There are many ways and strategies to make money online, but it becomes more and more difficult to tell what is working and what’s not.

Over the years, many internet marketers and bloggers have been using proven and tested techniques to monetize their blogs.

The first thing that probably goes into your mind is “affiliate marketing”. Yes, affiliate marketing is the most popular one, but as the saying goes “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”.

There are other ways which are as effective as traditional affiliate marketing, and some even more.

In this post I will show you 3 effective and proven ways to monetize your website (no initial investment is required).

 

Contextual Advertising

One of the easiest methods to implement.

The most popular way to do contextual advertising is with Google AdSense. I’m sure that many of you are familiar with AdSense and  how it works.

But for those of you who don’t, here’s a brief overview:

How It Works

After creating an account, Google provides you with a code, that you place on your website.

This code displays various ads (banner ads or simple text ads) on your website/blog and every time someone clicks on this ad you get paid a commission. So basically you get paid for click.

Sounds easy and it really is, you just need to have a lot of visitors on your website and your profits are almost guaranteed.

Sign Up For AdSense Account

Other AdSense Alternatives

Google might sometimes be unpredictable, so you must be prepared if they decide to temporarily suspend your account. (eggs in separate baskets, right).

Good alternatives to consider are:

• Chitika ( best )  – “Display search targeted, mobile and local ads that are suited to your audience’s interests, and earn revenue”.  >> Click here to join Chitika

• Infolinks –  Join Infolinks now -> Click here to join Infolinks

 

 

Offering Services

Offering services can be also very profitable business model. Just pick one thing that you’re good at and offer it on your website/blog  as a paid service.

This can be anything from a graphic design to more complex PHP/HTML coding. You can easily accept payments through PayPal  by adding BUY buttons on your blog.

 

The easiest and fastest way to start selling services on your website is to create a separate page called services.

There you can put in the information about your service, some testimonials from past customers or friends, some examples or portfolio and a BUY NOW button.

As I said above, I recommend using PayPal  as a payment gateway, because it’s very straight forward to set up and makes your life a lot easier.

 

 

 

 

Affiliate Marketing

I couldn’t miss that part. This is the most profitable methods of all.

If you don’t use it, you are leaving a lot of money on the table. Correct that mistake!

The process behind this method is simple – you drive a person to an offer/product  and he performs a certain action (this may be a sale, email submit, zip submit, install, etc.).

After completing the required action you get paid depending on the offer/product. Also known as CPA Marketing or Cost-Per-Action where action can be anything from a sale to simple email submit.

For the purpose of this post, we can divide the CPA Marketing into two major parts

• CPS (Cost-per-sale)
• CPL (Cost-per-lead)

 

CPS (Cost-per-sale)

Let’s say person A is selling a product for 20$ and has an affiliate program in place. He gives 50% of every sale made by an affiliate (in this case – you).

If you promote this product on your blog/website through banners or recommendations and a person B buys it from your link – you get 50% of 20$ = 10$ in your bank account.

Now imagine having several products, making several sales a day …

 

Where to Find Products to Promote

1.    ClickBank
2.    JVZoo

CPL (Cost-Per-Lead)

Website A offers, for instance, 3$ reward for every user you send to their website аnd this user must complete certain action – for example, submit an email address.

There is nothing to sell here. Just a simple email submit or zip submit can bring you $1-$3 per lead.

Where Can I find offers  to promote?

As I wrote in my other post -Which CPA Network For Beginners you should begin with, I recommend two networks as a starting point

• PeerFly
• Maxbounty

Go there, sign up, get approved and start generating some money!