If you are actually expanding energy to build, run and do I dare say pay for a website, you should be at least getting your money out. Seriously, a lot of webmasters fail to look at their websites as businesses and just let all their traffic go to waste. I used to know this girl that had a blog about her family that had received over a million hits! She did this simply by putting pictures of her family gatherings or just random stuff about her. But when I knew her, she was broke! Why?

All that traffic to her website for absolutely free because she never spent a dime on advertising, and she never made a penny on the website. I mean it was obvious to me the simple things she wasn’t doing. She was literally throwing tens of thousands of dollars down the drain. And I see many webmasters doing this. Don’t do that. Seriously! I know you could use some money. Here are some simple ways to monetize your website:

Get a Google adsense account, and just plug the code on your website. This is if you don’t really want to do too much work, just copy the code and insert it in your webpage. They pay you each time someone clicks on the ad. The amount of money you get depends on how much the keywords on your website are worth and what the advertiser is spending on the ads. Adsense is not something you can expect to make a great deal from, but it’s not wise to leave loose ends. Make sure that every place a customer clicks on your site is to your benefit in some way.

A more involved way of making money on your website is to advertise affiliate products for a commission. Clickbank.com is a good source for digital products; commission junction at cj.com is the best source for more tangible products. There are a lot of affiliate programs available online, but I only use these two unless if I find something interesting that people will buy on my website.

Most affiliate programs are free to join. The best way to monetize in my opinion through affiliate programs is to write reviews about the programs and get interest in them on your website. Jus putting ads on your website I notice is kind of ineffective for some affiliate programs, especially clickbank. It’s far more successful to upsell the product to customers thus improving your click through and conversion rates.

There are pay-per-play ads available online that pay you per impression. The pay rates are kind of low, but that’s a good way of making consistent money if you get a lot of traffic to your website. I don’t usually go to those but you can do a search on Google and you will see many available.

The best way of making consistent money with your website traffic is to build up a list of interested visitors by capturing their email addresses. There are a few ways of doing this, but the best in my opinion is to offer a free product or newsletter. Then you can have a list of interested subscribers ready to bite at whatever you offer. Just don’t abuse your members and spam as many will remove themselves from your list. It takes a bit longer to get a list going than to start advertising affiliate products. But the advantage to lists is that it takes on average about 7 return visits before a sale is made. The list allows you to keep in contact with visitors.

You can also make money through selling email advertising to other websites. I would be more careful with this approach as too many ads will sure cost you some subscribers. The list is endless on how this is beneficial for your website. I just hate to see good traffic go un-mined.

I know it’s tough to get started in the internet marketing business. It’s a different kind of environment with click through ratios, pay-per-click, and other ways of looking at the world. In the real world, things happen slowly. People actually have to drive from one store to another. People have to reach in their pockets for wallets or in their purses. Customers have to actually walk around your shop, call price checks, and stand in line at the register. What a waste!

On the internet, where the real hustlers do their bidding, we don’t have time for playing around. We get straight to the point and we usually have less than 5 seconds to catch someone’s attention before they click away from our website with their “Paypal dollars” tightly clutched in their hand. But that’s the great thing about the internet. In about 2 hours you can have a business set up for completely free. All you have to do is be willing to put in a little time and effort.

Real stores are expensive, they cost to build and maintain. If not, you’re paying rent and having to hire employees anyway. There are all kinds of regulations on what you can and can’t do. You’re endlessly limited by physical constraints and your liability is greater than online ventures. I have about 10 Blogs (businesses) running on the internet right now and I do not pay a single penny for web space. Oh yea, and I’m also able to do whatever I want on my blog. Check out blogger.com and wordpress.com to get a free one. You can even have as many as you want on the same account. Just pick a decent neutral template for this project though; wild colors do not stimulate wallets if you catch my drift. Just help you look like an amateur or hobbyist, not a business.

