You've probably seen a lot of internet marketing material about maximising your Adsense revenues in the last year or so in particular. It probably won't surprise you to know that there are many other ways to monetize your website. This article will explore some of the many different ways to monetize your website.

Firstly seeing that Adsense has been mentioned I'll briefly touch on some of the things that can make your Adsense ads work better for you. The overiding principle is that you don't want the ads to stand out from the rest of your pages. You do not want to have a visible border around your ads or a background color that is different from the rest of your webpages. You should also use the same font and size that is on the rest of your webpages. The main places you can put your Adsense units are the top of your page above your headline, in the body of your content (left or right placed) and at the bottom of your page. There are also some very strong opinions about what size ad units to use, with the majority view being that larger rather than smaller works better.

There is also some evidence to suggest that placing pictures near your ads also helps click through ratios. The important thing to note is that every site is different and you should test and find out what works best on your sites. Joel Comm, Michael Cheney and other gurus have gone into quite exhaustive details about Adsense and what works best, so there's plenty more information out there if you wish to explore. Apart from Adsense don't forget that Yahoo and Microsoft also have their own advertising programs.

A very obvious and potentially lucrative way to monetize your sites is to add some affiliate links to them. An affiliate link is simply a unique link that you can use to promote products that have been created by other people, for which you receive a commision for each sale. Some good sites for finding affiliate programs are http://www.clickbank.com, http://PayDotCom.com and http://Amazon.com, simply sign up and then find the products you would like to promote. In the past it was quite popular to put graphical banner ads as the main way to do this. In more recent times internet marketing research has shown that these tend to have extremely poor click through ratios and generally are not used very much anymore, although they are still around and again you should test on your own sites to see if they'll work for you.

These days there are other more popular ways to promote your affiliate products. One way is to write your own specific sales letter, generate traffic to it and have a link or links to the product that you are promoting, many marketers have had great success with this achieving better results than the original sales copy was able to achieve! The other main way is to weave your affiliate links onto your page in places where your content is related to the product you are promoting. You can do this with a normal HTML hyperlink on a related word or phrase or you could do it with some DHTML that does something like create a small popup window when the reader's mouse passes over the top of the related word or phrase. Either of these 2 methods are quite elegant and subtle ways of attracting a click from someone who is already interested in the content and quite likely would be interested to find out about a product that has more information about the same subject.

Another admittedly more complex way of monetizing your websites is to introduce a membership program. A common way of doing this is to have enough good quality free content on your site to attract and keep visitors in the first place. You then also have a premium content area that your visitors can only acess if they join up. You can do this as a one off lifetime membership or you can have some sort of ongoing fee to continue to allow access to the premium area. As you get more established with a membership site you can even build in more membership levels, each one with a different fee structure and access to different levels of content.

An alternative to Adsense ads is to go into some pay-per-lead programs. In a pay per lead agreement, the advertiser only pays for leads where the visitor performs an action at the merchant's site such as joining their program, signing up for their newsletter, filling out a survey, etc. No payment is made for visitors who don't sign up in any way. These can be quite rewarding at times because you're not relying on the visitor to commit any money in order for you to get a commission i.e. it's not so big a hurdle to get them to take action. As a general rule you can expect commissions that are higher than pay-per-click but less than an affiliate sale.

Of course you can always develop your own product to sell as a means of monetizing your site but that requires a whole article in itself. In the next in the series I'll start to look at some of the different kinds of software available that can help you with building your website.