Making money online: 3 ways to earn a living on the internet

• Introduction and index
• Part 1 - Selling other people's products
• Part 2 - Selling your traffic (which is this post)
• Part 3 - Selling your own products

Constant traffic is every webmaster's dream.

There are many sources of internet traffic.

Reports show that a majority of all internet traffic comes from search engines. That is why there is a whole industry devoted to "search engine optimization". The higher you rank on search results, the more traffic you receive.

Other sources include links through other sites, links or online word-of-mouth in forums, email groups, chatrooms, and also offline referrals.

So when a website begins to attract traffic through various means, its profile in the internet world also rises. Although I personally believe that rich content is much more important to success, traffic is still considered by many as the "currency of the internet".

Indeed it is very possible to turn high traffic into solid money. These are different from true affiliate programs (that is my opinion, of course). Affiliate marketing focuses on valuable content, selling, and pre-selling. Affiliates get paid when a visitor completes a purchase.

The traffic-based programs, however, also pay for pure clicks, or even pageviews, whether it finalizes into a sale or not.

Google Adsense
Adsense is the most famous and innovative program in this category. Google has employed their search technology in the program, and although you have little control over what ads will show up on your site, the program tries to pick the ones that are most related to your site.

Adsense pays for clicks on their ads. Google doesn't tell how much of the revenue they get from the ads is shared by Adsense affiliates. But broadly speaking (very broadly), each click will earn about $1 for the affiliate.

CTR
This is short for "Click Through Rate", or how many viewers of a certain ad (or link or banner) actually choose to click it. It is generally given as a percentage, and it varies widely between ads of different topics. It also varies between different sites for the same ad (better content of course provides higher CTR).

But just to give you an idea, again a very broad average for CTR is about 2%. That is, 2 out of hundred people who visit your Adsense site will actually click on the ads. I must repeat that this is a very general average. Poor sites with little content have CTR's close to 0%, while original sites with a certain theme may enjoy CTR's of 10% or perhaps even higher.

So how much is a visitor worth?
I knew this question would come, that's why I put those very general figures above.

Let me emphasize once again, that these figures are very broad approximations, and may vary widely between different ads, and according to the "power" of your own site.

So with an average 2% CTR and $1 per click from your advertiser, 100 visitors will earn you $2 on the average. And if your site attracts 500 visitors every day, you will make $300 a month.

Yes, that wouldn't exactly "make you rich quick".

But let's say your site covers a certain topic in great detail. Your content is rich and original, and offer a lot of value to your visitors. Your site doesn't attract as much traffic as 500 visitors per day. But all those who do visit, are keenly interested in your theme. And you succeed in giving them what they were searching for. And your ads are also very related to the needs and wishes of your visitors.

Let's say this way you could get a CTR of 8%. You only get 250 visitors per day, but with $1 per click, you can manage to earn $600 monthly.

You see where I'm getting? With half the visitors in the first example, now you can make double the money. Isn't that impressive?

How can that happen? Need I repeat: Content is king.