How to Earn Money on the Internet by Building a Website

You can definitely earn money on the Internet by getting your own website and spending lots of time adding killer content to that website. If you do this consistently over a long period of time then eventually the website will make good money for you.

Where does this money come from?

For most people it will likely come from advertising. This is fine, though there are a million other ways to monetize a website as well. For example, you might one day create your own product and then sell that directly on your website, which has the potential to make much more money per visitor than mere advertising can make. This is because when you sell directly to your audience, you get to keep 100 percent of the profits. When you sell advertising to your audience, generally you only get to keep about 1 to 3 percent or so of the real value captured. Nevertheless, you can create an amazing business by simply getting lots of traffic and then selling ads on your site. This advertising model has the added bonus of being almost completely headache-free, i.e., you do not have to deal with customers. Ever. That can go a long way and many people underestimate how elegant of a business model it truly is.

There are other avenues of course. One avenue is to build a huge website, keep adding to it, advertise as you go along to earn money, and then start approaching your advertisers in order to seek out deals. How does this work? For me, I started by making a spreadsheet that had all of the companies that were using Adwords to advertise on my website. I then went through and found contact details for all of these companies.

Then I started pitching to them. I called the ones that had phone numbers and I tried to get the marketing department on the line. This worked sometimes but not in all cases. Other times my only option was to send an email pitch. Again, I asked the reader of the email to forward it to the marketing department. Again, mixed success with this.

So what exactly was I pitching to these companies that advertise on my site? I was pitching a direct deal. Cut out the middleman (Adwords/Adsense) and create a direct advertising relationship. A few companies took me up on this but none of them really saw enough conversions to make it worthwhile, because they did not have full control over the website and ability to fine tune their offer, integrating it fully with the site content.

However, some of these relationships with advertisers led to other things and new opportunities. I got a huge offer to work for one of them and do freelance writing at a very competitive rate. Another business that I went direct with made an offer on one of my web properties. So the exercise of reaching out to your advertisers can go beyond merely negotiating a better deal.

I would not attempt this strategy though until you have achieved some level of success with the site beforehand. If you get 50 uniques per day then no one is going to be very interested in making big deals with you. I was getting over 1,000 visits per day when advertisers started to take note, and the real serious offers did not start until I was well over 2,000 uniques per day. But of course these traffic numbers will vary wildly depending on your niche. If you have a very lucrative and small niche, you might have companies that are begging to do business with you when you have less than 100 uniques per day. Other niches that are more popular might have them turning up their noses at you even if you have over 1,000 uniques per day. So it all depends.

The key is to build something amazing. Start a single website, build it up over the years, and big money will follow. Opportunities will happen.

If you found this helpful, click the Facebook Like button below or Tweet it.