Choosing an Appropriate Income Stream

This is the third post in the How to Make Money Online series of posts. Previously, I have how you how to create a website that can make money online and how to define a niche for your website. Today, I am going to show you how to choose an appropriate income stream.

In this article I would try to show you which income streams are the most popular today on the internet. Which you should use on your website or a blog and why. It is very important to choose which income stream you are going to use because it may strongly affect your overall earnings.

Ways to Make Money Online

The first thing you should know there is to know which are the best ways to make money online from your website. These ways are the most popular ways, and in the next post in this series I will show you some other (less popular) ways with which you can earn some money.

Advertising Networks

I have write about an advertisement networks many times on this blog. Ad networks are the most popular income stream available on the internet. Allowing you to make money by placing an advertisements on your site(s) and be paid for every click you get.

Advertising networks works in most cases with pay-per-click business model. They usually have a very good ad types including the related contextual and graphical ad banners. Below are the most popular ad networks currently available on the net:

• Google AdSense
• Yahoo! Publishers Network
• Chitika

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs are one of the oldest ways that allow webmasters and website owners to make money online from their sites. In most cases, they won’t pay you for every click you provide to them. Actually, they would pay you for every lead or sale through your affiliate links or a banners.

In this case, you would earn the commission for every lead or sale you do to that specific advertiser. In most cases, you can earn much more money than with other types of advertising on the internet and it can work well on most websites. Below there are some good, popular and proven affiliate networks you can apply:

• Commission Junction [Review]
• Azoogle Ads [Review]
• Amazon Associates [Review]

Direct Advertising

Direct advertising, also known as direct marketing is a very good way that allow you to make money online from your website. In most cases you would find many websites that sell their own website ad space for a fixed flat-price, for a month or more.

The good thing about this type of advertising is that money you earn is directly provided to you. Without any additional commissions other ad networks and companies gives you. For example, if you make a $100.00 on AdSense – at least that much goes to the Google. They actually live and make money from you and your earnings.

Below, you would find some interesting articles about direct advertising:

• Make money with direct advertising
• BuySell Ads – Direct advertising service
• 10 Direct ways to make money online

Difference Between these Methods

In the table below, I would like to show you the main differences between all these three methods to earn money online from your website:

Please note that there are much more other ways with which you can make money online with your website or a blog. These ways, noted above, are the most popular ways to do that!

I am going to explain further this chart above:

Ad Networks – As you can see their money-making-progress is mostly done by Pay-Per-Click (PPC) method. This means you would be paid for every click you generate on their ads through your website or a blog. Of course, they may be pay you some other way, but this is the most popular way to generate some revenue for your websites online.

Compared to these two other income streams you could make a moderate revenue using an advertising networks on the internet.

Affiliate Programs – Using an affiliate programs through the internet you can make most money. Affiliates would pay you per lead or per sale, providing you a commission or the fixed price for your advertising campaign. In some cases, affiliates may pay you by click but it is not common practice.

Affiliate programs have the largest earning potential, compared to any other income stream module. But you would know how to use them properly!

Direct Advertising – When you sell an ad space on your website you may use any price you want. If you set it too high, advertisers would not pay you but if you set it too low you might not get the most potential earnings through this method. Choose carefully which price you are going to use.

Direct advertising usually has  the lowest earning potential, when we compare it to the affiliate programs or ad networks. It is mostly because an ads through this method are purchased directly from you and they usually have a limited flat-rate price for a month.

Which Income Stream to Choose?

Now you probably ask yourself which income stream you are going to choose. Are you going to use these three income streams and on which sites. Now, I am going to explain and tell you all of that and even a bit more.

As you can see on the above table, earnings highly depends on your website traffic. I have consider the following rates for the low, moderate and high traffic sites:

• Low Traffic: 1 – 100.000 visitors
• Moderate Traffic: 100.001 – 500.000 visitors
• High Traffic: 500.001 and more

I understand that most people think that 100.000 visitors is much. In case of the advertising I would consider these values. Because traffic is the most important factor for these main income streams over the internet.

Ad networks are recommended and most effective if you have a low-traffic website. Simply because they would pay you out for every single click you provide on their ads.

Affiliate programs are recommended for moderate and specially the high-traffic websites, because you would have much more chance to gather more commissions and leads per click.

Direct advertising is the most effective for high-traffic sites. Advertisers would likely buy an ad on your website if it has more traffic. More traffic is simply the more potential clicks on your ads and more visitors for advertisers for sure.

This is the third post in the “Step-by-step guide to make money online” series of posts. The next post is all about some other ways with which you can make money online from your website.