You own a website and may even give advice there or share information of some kind. Whatever you are doing, if you are not using it to make money, then there is an untapped market waiting to be yours.

Website Traffic

This involves people visiting your website. What you want to count are your unique visitors, people who visit for the first time. Repeat visitors are great for sales but to gain interest, the more people who visit, the better.

In order for a business to make money it needs traffic. These people will do something for you on your website that will enhance their life and make money for you. There are a variety of ways to do it, but for any method you use to be cost effective, you will need traffic.

One way to gain traffic is to have a focus. This is your niche. This will determine which traffic comes your way and if they are going to buy whatever you decide to offer on your website.

Now, turn your attention to your content. That is why your traffic is there in the first place. If you haven’t already, optimize it for a wider readership. This involves targeting certain keywords in your articles, blog posts, headers and picture text. Not only will your content get ranked higher for those keywords, but your website also will. If you haven’t done so already, register your website with the major search engines.

Monetizing Your Website

Now that you have made a few tweaks to gain more focused traffic, you are ready to start making money with your website. Here are some ways you can get the job done.

* Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – This basically means that you are posting ads that people will click on. Whenever someone clicks on that ad, you get paid. Depending on who you are using for your service, there are other ways to do this besides just the click-through rate. One you can start with is Google AdSense.

* Banner Advertising – This is a way to get noticed. If you have a good fan base and have networked with others in your business niche, this can work for you. Sell advertising space at the top of your website. You can also sell on the sides, but keep in mind that the top half of your webpage is where people’s eyes tend to gravitate.

* Affiliate Marketing – You not only advertise for others and sponsor their products, but you also get access to lots of helpful tools so you can do just that. Earn commissions on your click rate as well as sale rate depending upon how the affiliate program is set up.

* Paid surveys – Companies will pay you to offer surveys to your visitors. Each time one of them takes the survey, you get paid.

There are many other ways to monetize your website but this is just the beginning. Once you have started, try other ways to make your expertise work for you.

Small businesses cannot afford to market themselves the way big businesses do. Rather than brand advertising, which takes a long time, small business advertising needs to bring in profits fast. Here are a few advertising ideas that will get you quick results.

Share an Ad Space

If you can’t quite afford a newspaper ad, you could split it with a few partners instead. Purchase a large ad spot in your local newspaper, then, split the ad with your partners. You will often spend less money than if you bought a smaller ad only for your business. You’ll also build relationships with potential partners and build a relationship with the advertiser, leaving room for more future deals to take place.

Try Postcard Marketing

Postcard marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways you can market your business. It costs just pennies per postcard and can often be extremely targeted. If you run a local business, you can mail just the people within a few miles of where your business is located. You could even mail just to certain people from certain lists who are near your area. Because you can target people so specifically using such a wide range of options, while spending just pennies per person, postcard marketing can be an incredibly effective marketing tool.

Facebook Pay-Per-Click

Facebook allows small businesses to target very specifically the people to whom they want to market. Unlike data you get for postcard marketing or other kinds of marketing, Facebook data is submitted willingly by users and likely to be much more accurate. You can expect to pay about 50 cents per click. You can target by age, location, gender, interests, marital status, income and a lot more.

Let’s say you own a local consulting business catered towards helping small business owners get off the ground. You might use Facebook to get new customers, first starting with individuals earning $30,000 or more, or you might target people between 25 and 50, whose interests include business. You would then write an attention-catching and informative headline and advertisement, along with a photo that really jumps off the page.

Customer Loyalty Programs

Customer loyalty programs have traditionally been very successful for small businesses. For example, for every ten slices of pizza someone buys, they get one slice free. This creates the psychology of people who come back for more, especially as they get closer to getting their free slice. If there are three pizzerias with comparable pizzas in the area but only one has a loyalty program, they are likely to go to that one instead.

These are just a few small business advertising ideas that can yield results quickly. Testing any of these ideas shouldn’t take more than a month or two and the results should be apparent almost immediately.

If you are starting a new venture and need sales quickly, then use one of the following techniques to give your business a jump-start:

Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC advertising is perhaps the most direct possible method for jump-starting your sales. Begin with your most targeted keywords, which should include your product name and the most direct keywords someone in your market might enter into their browser. For example, if you’re selling a pair of V-Mod Bose headphones, you might bid on keywords like:

* V-Mod Bose
* Bose headphones
* Best Bose headphones
* Best bass headphones (what V-mod is known for)

Start with a low daily limit and work your way up.

Direct Advertising with Related Websites

If there are a few websites in your industry that are very closely related to your website, try advertising with them directly. Contact their site owners and ask for their advertising rates. You could even try asking them if they would be interested in testing out a revenue split.

This type of deal can often bring you a lot of targeted traffic quickly. Depending on the website, the traffic could convert even better than PPC traffic because people already trust the site they are coming from.

Content Network to Direct

An extension on the above technique is to find direct advertisers using the Google content network. Bid on a wide net of sites and keywords. Let your ads run on a multitude of sites and track where your conversions come from. If you lose money on this test, that is okay.

Once you know where your conversions originate, contact those websites directly and arrange for a direct advertising deal. You might be able to cut your costs by as much as 20-40 percent, since Google takes an estimated 50 percent cut from AdSense bids. This is a great way of finding advertising spots that you would never find just by browsing the Internet on your own.

