People are trying various methods, products, ideas and approaches to make money online, and many of them are trying to do it in the easy way. Although making money online is not hard as it seems, it is not easy as many people hope it is. Successful and profitable business online is ongoing process that requires the right dose of knowledge, effort, anticipation and work. Although there are many ways how you can set up your online business, one basic way is to have a profitable website.

What would be a profitable website? In short words, that would be a website (no matter of which type) that is able to earn money and to make profit (at the end) for its owner on daily basis. It is not so important that profitable website earns money and makes profit on daily basis, but at the end of the month profit from that website should end in your pocket. Personally, I like websites that earns me money on regular daily basis. One type of such a websites would be websites that earns money from advertising networks, when you get paid for every click on ads displayed on your website. Example of websites that earns money on the end of the month would be membership type websites.

Since I really love those "daily cash machine" websites, I will tell you more about profitable websites that will put money in your pocket on regular daily basis. That type of websites could be very profitable for the owner. The best part is, websites of that type are not hard to create and maintain. As a matter of fact, it is pretty easy to create such a websites. Three basic things you will need to have are: content - I suggest you to write your own content, revenue sharing advertising program - the programs who's ads you will show on your web pages, affiliate programs - you can increase your earnings if you promote products through affiliate programs.

The whole process is very simple. All you need to do is to create a simple website with a few web pages. It would be great if you can target those web pages for popular keywords (search for free keyword tool on search engines), like "digital photography". That could be your main keyword, and then your other web pages would be targeted to keywords like "professional digital photography", "amateur digital photography", etc. If you are not familiar with website design and tools you can use to create web pages, search for free tools for creating HTML web pages. There are some pretty good ones out there, although I'm using only professional tools that cost some money.

Next, you should incorporate ads from revenue sharing advertising networks in to your web pages. Try to insert them in to your content and match their look to the look of your content (color of links, font type, text size, etc) as much as possible. It is important for your earnings to try to make visitors think how those ads are your internal links rather than ads. That will increase your clickthrough rate and your earnings.

Your next step would be to go through your content, find interesting words and phrases that you could match to some affiliate program you are partnering with. For example, if your main keyword is "digital photography" you should find affiliate programs that sells digital photos, memberships to websites with digital photo content or even digital cameras and equipment for digital cameras. Grab their links (your special URLs from affiliate programs with your tracking code included) and link words in your content that match keywords and phrases you have choose to particular affiliate program.

At this point you should be set to drive some traffic to your website. The best way to do so is to get as many relevant links as possible. With links I suggest you to go with quality, not quantity. That should help you to get your website indexed by search engines in a very short time. After that you will start receiving free traffic from search engines.

Other good ways would be to submit your website to social bookmarking websites and services, as well as social networking websites. You can also exchange links with other webmasters who run similar websites and the best way to find them is through forums and message boards in your website's niche. There are also other ways to drive traffic to your website and you should do some research about additional ways for getting traffic to website.

Traffic is really a life blood of your website. If you don't have any traffic, you can expect any earnings. So, after you create your website (keep it simple, optimized for keywords you have choose, properly linked to affiliate programs and with carefully inserted ads from revenue sharing advertising networks), your main occupation should be to drive traffic to your website.

Again, go for quality, not quantity. After you receive particular number of visitors, lets say ten thousands, check your stats and earnings and try to calculate eCPM of your website (amount of money earned on thousand visitors). That should tell you how much you are earning per each visitor, which will give you information on what is the maximum price you can pay for each visitor if you decide to buy traffic, which I strongly suggest if you have eCPM.

For example, if your eCPM is $100, which means you are earning $100 for every 1000 impressions of your website, that means you are earning $0.10 per each visitor. It is easy to conclude that the maximum price you can allow yourself to pay for traffic is $0.09, which leaves you $0.01 in profit per each visitor. Of course, you can pay less and keep more profit for yourself, but that whole game around eCPM and buying traffic is completely another story.

Thomas McMills
ezinearticles.com