by CC Pearce

Created on: January 15, 2010   Last Updated: January 19, 2010

If you're looking to generate income from the internet, there are a lot of creative ways to do it.  The main ways you can generate an income from a website fall into 5 main categories:

1) Advertising (AdSense and others)

2) Affiliate Marketing

3) Selling goods or services

4) Donations

5) Subscriptions

1 - The quickest way to start earning revenue from your website is by putting advertisements on it.  It's very easy to open an AdSense account and start running campaigns on your site.  Start by visiting AdSense.com and browsing the myriad of helpful resources.  

Once you've startedYou can change the look of the ads to match your site's aesthetic and you can target ads based on the content you provide.  For example, if you have a humorous blog, you can request to serve ads that are related to jokes or funny videos.  The visitors to your blog will be more likely to click those ads than they will be for car insurance because you already know that they probably like humor.

2 - Affiliate marketing involves someone following a link from your site and then buying a product because of your referral.  Many small companies will offer payment for leads on sales, but Amazon.com is probably the largest affiliate marketer with easy-to-navigate statistics on your sales.  Find places on your website that aren't intrusive to run these affiliate campaigns.

3 - Selling goods can involve hosting an eBay store, self-publishing books on Lulu.com, hosting t-shirts that you've designed, or even having people buy things from a brick-and-mortar store like most retailers do.  Variations of this include sites like Etsy which has people hand-make crafts and then upload a picture of the object that people can buy.

Other sites may have designated help lines or chat sessions that you pay for. One quirky version is a TajTunes.com where you pay to have some from India call a number on a designated date and sing a song.  You can basically sell any service that someone might need.

4 - Donations tend to be most relevant to bloggers who have loyal readers, but not enough traffic to sustain a reasonable income on advertising alone.  You can ask for donations to keep your blog going or for a specific event that you may want to cover in your blog.  If your fans love you as much as you might think, then they might donate money to you so that you can continue publishing.

5 - If you have an abundance of exclusive content - information, videos, pictures, articles, etc. - then you may be justified in a subscription-based model.  Sites like Lynda.com charge monthly or annually to have people use as much of their services as they want.  You will need to have your website designer set up the subscription model that makes the most sense for your site.

There are a number of ways to make money using a website, and creative entrepreneurs should be able to combine many of these to create their own unique business model.

Just make sure the content on your site is original and a high quality, and the rest will happen on its own.

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