I have about a dozen websites, some make good money, some make a little money, and some don’t make any money at all. Not all sites are designed to make money online though. Some sites are designed for other purposes. For instance, I have a website about asparagus harvesters that was not intended to make money online, but rather get some interest in my experimental harvesting machine, and maybe find a backer.



The site, asparagusharvester.com, fulfilled its function. Washington State University became aware of my machine through the site, and ended up funding the development of the machine for a number of years.

The first site I built, in 1998, after teaching myself HTML online, was to market an invention I had come up with, the Chilipepper appliance. It’s a pump that pumps hot water from the water heater to the fixture very quickly, and without running water down the drain. You get your hot water quicker and save quite a bit of water.

But how do you market something online that no one has ever heard of? No one would be searching for it because they did not know anything like it existed. When I first built the site, I optimized it for the keyword phrase “Hot Water". I got very good rankings for the phrase and zero traffic. It turns out no one searches for the key words “hot water" and why would you?

I thought about it and decided that I would build into the site a section about water heaters. It would cover how they work, and how to maintain and repair them. I know a lot about water heaters since I worked with them quite a bit while inventing the Chilipepper hot water circulating pump.

Eventually the site obtained very good rankings and I was getting about 1,000 unique visitors a day. I had been reading about this new affiliate stuff and decided to try putting some advertising on my site. I joined Commission Junction and selected some affiliate programs, placing the ads on the water heating related pages. I don’t put ads on the main pages of the Chilipepper demand system since I want them to stay and buy a Chilipepper. Pretty soon I started getting checks for commissions I earned. People were actually clicking the ads on my site, going to the advertiser’s site, and making purchases. And guess what they were buying…tankless water heaters. I still can’t believe people buy tankless water heaters on line, but they do.

So there I was, making about $200.00 a month on commissions from affiliate programs. Then I read about a new program called adsense. I put adsense ads on my Chilipepper site, and on a website that I built while on cruise ship vacations. My wife and I cruise quite a bit, and while on the cruise we update the site. We review all of our cruises. I put adsense ads on the site, cruisesrfun.com, on a site I built about inventing, inventionspatents.com, and a few others. Instantly I was making quite a bit more money from these sites than with the affiliate programs.

Recently I’ve started receiving requests from advertisers to place their ads on the pages of some of my sites. Sometimes they want to put an ad up permanently for a one time fee…I always say no. They offer usually around $75 to $150 per ad. It just doesn’t click with me for some reason. Just a couple of months ago I got an offer from an ad outfit offering me 50 cents per 1,000 ad views on one of my sites. No clicking necessary!

For some of my sites the $/1000 page views is in the tens of dollars, while for other sites its just a few cents. They let me put two ads per page, and they had to both be above the fold. So I get $1.00 for every 1,000 page views. I have two more ads below those, and they are adsense ads. I still make money from the adsense ads, not as much as before, but when you ad the two together it is substantially more money than with just the adsense ads alone. I also like the idea of not having all of my eggs in one basket. I’m not totally dependent on Adsense.

Another new thing I am trying is 5 second audio ads. It’s a new program that has some very nice features. When a visitor lands on one of my pages, a 5 second audio ad plays. I get paid for that ad. My visitor doesn’t have to click on anything. My visitor does not leave my page. The ad is short enough it doesn’t bother my visitor, and it won’t play another ad to the visitor for at least 3 minutes. It doesn’t affect any of my other advertising, no problems with Adsense, and doesn’t take up any room on my page. It also does not cost anything to join so there is no risk.

The audio ads program is in beta right now, and is slowly ramping up, but I am already making money, and I expect the audio ads to nearly double the income from the advertising on my sites once it is in full swing.

My sites are informational sites, and so my visitors are looking for information, not fancy graphics and whatnot. So I build simple sites with simple navigation. No search engine spider has trouble finding any of my pages. I write with humans in mind…I’m probably not always successful in that endeavor but I try. I keep my ads to a minimum. When I land on a page that is cluttered with ads and banners I usually leave quickly.

I make sure my Title meta tag has an appropriate and effective title, incorporating my most important key words whenever possible. I make sure the meta description tag has a well written description meaningful to humans. I try to have my main key words worked into the text in a few places on the page, but not too many. If my pages have images I use the alt text to describe the image and work in a keyword or two. Do not overdo it though.

If you trade links with other sites try to make sure you trade with other quality sites that have some kind of connection that a search engine would recognize.

And finally, I have patience. It just takes a long time to reach the point where you get significant traffic from the search engines. I figure at least one year and possibly two before I’m getting thousands of visitors on a particular site. You can opt for paid traffic and get those numbers quickly, but I am not willing to buy traffic, and I doubt it would be profitable, at least for the sites I have.

So there you have it. Build quality websites with information people are looking for. Monetize your sites with a variety of advertising, but don’t overdo the ads. And while you are waiting for the income to develop get on to your next site.