Making money online, is all about creating revenue streams on your websites. Each little source of revenue will be a small part of what will ultimately be a stream of money, flowing into your bank account every month.

Advantages of online revenue streams

Revenue streams on websites, are partly passive, which means they will keep generating revenue, even while the site owner sleeps. This does not mean there is no work involved, it just means that after the initial work is done, the stream continues on autopilot, generating money.

Having created sufficient revenue streams can lead to financial freedom, allowing for more free time, because of the very nature of the Internet.

Think about it: Let’s say for the sake of argument, that you are a carpenter by trade, and in order to make money, you have to accept a carpeting job, accept it, and once you have completed the job, you get paid for the work. Now, if you want to be paid again, you need to find and accept another job. With online income, you set up a website, do the promotions, and the stream of traffic going in to your site, makes you money, again and again.

In many ways online revenue can be compared to the way a famous writer like for instance Stephen King makes money; unlike the carpenter in our example, Mr. King writes a novel, and gets paid for it every time a copy of the work is sold, so he does a job one time, and revenue starts coming in again and again, very much like an online revenue stream.

Disadvantages of online revenue streams

Like with everything else online revenue streams have their own set of disadvantages also. With online revenue streams most of the time web site owners make use of affiliate programs and advertising agencies, to create the revenue streams on their site(s). Over time the amount of pages on a website displaying the ads, build up, and most likely a professional site owner will own many websites, that all use the affiliate programs to make money. In case one of these programs end, by closing the program, a bankruptcy, or any other reason, the web site owner sees himself facing the problem of having to change ads on loads and loads of web pages. Of course there are ways to limit the work involved, but even with the most advanced advertising software, the site owner still faces a sizeable task, that will take up a large part of his or her time, or in the worst case, when an affiliate program is the only one of its kind, the owner sees himself missing a sizeable chunk of his monthly revenue.

In other words, online revenue streams, make site owners in part depending on the affiliate programs they use.

Another drawback of online revenue streams are hypes and trends. Content that may be popular now, and brings in lots of visitors, may not in a few months, when the next hype hits the web. Therefore, web site operators, are required to stay on top of their niche, in order to ensure a steady stream of traffic.

Creating online revenue streams

The easiest way to start creating streams of revenue on a website, is by joining forces with large advertising agencies, like Google Adsense, Adbrite and other reputable agencies. These companies are large, well known and less likely to disappear on short notice.

Their product is also easy to implement, and most of the time involves a few copy & paste actions, to get started. These programs work with a pay per click or pay per impression model, so making money with them is quite easy, since there is no actual selling involved.

From the companies mentioned, Adsense is most well known, and also the most suitable, though the others serve their purpose, as we will disclose in other articles to come.

Different streams of revenue

Creating revenue streams on a website, is basically maximizing the potential of your content pages. In this example we are going to illustrate how we can create a few easy streams of revenue from a blog. For the sake of argument, let’s say we are building a blog about homemade remedies for minor discomforts, like eczema, skin infections and the likes.

We have created several articles on the subject, did our Search Engine Optimizing, and already have a decent stream of visitors coming in on a daily basis, so now it is time to start monetizing our real estate, which are the content pages.

We start with the obvious part, which are two small squares above the content, featured Adsense ads, that are targeted to the content displayed on the page. Since this is your prime ad spot, this will make the most money for pay per click models, and from those Google Adsense has the best program, so with this action, we have created our main revenue stream. Now, like we stated we are running a homemade remedy blog, and lucky for us, there exists such a company like ClickBank, that acts as a reseller of many products, like software and eBooks, that we can promote in return for a commission for every sale we make. So we join, search the ClickBank marketplace, and behold, there are several eBooks for sale on our topic, so we select the highest paying one, and place a link to it under our content.

With this copy & paste action we created a second revenue stream, as we get paid for every sale made through our unique links to the eBook.

Selling products may go a lot slower then generating revenue through pay per click or pay per impression programs, the commissions per sale are also a lot higher, so a well targeted link for a pay per sale product may well outperform your pay per click or impressions streams.

Last we want to make sure we make a little bit of money from every unique visitor that arrives at our web site, as a security to ensure at least some revenue will be coming in every day, even if nobody clicks or buys anything. For this Adbrite’s Full page intermission ads are perfect. They will show every visitor to the site a page that he or she can skip, but, we get a few cents per impression anyway.

With the simple actions as describes above we created a blog with 3 highly potent revenue streams, in a very short period of time. Setting up such a setup as described can be done within the hour, and provided there is sufficient targeted traffic to the site in question, can provide the owner with a healthy income, that comes from 3 separate revenue streams.

Why multiple revenue streams

Setting up several streams of online revenue is important, to ensure profitability, but it is also a fail-safe. With several streams of income coming in from a web site, the revenue never dries up completely, should one of the sources disappear, for whatever reason. Like a wise man once said: Never put all your eggs in one basket.

Maximizing promotions, using only one affiliate program, may generate better results in terms of income from that company, but if the company terminates their program, no matter the reason, the site owner will be left with nothing. For that simple reason, we need several income streams, in order to ensure money keeps coming in.

In the above example of the homemade remedy blog, we used three separate income streams, but the amount of possible streams is by no means limited to only three. Other possible income streams could be from using Adsense for search to power the search function on your blog, and using Adsense for Feeds to maximize the revenue from your RSS feeds, but there are many more ways to generate income from a website.

Assuming the above has all been set in motion, we now have a blog ready for action, and all that remains is keep adding fresh content, preferably on a daily basis, creating more real estate for your ads, and do the necessary promotions, to keep traffic coming in at an increasing rate.

Several streams of income on several sites

For the sake of simplicity we used one blog in our example, but in reality, it takes much more than just one web site to make a decent income on a monthly basis. With the obvious exceptions of the large web sites that get hundreds of thousands of visitors on their pages every day, usually web site owners need many web sites in order to produce the same results. Therefore it is vital to keep building and expanding new web sites, with the revenue streams as described, in order to increase your online income.

On the bright side, while expanding into more web sites, your older sites will keep growing, and ultimately, a few of them may actually reach the same level as those large web sites, and by then, you will have made a fortune in advertising revenues.

Outsourcing

Creating web sites, especially blogs is easy enough, but maintaining them can be a time consuming task, therefore, it is recommended to outsource this task, as soon as the revenue from our site covers the budget to allow for this. This may in the beginning, take a large chunk out of your profits, but as the sites build up, and more sites are added, you will find the outsourcing to be well worth it.

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