for analyzing your online traffic.

Michael Ehlert
RevUpYourWebBusiness.com

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