For your website to make money, you'll need to do two things:
How do you do these two things? It depends on your site's business model.
In the first table, find your Website Business Model, and see what your Appropriate Visitor Source is.
Then, in the second table, see how you can get visitors from that Visitor Source.
| Website Business Model | Source of Income | Appropriate Visitor Source(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Website for a real-life group (or personal website) | N/A |
Small number from Google Small number from real-life promotion |
| Website for a real-life business | Sale of products online and in real life, retention of existing customers | Small number from Google Small number from real-life promotion Any amount from paid advertising |
| Product-selling website (with no real-life business) | Sale of products online Use Paypal for this. |
Small number from Google (though it will be very hard, because few people will link to a store.) and/or Any amount from paid online advertising (though it's not easy to make more from your visitors than it costs you to get them to your site.) |
| Information website (with no real-life business) | Advertising on your website. Google Adsense is widely regarded as being the best advertising network. Don't apply to Adsense until your site is complete. |
Large number from Google |
| Visitor Source | Method of Acquiring Visitors | Upside | Downside |
|---|---|---|---|
| Real-life promotion | Display website address on vehicles/premises/products/ advertising, and promote website by word-of-mouth. | Takes minimal work. Visitors will be very interested in your products. |
Generates minimal number of visitors |
Get other sites to link to you. People follow these links to your site, and Google sees these links as "votes" for your site. Google ranks you higher. You turn up higher on the list of sites, when people search. More people click on your website. Don't waste time on tricks/cheating/plagiarism. The best way to get people to link to you is by writing lots of high-quality information for your site. Less-effective methods include link-swapping, and submitting your site to directories. |
Permanent source of free visitors | Large amount of work required | |
| Paid advertising |
Pay an advertising network to run your ads. Google Adwords is the other side of the Adsense system. Also, if you've signed up for FatCow web hosting, you'll have a $50 voucher to spend on Adwords advertising. |
Can get visitors on demand | Is very expensive, takes some work |