Make Money on the Internet

As many people have discovered the internet is a great place to make money. Whether you are  an entrepreneur looking to make a fortune or a student looking to earn some extra cash, you can profit from knowing, how people make money on the internet.

Making money on the internet comes down to two methods: Pay per click advertising and affiliate sales.

Pay per click Advertising

Like the name says, you put an ad on your web page an every time some clicks on it, you get paid. Google’s Adsense program is the most successful program. They got there because they have the greatest number of advertisers; also their system reads the content of a webpage and then returns ads relevant to that content.

Now, not all clicks are equal, some niches, like insurance, earn much higher pay outs per click than others. You can use Adsense’s keyword tool to research the relative value of a click. Look for the “show estimated average CPC” setting. You can expect to make about 40%, of that for a given niche.

Affiliate Sales

With affiliate sales you refer someone to a site and if they buy something, on that site, you get a percentage of the sales price. Say you refer someone and they purchase a $1,000 laptop and you are making 10% commission. That means you make $100. Clearly if you have the right kind of content you can make a lot more money with affiliate sales, than with PPC advertising.

So let’s look at the big players in the affiliate sales world and what they do:

Ebay: With Ebay you are looking at monetizing specialist web sites, for instance a baseball card or a coin collection site.

Clickbank: Clickbank sells online goods like Ebooks. Generally guys that send out mass emails do very well with Clickbank.

Amazon: Amazon is a good place to start. They have a very large inventory and they are very good at converting visitors into sales.

Commission Junction: CJ is a broker web site, they hook affiliate sites and publishers up with each other through their system, in exchange for a part of the sales. It is the right place for you if your content is about a service industry.