There are two basic methods to make money using your website.

1. Directly selling products or services from your website: this is done in two ways, firstly you could have a website which directly offers products or services on the web pages or secondly a web site may be made which offers free information so as to attract more visitors which can then be passed on to another site which actually carries out the selling for the products and services. There are numerous websites which offer products or services for sale online and this happens to be the most popular approach to making money on the internet. This is easy to setup and the money starts rolling in almost within a weeks time.

2. Generating traffic: the other approach to making money online is to set up a website which offers enticing information to the visitors and may even contain certain special offers. The sole objective is to increase the visitor count by all means so that the website can sell advertising space on its web pages. The advertising space that it offers is the money earner for the website.

This second aspect of generating income from a website through high volumes of traffic is not a very talked about subject because it is a gradual process and you may not see revenue flowing in even up to a year. For this the investment starts paying back not earlier than six months. However, once the website gains rhythm the payoffs are usually very large and the maintenance required is minimal.

For instance theres a site on the automotive industry which offers free information on all kinds of automotive products including prices and purchase points. This site is so common that it gets more than a million hits a month. The site is not into selling any kind of products and is solely for the purpose of offering free information but still it makes more than $100,000.00 every month by selling advertising space to some of the best automotive companies.

Another example is that of the Netscape website, which witnesses something like 5 million visitors in a weeks time and because of this high volume of traffic it sells a single banner space for more than $30,000.00 per month. With plenty of informative web pages its monthly revenue crosses a million dollars.

Of course the chances of people like us getting as big as the above mentioned two examples are quite low still we must understand that the potential is indeed there. Even if you do not earn millions each month you certainly can make a few thousand dollars from your website.

As far as the revenue from space selling on your website is concerned, the trend is usually that the small sites have fixed charges while the bigger websites charge on the basis of a number of impressions. Whats more important is how targeted is the visitor who approaches your website, if your website is more targeted towards a certain group of visitors you can really expect to receive a higher price.

With that kind of patience that is required for such a venture people normally resort to begin selling products or services to get the revenue rolling in faster.

So lets first have a look at the benefits that arise from setting up a business for sale of products or service promotion.

1. Complete automation is possible which helps to reduce the number of hours that you need to spend on your business.

2. Selling online offers time convenience in the sense that you can work at your own pace and at the time of your choice.

3. Lead costs are low which means the amount of expenditure required to get new customers is normally a fraction of what it would cost using the traditional methods.

4. The staffing costs are low as most of the work is automated and works on a 24 hours basis and of these hours most of the hours it does not require anyone to take care of it.

5. A wider customer base is indeed the biggest advantage; because once you are online customers from all over the globe will have access to your business.

6. Testing the customers attitude and preferences has never been as easy as it is with an online business because it offers the convenience of tracking how the customers move through the website and their preferences in terms of the quality, brand and the price structure.

7. The risk factor is low and you can afford to experiment with new ideas because even if they do not work it wont cause you any significant loss.

The greatest advantage of marketing the product or service online lies in the fact that the startup and operational costs are low and it is very likely to attract potential buyers at an unparalleled speed. The revenue can start flowing in as soon as 24 hours after the launch of the online business. And also the possibility of testing the advertising campaign can be accomplished within a few days while the traditional media would take months and months to evaluate a single campaign. The internet can surely beat the traditional media any day in terms of this speed and efficiency. If you are keen on online marketing here are the two most commonly adopted strategies:

1. Silent marketing: in this the sales are generated either directly from the website on from sources such as newsgroups and e-mail that is without any direct contact with the customer.

2. Mouth piece strategy: in this the sales are achieved by actively participating in various promotional activities such as newsgroups and mailing lists. The idea is to express ones opinion or to help people by offering advice through forums. The essence of this strategy lies in building up a relationship with each and every potential customer on an individual basis.

These strategies can either be used individually or as a combination of both depending on what to you plan to do. The silent marketing calls for less time commitment because under the mouth piece strategy you need to invest time in giving advice and participating in discussion groups. For the silent strategy you need to set up an automated system which will get you enough visitors coming to your website, so you will not require the human interface from the initial activity of attracting the visitors to the final activity of closing a sale.