How do websites make money?

The Web offers tremendous opportunities for those who know how to harness it. You hear of stories of people who earn thousands if not millions of dollars from doing business on Web. While there are many scams (same way in the traditional business world), there are various ways you can legitimately make money on the Web.

Here are the main business models you can adopt:

1. Sell products on the Web - Big boys like Amazon or Lillian Vernon online catalog or smaller businesses like BigKidsVideo.com or Candle4Less.com all sell products on the Web.

You can either sell: (a) through your own storefront through your own website or applications such as Yahoo Stores; or (b) sell through online auctions like eBay

2. Information Delivery. Others such as About.com or EuropeforVisitors.com create content and monetize their content in a number of ways:

a. Advertising - From the article "How to Generate Advertising Revenues for Your Web Site" http://www.powerhomebiz.com/vol28/adrevenues.htm , there are several ways you can earn money from advertising:

1. Join an advertising network. Advertising networks are organizations that aggregate Web sites that offer advertising space, and sell banner ads (and other advertising options) across them. Traffic requirement is often a minimum of 5,000 monthly impressions, although many do not accept sites hosted by free page services.

Burst Media http://www.burstmedia.com
Fastclick (ValueClick). http://www.fastclick.com
Advertising.com. http://www.advertising.com
Tribal Fusion http://www.tribalfusion.com

2. Participate in contextual advertising networks. Contextual advertising are text ads delivered based on the content of the web page using an automated system.

Google Adsense https://www.google.com/adsense/
Yahoo! Publishing Network (currently in beta and available to US publishers only) http://publisher.yahoo.com/
Intellixt http://vibrantmedia.com/site/web_01a5.htm
Quigo Adsonar http://www.quigo.com/adsonarexchange.htm
IndustryBrains http://www.industrybrains.com
Commission Junction Evolution http://www.cj.com

3. Sell advertising for your site directly. This is admittedly a more difficult route for a small business site wanting to earn advertising revenues. But hey, as they say: "no pain, no gain!"

b. Affiliate Programs - you sell other people's products that your audience may be interested in; and you get a certain commission after the desired action was done (whether a sale, a lead, subscription to email newsletter, or however this is defined)

c. Paid online content. Hoovers.com or WebmasterWorld.com Supporters forum all require paid subscription before accessing the information

d. Content licensing and syndication. Some publishers such as the Associated Press get paid every time their content is published elsewhere