There are a number of ways to make money off your website.  Direct sales of your product, sales of your content, registration fees, subscription fees, advertisments.  In here I will try to describe various ways of making money off your website and maximizing your profits vs your investment.

Then there is how do you get paid? There are a number of solutions from setting up a merchant account with a bank to using pay pal or having people mailing you a check.  I will try to give you various ideas on how to best get paid for the service your providing with your website.

The whole idea is making money off the net. Well if your gonna try to make money you need to have a way to generate income and get paid.  In here I am going to go through various different ways you can get paid depending on where your generating your revenue.  Google, Yahoo, MSN ads on your site mean you get paid one way, sales of product or other means of selling your content means getting paid another.  What is the best way? Depends on what your selling and how your customers feel about paying for what your offering.

So read on as I try to explain the various advantages and disadvantages of using various different methods, the costs vs the benefits.  As always feel free to register here and leave a comment if you have a question.

Sparky

Hard Goods: Obviously if your selling a product you want someone to make the purchase.  If you have followed along with the various general concepts, website concepts your site is full of CONTENT that makes visitors feel that your offering the best thing since sliced bread.  Selling things will be easy if you get traffic to your site.  Getting Traffic to your site will be discussed in the SEO, SEM, SERP, and General Internet marketing techniques.  But if you have hard goods that your selling on your site, the sales pitch on your site should sell the product.

Soft Goods: If your offering soft goods on your site generating revenue can be done in a couple of different ways and or both ways.  One is to use like I do here and have ads from Google, Yahoo, or other ad service put ads on your site that when people click on it you get a commission on the click.  These are Pay Per Click ads and they will be discussed further here in this section.  Then there is pay per inclusion types of ads these are advertisers that are paying you directly for either links or for graphics with links to their sites.  These are usually more profitable, but both are valuable to generating revenue.  The amount of clicks you get depends again on how many people visit your site.  Another way, that is used less is the pay per view, much like Pay Per View TV people have to subscribe and pay a fee to view the site.  This works if you have the right kind of site, generally an adult site is something people are willing to pay to view.  The more visitors, the more clicks, the more you can charge for direct ads on your site.

Attracting Visitors is the key and that is what this site is really all about.  Getting you set up so that you start to get visitors and customers as quickly as you can.

Sparky.

One way is to get a bank account with a Merchant Account so that you can take and process credit card orders.  Generally with most banks they have interfaces that allow customers through a secure server to make a purchase.  There are some drawbacks to this method. One is that the banks charge fees for this service and with internet based businesses they tend to charge more due to the credit card fraud that occurs on a regular basis.  Some of these fees include monthly account fees, fees on the purchase, fees on deposits, it can zap a start up business with lots of expenses while your waiting for your first sale.

The other is to use one of the many others out there that are offering this kind of service.  You will notice a link of interest which takes you to one of the most used and trusted payment collection methods Pay Pal.  Originally developed so that they could harvest money from E-bay sales they have expanded to cover almost any form of payment and credit card on the face of the earth.  They do charge a fee, but only when money is transferred into your account, and transfers out to your bank account are free and secure.  Pay Pal for all intensive purposes is a bank and needs to use the types of encryption that banks use to process transactions.  This makes payments secure without the need for a secure server or interface. Pay Pal also offers a variety of other services including dispute resolution between a buyer and a seller.  Keeping accurate shipping records is key to dispute resolution with Pay Pal.  The other thing that is nice about Pay Pal is that they are well known and well trusted by people so convincing them that their information is secure is simple to do.

You can also take checks, money orders and direct payments.  These methods for the net are not generally used except for those that fear putting their credit card info on the net.  The net functions for the most part on IMPULSE sales.  People are interested and they buy, instant payment with a credit card is the norm.  Just be sure that the checks clear before you ship the product that is ordered.  If the check is drawn on a US bank that is generally 3-5 days so a simple page that explains payment options and that checks are held till cleared is a simple task.

Those are the basic ways of getting paid for your hard goods.

Sparky

When your selling a soft good, you have your customer already locked in. They are ready to view your content or get your information NOW.  People by general nature are very impulse orientated. Even in standard stores impulse sales make up for a greater sale and EVERYONE falls for it.  Just ask yourself how many times you went into a store after a particular item and walked out with other things.  The other things you bought on an impulse.

Soft goods are by nature very much impulse sales. People have found your site and now they want to buy, not tomorrow, not in an hour, they want to Buy NOW and you have to be able to take advantage of that.  The only real way to accomplish the sale is to have some sort of method that they can pay and get access right now.  This means using and instant payment method be involved, along with instant access to the product.

Pay Pal is one of the best ways to do this. People can click the link fill in their info and instantly have access to the content through what Pay Pal uses as a re-direct after the purchase back to your site.  This way you get the sale right away and they get what their impulse at the moment says they want.

Selling soft goods and getting paid for them is just as easy as selling hard goods.

Sparky

You can take advantage of this in several ways. Google, MSN, Yahoo, and other search engines and even an ever growing market of companies that sell advertising for sites you can get a commission for each of those clicks.

Even if you have a hard goods website the use of ads from the ad companies on your site can increase your revenue. Most of the big ad companies have various different ways that they display ads.   In the example of Google you can use a content form (where google reads your site, sees words in the pages and then puts ads up that are similar to your content), and then refine it so that you get the kinds of ads on your site that you think your visitors will be interested in.

Most all of these companies require that you register with them and then they give you a bit of code or allow you to generate code that is included in your site which calls up the ads from their server.  In the registration process will be a way for them to send you a payment. The key is using a known company to put your ads up for you or if your site is really popular you hitting the net and finding companies that might advertise on your site.  Obviously it is easier to use something like Google to display your ads as you can be pretty sure they are gonna be around for a while and they also allow you to look at what your clicks are, and how much money your making off of them.

Many wonder why would you put ads for other companies that are selling similar products to what you offer on your site?  Simple, most people who run ads are either very big companies with lots of money to spend on ads, or they are new to the net and looking to get people to their sites.  These are people with money to give you for forwarding someone to their site, not that they will buy from them, but you get paid for the click to their site.

Sparky

Check Stub from Google for Ad-Clicks on my sites