I thought it would be useful to you guys if I explain the various ways that I make money online. Most of them are really simple concepts that I am sure that you can replicate.

I won’t show you my actual websites, but rather some similar examples. Similar in concept rather than the design.

I was going to say that they have a better design, but you may find that an ugly site makes you more money than a pretty one This may be particularly true for an affiliate site where you want the visitor to digest your information and then go to the cool sales page to buy a product via your link.

So lets kick it off with Adsense. This is Google’s program where you can gain a slice of the Pay Per Click revenue that they get from the Content Network.

To get the most revenue share, your website needs to be targeted to a niche that is well matched to the search terms that Advertisers are bidding on.

So the major niches are best such as health, food, and pets. If you go into a deep sub-niche you will have very few advertisers that are targeting those keywords and not much traffic. Plus, you will struggle to produce much content.

For an Adsense site, you want a lot of traffic and target a popular niche. So let’s consider the food niche.

In this niche there will be plenty of Adwords spend on diets, restaurants and cookery terms. Also, it is easy to get hold of content to put on our website.

Here is a great example of such a site: COOKITSIMPLY.COM

You can see that the site concept is quite simple in that it has several thumbnails of photos and under them a small amount of text describing a type of cuisine. Then you click through to get a list of recipes that are rated.

Then click on a recipe for the details of that recipe with the ingredients list and the method.

To monetize the site, they have an Adsense Ad unit in the top right corner of the page and one below the recipe. The color of the links blends in with the theme so many visitors will click these once they are done reading the recipe.

I mentioned that it is easy to get hold of content for the food niche. So how do we do that?

For photos, you can make a habit of taking photos of your own meals when you go out, or look for them on Fickr for example.

For the recipes, a great resource is Project Gutenberg which is an archive of non-copyright books that you can download in text or HTML format and re-use the content.

So I hope I gave you an idea of how to create an Adsense money-making site with this brief example.

This should also work well to advertise cookery books and DVDs for example.