How to monetize your Drupal website

This is a sample chapter from the book Drupal Website Models >>>>> http://www.websesame.com/node/139

Website monetizing is the process of converting existing traffic being sent to a particular website in to a revenue. There are many ways to do so, firstly have a look at Google Adsense this is one of the most popular ways of monetizing a website. Google Adsense allows you to place advertisements on the particular website you want to monetize in order for you to benefit from the traffic that the website is producing. As well as Google Adsense there are various other methods used today to monetize websites, to allow people to profit largely from the incoming traffic they receive for their websites.
Other ways to monetize a website includes:
Pay per click advertising: Pay per click otherwise known as PPC (pay per click) is a marketing strategy put in place by search engines. PPC (pay per click) advertising works by placing an advert on search results for specific words which are relevant to the website you are advertising generally placed in the right hand column on the Google search engine.

Affiliate programs : This is another very successful way of making money, by signing up to an affiliate program such as [www.clickbank.com] searching for products with in click bank to sell and well advertising them on your website, and making people buy them.

Banner advertising : This is another form of advertising and monetizing, which incorporates a banner advertisement that is implemented onto a website, the role of this banner is to catch the eye of incoming traffic to the website, therefore enabling them to click the advertisement. This form of monetizing, implements both that of affiliate programs and google adsense.

Google Adsense : AdSense is an advertisement application run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image, and more recently, video advertisements on their websites. These advertisements are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis. AdSense has become a popular method of placing advertising on a website because the advertisements are less intrusive than most banners, and the content of the advertisements is often relevant to the website. Currently, AdSense uses JavaScript code to incorporate the advertisements into a participating website.

Many websites use AdSense to monetize their content. AdSense has been particularly important for delivering advertising revenue to small websites that do not have the resources for developing advertising sales programs and sales people. To fill a website with advertisements that are relevant to the topics discussed, webmasters implement a brief script on the websites' pages.

Monetizing the Drupal site
Depending on what business model is employed, the Drupal contribution modules offer several possibilities for monetizing the web site :

Affiliate programs: For an e-commerce site affiliate programs could be a great way to increase both traffic and sales. The incentive offered participants is to be paid a commission on sale anytime a purchase is made from traffic directed by the affiliate. The means of creating the traffic usually is by links placed on other websites, email and newsletters. The Ubercart shopping cart module enables the creating of affiliate accounts through the supplementary Ubercart affiliate module.
Banner advertising : The advertisement module is quite versatile , and enables banner and text ads to be automatically inserted inside content and rotated sitewide. Ads can be bought and banners uploaded from the browser, by users. Such advertisement can be automatically expired or renewed according to parameters set by the site administrator.

Google adsense :Google ads are easiest to implement on the web, and on Drupal sites the codes can be inserted inside blocks which can thereafter be placed in any desired position on the site. A better way however is to use the highly configurable Adsense module ,which will help prevent the site from being penalized by Google due to site owner clicking ads on own site.

Other monetizing opportunities: Other available monetizing opportunities are loosely based around the affiliate concept and they use banners, links and widgets supplied by third party web sites. Even though presented as modules, these are typically made available to site owners as blocks which may be placed in several locations on the web site. Some ideas are:

Travelgrove Meta Search Integration - allows for users to utilize Travelgrove’s search engine for travel, that scrapes the travel vendors, for cheap airfares, cruises, hotels, travel deals, and more.
Affiliate Products Shop - facilitates affiliate products feeds transfer from http://www.commissionjunction.com/ and http://www.linkshare.com/

Cafepress Shop-front Integration - displays items from a cafepress shop in your own drupal website. It can also display a block with a randomly chosen item, optionally provide a link to the item as well as the shop and the "sell your own stuff" affiliate program

Click2Sell Suite - lets you sell your products through Click2sell marketplace or on your website with buy it now buttons, and which also allows you to access hundreds of affiliates who want to sell your product for you and earn commission.

READ MORE ABOUT DRUPAL WEBSITE MODELS >>>> http://www.websesame.com/node/139