How website owners make Money
My name is Kwame Sektor, a website designer, administrator and author at blissgh.com, and a co-founder of wetaya.com. I’m not an authority or expert in the field of technology, at least, not yet, but I am a technology enthusiast. I’m an IT (Information Technology) student in one of the prestigious Universities in Africa, but I mostly go for lectures on youtube, where I learn most of the stuff I know. Since childhood, I have been fascinated by machines, electronic devices, and the internet. I often wondered how people could be so generous with their time and effort so as to offer very useful and valuable content to others at no charge, until I realized the contents are not really free.
One of the “easiest” way to make money today is to own a website. I will tell you why the word “easiest” is in quotation marks later on in the article. A chunk of website owners are among the richest people in the world today. The secret lies in the traffic or numbers (visitors that troop in to the site) and content (what the site offers to the visitors).
There are 3 key players in a market, the producer, the seller, and the buyer. The online market is not so different from this. It involves the producer (a company or individual looking to sell their products or offer services), an advertising network (a middleman between the producer and the website owner, examples are Google AdSense, Propeller ads, and Content ads), and then there is the publisher (the owner of the website). The producer contacts the ad network to advertise their products, the ad networks in turn pays for space on the publisher’s website to display the adverts for the producer. Obviously, the visitors are the buyers since they are those who will click on the adverts and make purchases if they are interested in what is being sold or advertised.
There are different payment options available to the publisher, but let’s just talk about the popular two (2), CPM and PPC. CPM stands for Cost Per Impressions, and is calculated per thousand impressions. It means there is a set amount (say $1 – $10), depending on the industry or ad network, that you get paid for every thousand impressions. Impressions are like interactions with or engagements with the ads that you generate for the producer or sponsor of the ads. So for a $6 CPM, you can make $18 daily for 3000 impressions (about $540 monthly). That may require roughly about 5-10,000 visitors daily. These are just rough estimates to make you understand how the system works, as CPM varies among the various ad networks, and the value is not stable or constant even for a particular ad network.
The other option is PPC, which stands for Payment Per Click. You make pennies every time someone clicks on an ad banner or link. It generally works out to a higher amount per click when compared to CPM but it might depend on your ingenuity.
Visitors do not necessarily have to make purchases for the publisher to get paid, once the visitors click on the ads, even unintentionally, the publisher gets paid. Publishers cannot click on their own ads though, because the ad network monitors them and are able to determine false clicks. The more visitors you have, the higher you get paid. There are publishers who are making as much as $25,000 and over daily.
Making money with a website may sound easy, but it is not that simple. As mentioned earlier “easiest” comes with strings attached. It requires constant effort, time, persistency, passion, and good or unique content that will drive in traffic. The starting stage is the most difficult, you may be getting just 30 to 100 visitors, don’t be discouraged, it takes time. My next article on this series will be about how to start or build a website from scratch, and then move on to monetize it. Please don’t forget to Subscribe to the blog for updates.