Here is the way you can set up an online business and see for yourself how quickly you can begin earning a serious income online for free.

Now, I won’t go over how to pick a topic in detail for your website right here, but just go with something you know enough to talk about. Something you’re knowledgeable on and can form a respectable opinion about. Do some reading online about the topic and learn the style of the highest rated articles about the topic. Learn more about this on my website.

Create a blog about your topic and populate it with a few articles you picked up and liked online. Your next move is then to write your own articles about the topic. To show you how this works, just write two 500 word articles about the topic. Make sure to have a headline that engages readers and makes them want to continue to your article.

Submit these articles to ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, amazines.com, and articlesbase.com. Once you have completed that and are awaiting approval, just post the articles on your blog. Get a stumble upon account, and post your articles as Blogs that links back to your website. Stumble your blog by clicking the “I like it” tab and writing a review about it.

Here is how you’re going to motivate yourself after this. get a free hit counter that only counts unique visitors to your blog. Do a search on Google for a free web counter and copy the code to your website. You will begin to notice a few hits every day on your website from people that are looking to learn more from you. This can be your motivation to keep writing, just so you don’t waste all the attention.

A step further is to get an autoresponder, offer something for free on your website in exchange for subscriptions, and see how many email addresses you begin to receive from these two articles. You can then go on to write more, submit them to more websites, and see your blog grow into a real business.

You have to first get going on the articles though, this took me the longest to get right, but once you do start writing, you’ll never go back!

I’m sorry, but I couldn’t resist from sharing my excitement as my online business finally comes to life and I see myself leaving ole dreaded workplace for a full-time job doing exactly what I’m doing now: Blogging!

The reason I can so confidently say that I will be free to work from home in this period is that I have finally understood what everyone means when they tell you about bum marketing and how effectively it works. After spending years wasting countless hours digging in books and infomercials about internet marketing just to lose your lunch money, I finally broke through with the simplest free methods I fought so hard to avoid implementing.

Let me show you what I mean as far as bum marketing and why I’m so excited about it. I have created a blog centered on making money online. For one reason or another, Google Adwords sets the minimum bid on clicks too high for my linking, leaving me without a choice but to go back to free and sometimes more tedious efforts. Stumbleupon.com also rejected my website because I take people’s emails on my website. Sorry, but return business is what I want and I wasn’t even sure to begin with if stumbleupon.com had the right crow for what I was doing.

I never really liked writing articles. I was a ghostwriter when in college (before the dropout) but I still just couldn’t get started although I would enjoy the task when going. The only way I think my taste grew for writing had to be when I posted on forums about the topic I was promoting. A lot of reading also helped as you can pick up a lot of content and brainstorming material. It also makes the article flow smoother when you actually know a thing or two about the subject.

Writing like you talk is my favorite, because we all like to talk. If not speaking the words, we are constantly having a dialogue in our mind with ourselves. This is how I’m able to write articles in under 30 minutes, simply because I tap into that talkative side and just write. No matter what comes out, fix it as you go, and if it sucks, well someone out there will like it!

Enough of my rambling… I wrote 3 articles about the website, and post them on 4 article submission websites. They were Amazines.com, goarticles.com, ezinearticles.com, and articlesbase.com to be exact. I’m not even sure if ezinearticles.com had approved them yet because it takes them a longer time.

I had 4 visitors and 2 subscriptions to my blog the very next day! Let me put it the way I like to think about it, which is. 120 visitors and 60 subscribers a month is fair enough for me. And that is if the articles don’t get picked up to a blog or ezine, bringing even more traffic. The articles are going to stay on those websites pulling that amount of traffic forever. All for about 2 hours of work writing and submitting them.

Well the way I do my math is to add up what would happen if someone were to write 10 articles, or 100. At this rate I wouldn’t take long to get hundreds of visitors a day and a massive list. That is why I’m quitting my job in 2 months!

Learn more about bum marketing and making money online here!