Where should you start? Trying to make money on your site can be overwhelming. It was for us at first. Start off slow at first and test the waters with your audience. A good place to start might be signing up as associate at Amazon.com. Tip #1 Building Your Audience Often sites don't have enough traffic. Don't despair. There are some great services that actually make your site better that you can just plug-in and many are "ad free". Here's one of the 5 of the free tools/content resources we strongly recommend. Check out the our Audience page for more information. Tip #2 - The Key to Making Money Have you promoted your site? Have you analyzed your keywords and worked on your position in search engines? This is critical. But you must also offer visitors something of "value" so they'll come again and again. It's exhausting work getting "new visitors" - what if 1 in 5 visitors came back weekly? Wow! 4 Steps to Making Money on Your Site Assess your own site Are you ready to go make money? Is your content in place? Do you have traffic and a promotion plan? How many page views do you have per month? Who uses your site, what are they looking for and what might they respond to in an ad or affiliate program. How much time do you have to put towards this project? 1 hour/week to 10 hours/week? Find advertisers and affiliates Learn the "ins" and "outs" of the services. We listed some good programs that will send you a check at the end of the day. Not all programs are legitimate. Which ones can you trust to pay you? You may need to try a few to figure out which service/ad combination will work for your type of site. Set up the ads/affiliate links Find free scripts and tips that can help make this easier. Optimize your site so it's easy to add programs and ads. Consider using server side includes. Server side includes dynamically add the header and footer files to your site. You can change just the header file and voila all your ads change on all your pages. An HTML editor like Dreamweaver lets you insert server side includes. Make sure that your web hosting company supports them. Of course you can also use one of the many database programs or web content management systems or even weblog software to build your site. Choose an authoring method that works for you. . Monitor the performance Check often and make changes if needed. Ads grow stale. Do you visitors respond to text links or banner ads. What's new that you could be adding. Add content and tools can really help attract traffic and hold an audience.