Owning a town or city portal website is a great way for you to make money online by providing local residents with the information they are looking for about local businesses products and services, and making money by providing advertising for local business owners. Aside from making money from allowing local business owners to advertise on your portal, there are several other ways that you can monetise a portal website. In this article I'll outline 5 other ways that you can make money with a town portal website.

1. CPA networks. These are networks that pay a commission on a visitor taking some kind of action, like buying a product or signing up for a free offer. Joining one of these networks you can offer visitors to your portal website products or services that are outside your local area but of interest to your local visitors. This could include insurance services, loans service, telecom services to name just a few.

2. Very similar to CPA networks, affiliate marketing allows you to offer your visitors with products or services that may interest them. For instance, if you take a look through the Commission Junction Marketplace you could find products or services that you know will be of interest to people in your local area.

3. It's long been known in the Internet marketing world that Private Label Rights products are a lucrative way of making money online. However, choosing the right products you could use PLR to make money from your local website visitors. As an example you could find a PLR product about green living, a subject close to many peoples hearts, and sell it via your portal website.

4. JV brokering. As the owner of the portal website you will come into contact with many local business owners and many of these owner, who by the way will know very little about marketing their business, may have complementary products or services that they could offer to each other customers. By being the middleman in bringing these business owners together, you can charge a fee to bring about these Joint Ventures.

5. In a similar theme to JV's and allowing business owners to advertise on your portal, you could allow business owners to plac coupons on your website, saving them money and making you money.

6. Provide a website design and marketing service. Getting a portal website to rank highly in the search engines isn't a difficult task. Using minimal Internet Marketing skills you can easily get your portal to rank well, and the good news is that it isn't very difficult to do the same for local business owners. Even better you don't need to do it yourself, using what you have learnt in the Internet Marketing arena you can outsource most of the tasks required, including website design, article writing and direct response marketing. You simple become a project manager, taking a large cut of the profits for yourself.

Owning a town or city portal website opens up a huge amount of opportunities for anyone with minimal Internet Marketing knowledge to make money in many different ways.