Get On an Affiliate Network

Affiliate networks like Azoogle, Neverblue, Affiliate.com and Commission Junction are all great places to locate affiliates.Getting into most of these networks is quite difficult. For a network like Azoogle or Neverblue, you will usually have to pay a deposit of at least $10,000.

However, if you want to really jump-start your sales, getting on the radar of super affiliates is the way to do it. These are the affiliates that can drive tens of thousands of dollars in business to your website every day.

The key to working with affiliate networks is ensuring you can handle the traffic and that your back end works out profitably. Often times you will have to pay out more than you actually earn; for a $30 profit product, you might have to pay out $40. You need to know that you will make money before taking on that kind of deal.

These are a few powerful ways of jump-starting your sales quickly. The first three techniques work great if you have limited capital and are just getting started. The fourth technique can send an enormous amount of traffic to your website if it has the bandwidth and capacity to handle it.

A lot of revenue is lost by marketers who don’t get the most out of their pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.

Finding probable campaigns is quite difficult, but once you do find them, it is critical that you do everything you can to get the most out of them. Here’s how to get the most out of every pay-per-click campaign you build:

Build a List or Build Out Your Back End

Making just one front-end sale is a terrible way to do PPC marketing. For one, you are losing a lot of revenue. The second sale is seven times easier than the first and can be of a much higher price without having to subtract advertising costs.

You also won’t be able to compete in the long run with competitors who have a strong back end. If you can pay only fifty cents per click because you are selling only front-end products, and the other guys can pay two dollars because they are selling front and back-end products, you will eventually be forced out of the market.

Build your list and build back-end products. Get the most out of every visitor.

Expand on Successful Campaigns

When you find a successful campaign, build that out as much as possible.

Find variations of your existing keywords. Look for synonyms and misspellings. Look for other keywords that the type of people you’re targeting would look for.

Expand your match types. If you find that you’re profitable on exact match searches, try expanding it to phrase or broad match.

Look through your traffic logs to see what people actually typed in to get to your website. Often times you’ll be able to find a lot of keywords you would have never thought of this way.

If you’re using AdWords, turn on their search partner’s feature. This will give you a good 10% to 40% boost in traffic. Make sure you test it carefully to see if it converts.

Duplicate Successful Campaigns to Other Mediums

If you have a successful campaign on AdWords, duplicate it to Yahoo and MSN. Sure, it’ll only give you 15% more traffic, but you don’t have to go through the painstaking process of finding a profitable campaign. All you need to do is export your campaign, import it and collect the check.

Try Facebook PPC or display PPC (magnify 360, AdBrite, etc.) once you have demographic data. The “style” of advertising is very different, but if you can target the same type of people with an offer that you know converts, you have a very decent shot of making it work.

Also try exporting successful campaigns to contextual networks. Both Google and Yahoo have contextual networks, though Google’s is much larger. Advertising on the content network means mastering a pretty different skill set, but again you have a huge leg up because you already know what works and what doesn’t work from your first successful campaign.

Get the most out of every campaign you build by having a solid back end, building a list, expanding on successful campaigns and then porting those campaigns to other platforms. If you do all three of these things, a successful campaign that’s making $1 today could easily be making you $5 or more in just weeks or months.

Google AdWords wasn’t the first search engine to come out with the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) model, but they certainly are the biggest and most well-known. However, that doesn’t mean that you should ignore other search engines such as Bing. In fact, there are many marketers who are making full-time livings on search engines like Bing without spending any money on Google at all.

Here are the differences between AdWords and Bing and why might you choose one over the other:

Conversion Rates

Out of AdWords, Yahoo and Bing, Bing traffic tends to convert the best. That means that out of 1,000 visitors, you’ll tend to get more sales from Bing than from AdWords or Yahoo traffic. One common theory as to why is because people using Google tend to be more savvy computer users and more discerning about where they spend money. Bing users tend to be people who just left their browsers on their default search engines. They’re less discerning with their money and their internet habits.

Volume

This is where Google AdWords wins. For any given keyword, you can expect to get ten percent or less with Bing than what you would get if you bid on the same keyword in AdWords. That doesn’t mean that you can’t make significant money on Bing, it just means that your strategy needs to be different.

Bidding Strategy

Generally, with AdWords you don’t want to go for high-profile, high-competition keywords with high volume as the bid prices are just too high. With Bing however, it’s different. Bing’s PPC bids tend to be a little bit cheaper than AdWords, and there also tends to be less competition. That means that on AdWords a keyword like “Lose lower belly fat” may be far too competitive and expensive. On the other hand, on Bing there will be competition, but you may have a good shot at making money with the keyword. Basically, on Bing you’ll need to take advantage of the lower competition to bid on broader keywords. This will help you offset the lower search volume: You increase your total traffic by bidding on higher traffic keywords.

AdWords versus Bing

There are many similarities in strategies between AdWords and Bing. The principles of writing great ads and split testing carefully apply to both systems equally. Choosing the right keywords is as important in one as it is the other. On the other hand, these two systems require very different strategies to master.

AdWords often requires drilling down to very precise keywords in order to create profitable campaigns. On Bing, your main challenge is often getting enough volume rather than getting your traffic to convert.

Each search engine is different and need different approaches. There’s a lot of money to be made in both.