Websites are a great investment nowadays with interest rates so low and, in general, the world looking a little unstable. The traffic that a website achieves is the primary reason behind a website making money, since a lot can be done with traffic. However, determining how to monetise the traffic on a website can be a little tricky situation since there are many ways you can monetise the traffic on your website. With this in mind, here are three of the best way to monetise a website, talking from years of experience with running and monetising websites.

#1 PPC Advertising

PPC advertising is by far the best way to monetise a website. This is because the contextuality of adverts it can deliver for websites mean the CTR (click through rate) websites achieve tends to always be good when compared to other forms of advertising.

With this, of all of the PPC programs out there, Google’s Adsense is the one to go for. Be this as this may, if you can get accepted by a Google Certified Publisher Partner, such as Ezoic, your earnings could potentially triple, as was the case with one of my websites. Therefore, a Google Certified Publisher Partner, as this moment in time, seems to be the best way to generate revenue from a website.

#2 Affiliate Advertising

Although the conversion rate of affiliate advertising can be quite low, depending on what you are advertising, there is the potential to make some serious bucks from affiliate advertising. However, I tend to find affiliate advertising works best with two different approaches:

• Going for ‘big buck’ items, such as cameras, laptops and smartphones, where the commission will be very high. This also tends to be the case for niche items too.
• Going for ‘low end’ items such as books and accessories. When this approach is taken, lots of traffic needs to be generated in order to make the small amounts of commission worthwhile.

Either tactic works extremely well when performed correctly. From testing a few different channels, Amazon’s affiliate program tends to work well, simply because there are millions of products to affiliate link to.

#3 Banner Advertising

If you can generate a long lasting relationship between your website and advertisers, then banner advertising can be a great source of income. However, from my experience, I have found that banner advertising is to unreliable in generating revenue, when some months all my units would be sold while other months nothing would be sold at all. Therefore, it depends on your niche, advertiser demand and the types of units you sell which will determine how effective banner advertising would be for you and your website.

Although only three sources of making money are mentioned, there are still many unsung heros such as in-text advertising, sponsored articles, guest-blogging and more which, when used correctly, could be just as good as the three above mentioned.