Over the past four or five years I’ve tried to run websites monetized with advertising. In all of those years my biggest pay day was probably the one day that I made almost $4 from advertising clicks. At the time I was pretty ecstatic about the $4 payday. If I could just double the traffic to the site I could be making $4 everyday and maybe have a couple of $8 or $10 days. That would start to add up and I’d be able to put the money towards a new computer or something.

That never happened.

After years and years of having various websites my total income from Google Adsense is currently just $55. All those many hours of work over the years I was effectively making just pennies per hour. I don’t want to knock the idea of writing for a passion and you just happen to make money on the side. But the only way I can see to start really making some serious money online is to actually get closer to the actual sales part.

Affiliate Marketing is really a step closer to the business. Rather than just offering some space for a business to advertise you’re actively help make that business some income. They’ll reward you for that extra effort.

If you have a website right now consider adding a real product to the site to sell. Here’s how:

1. Open a ClickBank account and find some products that are related to your niche in the marketplace.
2. Get the hoplink for anything that might be of interest to your readers.
3. Do up some advertisements and display them prominently on your site, like you would with Google Ads.
4. Test test test.

Some more advanced things you might consider is to split test different ads or different products. That’s possible with something like OpenAds or just do some click counting with my url re-direction code.

Consider that for many Clickbank products you’ll make more on one sale than you’d make in a year with Google Ads. Give it a try!

Note I realize that this I use Google Ads, but that’s just because I want to hit the payout threshold so I can finally get paid for all those clicks over the years.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Advice, Internet, Passive Income. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.