First lets talk about Pay Per Click. You have been to google, yahoo, MSN, and done a search.  What do you see at the top and along the side when you search? Ads. These are Pay Per Click ads that are generated because the advertiser thinks that what you put in to search for is related in some manner to them.  Essentially the advertisers are bidding against each other for the placement of the ad, and also it’s position.  In some industries or markets, this can be very cheap for key words or phrases that people are likely to search for.  However if your trying to reach the most generic single term search your going to pay more to get a good position in the search results.  As I said the amount you bid determines where you show up. In some markets the generic key words are so expensive that unless you have a very big ad budget it’s best to stay away from Pay Per Click ads.

There is also an ongoing issue of are the people doing the clicking actually customers or are they bots or competitors trying to click you out for the day. Think about do you click on ads or do you look through what is called the generic search results?  Is there an advantage for a competitor to keep you out of a search term or run up your costs for ads?

Testing Pay Per Click ads, or at least looking at what it costs to get a good position is worthy of checking out for your site, however if you follow some of the other methods available most of which are free and generate real customers, your probably better off.

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.

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

So what do you have that would be of interest to people that they might be willing to pay for in one form or another? There are so many directions you can go here it boggels the mind.  From something like an advice site about what ever you can offer advice, an online community of people, a blog about your thoughts about the day, you would be surprised the kinds of soft goods that are making people lots of money off the internet.  Actually there was a person who had a site that sold PIXELS… (pixels are the little tiny dots that make up the stuff you see on your computer screen).  For a Buck a pixel you could buy pixels on his page. Now you have to realize that on the average computer there are 1024 pixels wide and 760 pixels tall.  That comes out to 778,000 + pixels at $1 each. 3/4′s of a million dollars were available on his page.  Most pictures are better than 200 pixels wide by around 200 tall, that is 4o,000 pixels or $40,000.  Company’s were paying to place their logo on the site as an advertising expense.  The person made lots of money as they got exposure on the network news and became rich.

Nothing is TOO STUPID, STRANGE, OR IDIOTIC that you will not find an audience. Many blogs thrive on doing the insane.  Take a look at the Onion.  They make money making up stuff, same for the Inquirer and other Rag Mags as I call them.  YOU CAN DO THE SAME if that is what you want to do.

If your going to go with soft goods then you need to be knowledgable in a particular subject or not. Look at the popularity of Poltical Blogs.  Do any of these people have any special training in politics?  Some yea, most no but they all have readers that come there day after day to read what it is the person has to say.  They either are their because they agree with you, or they want to see what kind of crazy nonsense you might be spouting today. People on the net find it entertaining and also for information, if you can do one or the other you can have a soft goods site, like this one.

As with all sites soft goods sites need to have CONTENT (have I mentioned how Content is KING? yea I think so), and if your lucky you might find through the market research you do that you might have few competitors out there or millions in any case there is always room for one more.

The way you turn that into money is through the use of google, yahoo, msn, or other types of pay per click or pay per show ads. Some sites like this one, use ads generated by the content on the page.  You may notice that ads are different on different pages, that is how those kinds of ads work and we will discuss that in more advanced parts of this site.  The other kinds of ads are ones that people or companies pay to have on your site.  These can be just a simple link to graphic images and much more.  If you go to a site where you see ads at the top, that is why the site is free.  Someone somewhere is paying the bills.
Sparky