Making a website is only the start of a new stream of cash flow which can become very successful if done in the right way, once your website has become popular there are many options in which you can monetize your website. Here are just a few ways in which you can turn your hobby site into a great flow of revenue.

Pay per click advertising

This is where you integrate code into your website and get paid when users click on the advertisements. This has been proven to be a very successful method of generating money with very little maintenance. The idea is to get a site up and running with plenty of traffic and hope that it gets a good conversion rate.

There are two main pay per click companies, they are Google Ad Sense and Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN). Not everyone is eligible to join yahoo publisher network, only residents of the USA can join them as they are still in the beta stage. Everyone is allowed to join Ad Sense but you have to be careful and follow their terms and conditions as you are only allowed one account per person. If you are found to break their TOS and get banned from integrating Ad Sense into your websites you are prohibited to open up another account, if they find out that you are in someway linked to a previous banned account your current account will be banned and any revenue earned will be lost.

There are many smaller pay per click companies that can be successful, the main problem with these are that the advertisements are not as relative as the bigger companies which will result in fewer clicks. Bidvertiser and Exoclick are examples of the smaller companies, there are many more out there so if you do your research you will be able to find the perfect alternative.

CPM advertising

This alternative method of monetizing your website is designed for sites that have huge amounts of traffic, basically you get paid per thousand impressions. The users don't have to click anything in particular on the page, the cpm company logs the hits by users and usually pay you on a monthly basis based on the previous months performance.

The key to finding the best CPM company is the one paying the most per thousand impressions, the ads don't necessarily need to be targeted as you get paid per the impression. The problem with this type of income is that if your website doesn't receive sufficient traffic then it's worthless and can take a long time to reach the payment threshold. You can integrate both pay per click and cpm into the same website in order to get the maximum potential out of your website.

Selling links

If you have put the effort into your website and got a series of strong back links it will show with your site's page rank. A site with great authority can be very rewarding when you come to monetize it. Many people will want a link on your website as it will give their site a natural boost in the search engines, you can actually sell links to others for a set fee per month. This can be a very quick and easy method to get a constant flow of pure profit for doing nothing.

The higher the page rank and its popularity, the higher the price of each link you can ask for. You have to be careful when selling links because if you sell too many they will become worthless and do your web site more damage then good. It's recommended that you have around 5-10 outgoing links on each page so that your own page rank will not be affected.

In order to get the maximum potential out of your website you can use a combination of different methods giving many different streams of income from the one site. Always remember to keep your site updated with unique content on a daily basis making users want to come back regularly. Do your research into the different ways of making money from a site in order to get the maximum amount of revenue and then multiple that as many times as you can in order to make a small fortune from the website industry.