When most people decide to start an online business, they first attempt to sell products on eBay or Amazon. Or they try to sell an ebook through ClickBank or PayDotcom.  Those are some quick and simple ways to make a few extra dollars online.  In fact, for many people, selling on eBay is now their full-time job.

The problem with that method is that it actually is usually a full-time job.  That’s because you must locate, purchase, and warehouse the products.  Then you must ensure prompt and safe delivery.  Then you have to deal with unhappy customers.  And you often have to contend with criminals trying to “game” the system.

In my opinion, a much better way to make money online is to set up membership websites in hot niches for which you get a monthly subscription fee.  You can include tips, resources, ebooks, audios, videos, and more to provide value to your subscribers.  You could have an exclusive forum for members only, and you could offer special members-only offers on products of interest to them.  With a nice list of monthly subscribers in your group, it would be easy to attract vendors willing to provide incentives in exchange for the traffic.

How do you set up a membership website?
One of the simplest ways to get a membership site set up is to use a membership script that already includes everything you will need.  A good membership site script will handle recurring payment processing through PayPal or your own merchant account, multiple levels of membership, simple method of securing areas of your site to only allow paid subscribers, and integration with other systems such as AWeber, 1ShoppingCart, and popular CMS packages.

With the membership script in place, you can put your site together as you normally would, while securing access to certain files on folders within your site.  This means you could use a tool like DreamWeaver to build the site front-end, or you could even use a CMS such as Drupal or Joomla to make maintenance even easier.  A good membership script will integrate with those systems to synchronize member details and to handle logging into both the CMS and membership system.

With the membership script installed, you may begin to sign up affiliates to help you promote the system.  They will then share in the monthly revenue while you continue to grow and improve the site.  Because the typical customer will remain a member for only 3-6 months, you will want the extra assistance of affiliates to help you maintain a steady stream of new subscribers.  This will help you to build an extra source of recurring income that you can continue to build on.

There are lots of ways to make money with PPC ads such as Google’s AdSense program.  You’ll find thousands of sites online with content targeting a specific set of keywords just to get a little money from the PPC ads on their pages.  Most of these sites are pure garbage, and the search engines are getting better at filtering them out of search results.  Add to that the fact that more people are using alternative methods for finding good content because sites like these show up in the search engine results.

So, what can you do to make extra money with PPC ads when the game seems to keep changing?
Obviously, the best way to make money with anything is to provide a quality product or service.  For website owners, that usually means providing high-quality information on a specific topic.  And by high-quality I mean fresh, original content that isn’t something you’ve purchased for a few bucks and republished.  But that doesn’t mean you have to spend hours at your keyboard writing content. 

You can let your visitors add to your content.
There are many ways to do this.

• Request articles. Some writers will provide content just to get their name published. 
• Create forums to discuss topics that interest your visitors.  
• Allow visitors to place ads for buying and selling products related to a specific niche.  Just make sure the ad script is SEO-friendly or you won’t benefit from the ad content. 
• Create a dating site just for people interested in a specific topic.  There are free and inexpensive scripts for this as well.
• Add cartoons or jokes on your site and update them frequently.
• Add online gaming (not gambling) to your site along with quality content.  The games will keep visitors coming back, and the content can include ads that may be relevant to their interests.  Be careful with this one because competitive gaming is governed by law in many areas.  If the games are just for fun, you should be safe.

I’ve used a few of these methods to build sites, and they provide me with a constant source of income.  The key thing to keep in mind is that you must provide quality content or a valuable service to keep visitors interested.  If you intend to make money with PPC ads, you want your visitors to be just interested enough to come to the site.  Then you want them to click away to something that catches their eye in an ad.  If you’re providing good content, it’s more likely that they will be really interested in what your advertisers have to offer.  That will keep your ad payment rates higher, and it will also help to prevent advertisers from asking to have their ads removed from your site.

The toughest part of building a community site is attracting those first visitors, so expect a bit of work up-front to get things rolling.  No one likes to be the first person to comment on a forum, so you may need to help your visitors feel more comfortable by “seeding” your forum or ad site with a few comments of your own – or from friends.   I don’t advocate being deceptive, but you really have to be creative in order to get a conversation started among your visitors.  When I started my first classified ads site, I simply included an ad that said “Place your ad here to sell your…  It just might get results. After all, you’re reading this aren’t you?”  That’s all it took to get things rolling.  Within a few weeks, I had dozens of ads – all getting indexed by search engines.

There’s a lot of debate about whether interesting graphics really help or hinder online sales.  I’m sure a number of intelligent marketing tests have been done to investigate whether or not including great-looking graphics on your site really helps add credibility – the kind of credibility that leads to sales.  I haven’t seen any of those reports, but I have read articles by top marketing experts that say the opposite is actually true – plain text sells best.

So, if that’s true, why do we see so many pages with fancy headers, footers, “virtual” boxes and book covers, etc.?  You would think that everyone would go the “simpler” route of throwing up a sales letter with a link to their payment processor near the bottom of the page (before the ubiquitous PS).  It would stand to reason that if research indicates that graphics reduce sales conversions more people would choose to forego the time and expense of adding them.

But, most people fail to consider that there are other variables at work.  I would like to see a study that compares text-only sales conversions with sites that include nice graphics along with a few other variables thrown in. 

For example, do graphics help relatively new online businesses more than established firms?  In other words, once an individual or business establishes credibility with their market, do graphics then become a hindrance?  And would having the extra graphics actually work better to boost credibility for the newcomer?  Or does it even matter?

And I’m sure the actual content of the sales letter would make a huge difference.  You really get into elements like the heading, sub-head, use of bold and highlighted characters, testimonials, Johnson Boxes, etc.  Effective sales copy becomes much more critical when that’s all you’re relying on to get the sale.  I’m talking about copy using techniques like Joe Vitale’s famous “hypnotic” methods to send customers into “buying trances.”

I personally like to see nice web graphics, but I’m not sure they actually influence me to buy any more or less than a site without graphics.  The sales copy really has the most influence, but I haven’t really stopped to think about whether or not the graphics make me feel more or less like making a purchase.  Perhaps that’s something to consider when visiting a new site.

If you have any information on how the use of web graphics helps or hinders online sales, I’d like to hear about it.  Or, if you have a personal opinion on the subject, I’d like to hear that.  I think this is a subject worthy of a bit of discussion.  Our online sales are at stake.