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Creating revenue on your website can be relatively simple, yet extraordinarily complicated. For the most part anyone can get started and make some sort of dollar value – but to make thousands per month takes a little bit more knowledge and expertise.

Obviously since you’re reading this article, I’ll make the assumption that you want to generate ad revenue. I’ll strongly suggest against putting advertising on your site if you’re solely devoted to selling a product or service. After all, if you’re selling a product on your website, that’s your money maker. You want all your visitors to be interested in the content you have related to purchasing YOUR product. Not someone else’s.

You should never have a website that costs you money!

That’s more less my general rule of thumb for owning a website. (Although I hadn’t actually followed it religiously until recently). Owning a website has 2 expenses that are always associated with it. One being the cost per year of the domain name itself (usually around $10). And second being the cost for web hosting. (Ranging anywhere from $7-10/month for cheap shared hosting, up to $150-300/month for dedicated high bandwidth servers).

I personally own 1 physical dedicated server (that’s right above me on a shelf) which hosts 3 domains and is connected to a dedicated line. I sold 2 servers which were becoming outdated and purchased an extreme (dv) package at mediatemple.net for a few other domains which needed a better uptime and bandwidth scaling which I currently can’t provide due to technical limitations on my location. Media Temple (mt) is a very professional company with great service and Millions of dollars worth of equipment. Great redundancy and the scalability to start with a low cost package and scale up when your bandwidth requirements become larger. This saves a LOT of time and money as it’s all done seamlessly.

Without any other costs (ie. professional design & customization) a website will run about $150/year starting off. You can find cheaper I’m sure. But be wary using shared servers can be a waste of your time and money. Many companies will oversell their physical limitations and you will be stuck with a slow website that may experience constant downtime. And downtime is time where you’re not making money!

You’re biggest goal in bringing in ad revenue is first off brining in visitors! In most articles I write related to increasing traffic, you’ll constantly hear me telling you to write relevant useful content for your users! Write first for the user, and modify or edit secondly for SE robots.

Using Google Adsense is probably the best way to start making money on your website. It will automatically display ads relating to your content. (Which should be something worth reading). Avoid using this method if you’re selling a product. You are able to stop competitors websites from showing up in the Google Adsense banners, but depending on what it is you’re selling – you cant avoid directly sending your potential consumers to a competitors website!

If you’re primary objective of your website is to sell a product or service, then you should be spending money advertising with Google Adwords and thru other websites by purchasing banner space. And then the visitors coming to your site are looking specifically for your type of product or service… which in turn pays for the advertising and you make money.

I’ll give an example of when to advertise on your site, and when not to advertise on your site.

When to Advertise on Your Website
Your website primarily deals with written content (articles), subscriptions to paid content or newsletters. Generally you’re offering content for free, but may have a subscription service that gives the reader the inside scoop to your unique content offerings that is entirely optional. (But the users come back because you still offer great FREE content).

When NOT to Advertise on Your Website
Your website primarily deals with selling a product or service. Your main goal is to inform people about your product and allow them to make a direct purchase. You don’t want any users to be directed away to any competitor. (Safe to say do not use the Adsense program here).

But It’s not to say you CAN’T advertise, as there are some exceptions which I’ll help explain (So you can decide whether or not to advertise on your site). But advertising on a website dedicated to selling a product or service should be secondary.

Example: Your website offers Web & Graphic Design services. Adding Google Adsense would bring up many links to competitors websites (Which more often then not, will be drastically cheaper than your service). So you want to avoid that. But a smarter thing to do would be to allow other companies of your choice to place a banner ad on your site. Perhaps a company that offers computer & equipment sales. A printing company (unless you outsource and markup). But you get the general idea.

Adsense vs Selling Banner Space
While Adsense can make you quite a bit of money, selling that same ad space to other companies can boost your income even more! You can sell based on a flat monthly rate depending on your number of visitors/page impressions, or CPC (Cost per click). Now if you’re writing articles like me, stick with the Adsense until you reach 500,000 – 1 Million visitors per month. Then think about adding banner advertising channels specific to the articles. You can keep making the same revenue from Google while making the added income from the banner ad you just popped into an article.

One last quick mention would be adding TEXT LINKS. (Similar to the Adsense links, but through other advertisers).

Most of you may be plenty happy making full time wages on top of the full time job you already have. Or even a measly extra $1k a month spending money.