Hey Everyone

Here is part two of the series in starting your own website(s). In this small post we will talk about maintaining and moetizing your websites. If you have anything to add or anything you need help with please post below and I will do my best to get back to you as soon as possible.

Anyway, the first thing you need to get on your site is traffic, without the stats your site is worthless and monetizing is, well, impossible. To get some traffic I reccomend (as discussed above) you have a link in your signiture, get quality ads (www.adengage.com) and find suitable other sites to advertise on. Once you have the users, you need to keep them, otherwise you will find yourself repeatedly trying to get more advertising space to make the numbers shoot up. To grip your readers/users you need exciting, original ideas and content. This skill is something that cannot be taught or put into a tutorial, you either can do it or you cant. If you have an idea that will make yoursite original, and useful to the readers then you need to advertise or include that in your adverts. I suggest you run an advertisement with a few sites for two weeks or so and then continue with the ones that are providing the most clicks and unique visitors. I would suggest a realistic adverising stop point is when you reach 400-500 users per day, of whom all are unique.

Visitors are money there is no alternative to users browsing your site. Without them you cannot have a hope of making some money.

Once you have a website established with a regular flow of visitors I suggest that you can monetize your website by a few easy methods. Firstly, you can sell advertising personally, which depending on your stats and genre of site can work well. If I were you, and you were recieveing about 500+ Uniques I would place banners on rotation with software like PHPadsNEW. Otherwise I suggest services such as www.google.com/adsense/ or www.adbrite.com . To recieve maximum click, and therefore more money as a result you need to think about your advertisements position around your site, and the blending that it has with it. For example an advertisment link under the lowest point in your site in bright ornage will get less clicks than one close to content in a blending (same) color as the surrounding objects on the page. Within a web page there are different places that you should place ads depending on what site you own, there are differences between forums and normal site such as a blog etc.

For a Forum, you will recieve maximum potential by placing the ads:
-Under every post or thread.
-Inside the forum banner, like talkfreelance
-On a sidebox like talkfreelance again.
I suggest the last two, but all three work a treat

For a Blog I suggest:
-In the header of the page - though this may affect the visual apprence.
-Directly beneath / above content of the site.
-In the navbar
-In a sponsered link box close to the top of the forum.

With all of the placements you want to make it blend with the design if it is a text link so users will read it. Users nowadays block out ads that look to obvious. If you want to place banners across your site I suggest that you place them close to the top of the forum.

Good Luck
End of part II.
Alex