EasyHome InternetBusiness

Finally we get to the good part of creating a home internet business. After choosing an item or service to promote and creating your website, it's time to include fields on your website that generate revenue. There's really just three ways to make money with a website:

1. Sell a product or service
2. Sell advertising
3. Refer customers to other sites that sell a product or service (affiliate marketing)

This home internet business guide focuses on the last two means of making money with a website. These two ways offer plenty of income potential and are much easier to start and maintain than selling a product or service yourself. This way you don't have to manage inventory, coordinate with co-workers or employees, or handle customer complaints.

By far the most popular way of selling advertising on the internet is by including Google Adsense ads on your website. Adsense is an example of a pay-per-click (PPC) ad. Whenever someone clicks one of the ads on your website, you earn money. Visitors don't have to actually buy or do anything. As long as they click the ad, you get paid. The revenue you earn from a given click will vary according to the ad. Click amounts range from $0.01 to $25.00.

Once you place the code for a Google ad on your site, it automatically scans the content of your site in order to determine the most appropriate ads to include. Google does a very good job of matching advertiser ads with the content of a given web page.

Including Google Adsense ads on your website is very simple. Just go to the Google Adsense site, sign up, and then create ads for your site. It's a pretty intuitive site, so creating your first ad should not take too long. You can choose the ad size, color, and whether to accept only text ads, image ads, or both.

In the offline business world, someone that refers a customer to a business is entitled to a referral fee. Referring customers to online businesses is called affiliate marketing. Thousands of businesses have established affiliate programs in order to capitalize on the fact that website owners are willing to promote their business in exchange for a fee. This fee is only paid if the customer actually buys a product or service offered by the business, but the fee is typically much larger than you'd receive from a PPC ad. Referral fees typically range from 1-50% of the price of the product or service. So, depending on the product or service that the customer buys, your referral fee can be quite substantial.

You may wonder how the business knows that you sent the customer to them? This is accomplished by using a coded link on your website that directs customers to the business. Coded links point to the business website in the normal manner, but they include a unique alphanumeric tag affixed to the end which lets the business know which affiliate directed the customer to them.

Often times third party affiliate sites manage affiliate programs for businesses. They act as sort of a clearinghouse, whereby businesses interested in having affiliates and website owners interested in earning revenue meet. The well know and highly respected affiliate sites are:

• Commission Junction
• LinkShare
• ShareASale

You can find nearly any product or service to promote at these sites. Visit these sites, create accounts, get affiliate links from businesses you want to promote, and place the links on your website.

After you've included ads and/or affiliate links on your website, the next step is to promote your website so that visitors will come to it.