Domain Parking
It you were to register a domain name and then choose to park it, you could permit advertising to appear on the page, which would earn you money when someone clicked on the ads, providing you with a passive income. You can choose to take this approach with one domain or with a portfolio.
If you are interested in this path, you may wish to do some reading about domaineering as a way to have a money making website. See, in particular, the article “What Is Domain Parking?”
Join Affiliate Networks
Affiliate networks can give your visitors access to related products, but they can also provide you with income, even if you don’t have your own products for sale. Visitors click on ads that appear on your site, but you get paid for sales, not clicks. You can choose to affiliate with one or more merchants to create a money making website.
Two affiliate networks that you might wish to visit to get a better idea of the offerings are Commission Junction, which includes partners such as computer, office supply, and travel businesses and LinkShare which includes communications, department stores, travel, florists, and media. Also see the articles “Affiliate Program Basics” and “Tracking Affiliate Sales” for more information on a money making website.
Try Out Advertising Link Programs
Programs like Google AdSense place advertisements on your site and pay you on a per click basis for visitors to your site clicking through to the advertiser’s site. Ads may be text, images, or video that are relevant to the content of your site. It is worthwhile to keep the content fresh in order to attract visitors and be a money making website. Google has a program to disregard invalid clicks. Google AdSense is the counterpart of Google AdWords, a program through which businesses choose to advertise their goods or services through clickable ads that appear on search sites or content sites. For more about Google AdWords, see the article “Using Google AdWords.”
Sell Your Product(s) on Your Own Ecommerce Site
Of course, the most direct way to make money with a website is to sell a product. Elaborate ecommerce site set-ups are available to help provide you with everything you might need for sales: store-building tools, the ability to change existing sites into commercial sites, catalog management, databases, security, shopping cart and checkout services, merchandising tools, support for opt-in email marketing, shipping, and more. Even if you are not selling a product now, if you think you may wish to at some point in order to have a money making website, you may find it beneficial to check a potential web hosts offerings in this area.
Donations
Some people prefer to take an indirect approach. Whether they provide an informative blog, topical articles, or other material on a site, rather than setting a fee schedule and charging visitors, they simply put up a PayPal link and an invitation to make a donation through their account to help them have a money making website. This prevents anyone from having to expose personal information on the website, and frees visitors to support the efforts of the site owner, or not, as they choose. It may not make a lot of money, but you never know . . .
