I hear lots of people talk about how they want to make extra money and not be strapped down to a job. Owning your own website is a great way of earning money, and once it’s set up, you can just let it go to provide steady, no-worries income. Start within a niche, and expand. Who knows? Maybe you will start the next Amazon.com.

The following are the steps to take when starting a website or a blog:

1. Plan your site
2. Create your site
3. Get traffic
4. Make money

Plan Your Website or Blog:
Before you can build a site, you have to know how you’re going to monetize it. Do you have a product you can sell? Are you going to be ad driven? The following are monetization models which will help you decide what you want your site to do:

Hosting Pay-Per-Click Ads
How it works – You assign space on your website for someone to place ads. AdSense by Google is, by far, the easiest. Every time a customer clicks on an ad, Google gives you a percentage of what they make.

• Pros – Easy set up, install and management. No traffic requirements or minimums.
• Cons – Not a significant source of income unless you get a lot of visitors coming to your site. No pay unless customers click.

Selling Ad Space
How it works – Find a company who would like to place an ad on your site, and give them the space. This can be in the form of banner ads, or many others. You are usually paid on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) model, so the more website visits, the more you make.

• Pros – More lucrative because it pays higher than AdSense.
• Cons – Unless you have a lot of traffic (or very targeted traffic), advertisers usually aren’t interested.

Affiliate Commissions
How it works – Find a product that you enjoy, and become an affiliate. Affiliates make a commission whenever they refer someone that makes a purchase. Getting the right people to your site to purchase is the goal.

• Pros – Get paid money for referring customers. Thousands of companies have affiliate setups in place.
• Cons – Market is pretty saturated and there are a lot of powerful affiliates.

Paid Reviews/Blog
How it works – Find companies that will pay you for your reviews/blogging about their products or services.

• Pros – You can get paid to do things you love, like eating or gaming.
• Cons – Constant need to find new sponsors and products creates a lot of management time.

Sell a Product
How it works – This is the traditional model, and it entails having a product or service to sell, and selling in on your website.

• Pros – Your website is your company’s salesman, and works 24/7 to make you money while you play and sleep.
• Cons – You need to have a product or service to sell.

Build Your Website or Blog
Once you have a plan for the type of site you want to build, now have it built! Torino Creative builds excellent websites and I highly recommend having them put one together for you. Otherwise, if you are a web guru, you can build it yourself.

For your site, you will need:

1. Your own domain name (yourbusinessname.com) for around $11 a year
2. Hosting (a server to serve your website) is usually around $6/mo. I recommend Hostmonster hosting which gives you a free domain name with hosting purchase.

Get Traffic
Once you have a website, now you need to get traffic to it. There is a variety of ways to get people to your site:

Paid Search (PPC) – Pay only when a visitor clicks on your ad. Paid search is highly measurable and a sure shot at getting traffic to your site. Depending on your keywords, expect to pay between $.50 and $2.00 per click.

Organic Search – Get traffic through Google, Yahoo, and Bing’s search engines through a process called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Get experts to help you out, and plan between 6 months to 2 years to get your site to the top of the search results. The great part about SEO is that all the traffic is free, and people trust your site more than if they clicked an ad.
Ads – Advertise on someone else’s site, or get them to link to you. You will get a portion of their traffic.

Get Paid
Enjoy getting paid for your ingenuity – you deserve it! Your internet business requires very little upkeep and money to sustain itself.