Know what advertisers or ad placement algorithms are looking for in an advertising venue (i. e. , your website): generally, it’s potential buyers with disposable income who visit your site in significant numbers, and would be interested in products that are closely related to the content on your site. What you want in a site, then, is to attract—and keep—a lot of visitors. The longer they stay, the more likely it is that they will eventually leave your site by clicking not on the back button, but on your advertiser’s links.
Keep in mind that the goal is clicks, not sales: that’s what generates your revenue. Once the visitor has clicked out of your site, it’s up to the merchant to make the sale. You get paid, regardless of the outcome. Search the web for trends and ideas for websites, and include the year in your search so that you avoid wasting search results on what was hot in 2006. For example, searching Google for “website ideas 2012” returned nearly a billion results. From there, it’s just a matter of combing through to find ideas that pique your interest.
One good way to proceed is to secure a “. com” domain, find a host (many domain registrars will also host sites), and build your own site. This has the advantage of being the most flexible in terms of design and installation of custom code. Alternately, you can sign up with a service such as Blogger, from Google, or Wordpress—both of which will not only let you put your site name in front of their service name (e. g. , geeks. wordpress. com), they will give you that and a website for free. The advantage, aside from that, is that Blogger and Wordpress give you a great number of really well-designed templates to make your site look visually awesome. The downside is that generally takes having a “pro” version (i. e. , paid for) before you can do any serious customizing.
The more you write, the more interest your site will hold. The more interest your site holds, the more people will follow it. and more importantly, the more relevant your site will appear to the ad placement algorithms. More ads = more clicks = more money. Never lose sight of that goal.
You get paid a very small amount for each impression (view) or click. Therefore, the more traffic you generate, the more clicks and impressions you will have, and the more money you will receive.
Have accounts on all of the above and make sure you have prominent links to your website on all of them. Start an email campaign as well. Once a week, publish a “best of my site” HTML email—frequent enough that people enjoy the content, but not so much that it becomes spammy.
By continually refining your process, each visit will be a higher value for revenue generation. Always remember: the longer they stay, the bigger your paycheck will be. Good luck!
