How to Make Money

How to Make Money from your Website

No matter what your website is about you can potentially make money from it.  How?  There are a couple of ways.

• Ways to Make Money
• How to Find Merchants to Pay You
• Aren't Sure What to Sell?

Ways to Make Money

You can sell a product directly.   If you do this, you will need to accept credit cards.  If you have people mail you a check, you are going to lose a lot of business because people like the ability to pay right away.

You can accept credit cards through PayPal or through a 3rd party gateway such as 2checkout.  It is free to set up an account with Pay Pal, they charge very reasonable rates if you make a sale and they have really improved their service.  I recommend them.

2checkout charges $49 to sign up with them and they take a percentage of the sale.  They used to be one of the cheapest and best places you could sign up with to accept credit cards outside of getting your own merchant account; however, I do NOT recommend 2chekcout any longer. 

They upgraded their system recently which has made their system much harder for people new to all this to use and their customer service is in total disarray.  Their service has gone from really pretty good to just plain awful.  They are no longer customer service friendly and I do not recommend you use them.  You will be better off with Pay Pal. 

Side note:  So many people wrote to me from this site telling me I should write a book about this stuff that I did.  If you want to start your own internet business you may be interested in checking it out.  It's an easy read, 162 pages long, and guides you step by step through the whole process of starting and running your own internet business.

It's got the nitty-gritty stuff that you need to know, not "fluff."   If you're interested in finding out more about it, click here.  I think it can really help a lot of people.   Okay, enough with the shameless plug, back to the site ...

You can also make money by referring people to another merchant's services.  This is called affiliate marketing.  The merchant selling a product wants people to come to his site.  For every person that comes from your site to his that buys a product he will pay you a certain amount of money.

You can put up banners on your site or recommend the places in text.  It's best to put advertising up that relates to the content of your website. 

For example, let's say that you are crazy about English Castles and your website is about Castles in England and the history associated with each one.  You know if someone visits your website they are interested in English Castles or they wouldn't be there so what would people that are interested in English Castles be interested in buying? 

Well, they would probably be interested in a tour to England to visit the castles so you could sign up with a merchant's affiliate program that provides these tour packages.  Your visitors might also be interested in reading books about English Castles or English history so you could recommend a few that they might find interesting from Amazon.  You may also sign up with an affiliate program that sells posters of English Castles.  The list is truly endless. 

The best part is it doesn't matter what your website is about you can offer your visitors advertising that reflects your website content and your visitor's interest. 

How to Find Merchants that will Pay You  

I usually just go to Google and type in the type of merchant I'm looking for.  For example, let's say that I want to offer posters on my site.  I would type in Poster Affiliates in the search box and then check out the merchants that come up in the search. 

Click here for a list of some merchants that have affiliate programs. 

Aren't Sure What to Sell?

I've gotten a ton of mail from people who want to make money online but don't know what to sell.  Most of the places that I've seen that tell you that you can make money through them don't work or are just plain scams; however there are some places out there that are decent.  The trick of course is figuring out which places are decent and which just take your money.

To help with that there is a service, called Wah Watchdog (wah stands for work at home) that lets real people who have actually purchased "money making" products grade them.  Millions of people have rated the various programs so you can get a really good idea of whether something will work or not without having to actually buy a product and find out for yourself.

It's a totally free service and you can see what real people like you say works and what they say doesn't.  It's worth checking out if you aren't sure what to sell.  Plus, it can keep you from wasting your money on something that doesn't work. 

Step 5:  How to Get Visitors  è

 

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