People say that you can get rich on the Internet. But, if you are serious about making money on the Internet, remember, it's not a get rich overnight business. Internet success takes time, effort and knowledge. There's no easy 'get rich quick' method, so you need to spend the time for building income stream from your Web site.

Now anyone with a good idea or a hobby can create an online money-spinner that works round the clock.

Developments in the way online businesses make money mean that you don't have to spend all your time selling junk on eBay. Even amateurs such as bloggers or those running special-interest websites can make money.

You can find many kinds of Web sites that have the aim, directly or indirectly, to make money. Apart from the online retailers who are using their sites to directly make money, you can find many Web sites with various moneymaking features.

Here's an excellent page describing realistic ways of making money on the Internet from your personal Web site - Work From Home. No 'get rich quick' schemes. Just proven, reliable ways to to build an online business or use a Web site to expand your offline one.

The basis for building serious income is the high traffic. If your site only gets a few hundred visitors per month, as most of personal Web sites, you'll unlikely make more than pocket change.

Once your website is established and you are receiving a reasonable amount of visitors, you may want to start bringing in some revenue. At the simplest level, revenue will come from your visitors; if you are running a services/product based website then your revenue is likely to come in as a direct result of sales, however if you are not yet making any sales, or you run an information based website then you may want to think about other avenues for making some money from your visitors. There are several options available to help achieve this, but the basic principle is that all of the visitors that come onto your site are potential buyers (eg they may have money to spend and they may be looking for a particular product or service).

If you can convert these visitors into direct sales then this is where you will make the most money, as you are not giving away commision to third parties, however, some third party sales programs will provide a much quicker and sometimes greater immediate revenue in the short term. I am going to cover the most effective of these programs on this page.

Before I get on to individual programs there are some other points you should be aware of. Firstly, as I said before, every visitor is at best potential buyer and secondly a potential return visitor. However, when you display third party adds on your site you are effectivly giving away visitors to those advertisers; if a visitor clicks on an add you may make say 20p (for arguements sake) but you have lost that visitor - they may follow that link and spend £10 somewhere else, and they may forget about your site completely and never come back. So although it is great when you start making some quick and relatively easy money on your site, you should always bare in mind that, in theory, someone else is making three or four times as much at your expense - so your end goal should be to take direct revenue from your visitors rather than passing them on to third parties. Having said that, these advertising programs are great to start off with and they will help you recoup some of your running costs.

Making money on the Internet from your personal Web site : 

Affiliate programs
They pay you a percentage of the sales you generate for them, or for each visitor you send. This is one of the best ways of making money on the Internet. You don't have to spend time and energy creating your own product. And some of them pay 50% commission. See Affiliate programs for more information on building income from affiliate programs.

Banners
They were one of the first ways of making money from hobby Web sites, however they are not so popular now since most surfers don't even look at them. In fact, the click-through rate (the percentage of visitors who actually click on a banner) has steadily dropped, from around 5% 4 years ago to less than 0.5% now.

If you have highly relevant, cleverly designed banners, you can beat the odds. However, you need relatively high traffic to actually make more than pocket change. In fact, most banner advertising companies prefer to only pay for actual sales (even click throughs are no longer attractive, since many people click through because they are paid to, and not because they intend to buy anything).

Google AdSense
This is one of the easiest ways of making money on the Internet for small and medium sites by displaying relevant, text-based ads from Google AdWords (Google's own advertising program) and receiving a share of the pay-per-click payment. 

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