As someone who has been building websites since 1996, I have a small collection of domain names that I am not making use of. Over the years, I have tried a variety of methods to monetize these domains.

1.) Domain Parking Services. These services allow you to point your domain to their name servers and they show semi-targeted pay-per-click ads on the domain. The level of input you can have related to targeting varies for each service, but most let you provide some keyword suggestions.

Advantages

While browsing Valleywag tonight, I noticed a post about how social networking site TagWorld may be headed out of business. The scary thing is that they are still running an offer on ClickBooth that pays $.80 per signup. Over the weekend I was thinking about a few ways to promote this offer, but I wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole now.

This is just another great example of how publishers should always do some preliminary research on a company before promoting offers. Myself and countless other publihsers have been burned by this in the past, and there is no shortage of  shady affiliate marketers. Be safe out there.

A while ago, I covered BlueHatSEO’s blog post about an idea to earn $100 per day from promoting screen savers bundled with adware.  Earnersblog just put up a great post about how the author earned $200 per day promoting Casino affiliate programs with an ebook. He basically wrote an ebook about a roulette strategy and encouraged readers to try out the strategy by signing up for an online casino via affiliate links embedded in the book. He distributed the ebook via p2p sharing and ebay promotion.
I think the idea is worth consideration. I really like that:

This week I began my first venture into purchasing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on search engines. I am monetizing the traffic via a variety of affiliate networks. This traffic has been the first large chunk of traffic that I have sent to Hydra Media, and I have to say that I have been quite impressed with the performance of their offers.
My first few learnings from my first week of PPC advertising are:

Over in the Azoogleads forum at DigitalPoint, an interesting exchange sprung up between Shoemony, a well known super affiliate and JP the owner of the MaxBounty affiliate program. The post starts out innocently enough when a user asks if Azoogleads would be a good place to find ringtone ads. Someone replied that MaxBounty has a ringtone offer paying $13.90 per lead. Then Shoemoney jumped into the thread and said that MaxBounty is a bad company to work with and one of his friends way not paid when he drove a large volume of traffic to MaxBounty via PPC search traffic.

Bluehat SEO has a great idea up on how to make $100 per day. He proposes creating some free screensavers and packaging them with the software from ZangoCash. Zango pays $0.45 per user download, so this could add up pretty quickly. The post very clearly lays out how you could get this up and running, and how to promote the site.

I probably will not be jumping on this anytime soon. Zango has a relatively shady past, including an large fine from the FTC. The idea is good for stimulating further thoughts. In the comments of the original post, people bring up some other good ideas such as putting URLs for sites with PPC ads on the screensaver.

Sleepyblogger has a post up where she advocates use of affiliate programs over Adsense. While I have had some success with very targeted affiliate programs, I think that Adsense and YPN can be the best solution for many sites.

Drawbacks to Affiliate Programs:

1. Your audience may not match up well for making purchases online. For example, my friends who run Kiwibox.com, a site for teens, would not make much running affiliate programs where you get paid when a user purchases something. Yes, there are some affiliate programs that pay upon registration or other non-purchase activities, but these have become increasingly rare.

I have had some decent success with a handful of advertising and affiliate programs. Here are five programs from which I have made at least a $1,000.

Websponsors – One of the first affiliate networks that I had some good luck with. For a while, I was making a ton of money off their free poetry offer that paid out at $1.00 per lead. Lately, I have had some success with their free student pack offer that pays out $.60/lead.

AdSense – I have done well with AdSense since its inception. I would like to do some more testing to optimize AdSense on my sites, and I will chronicle the results of the testing on this blog.

In my post about a framework to make more money from your site, I wrote about Revenue Generation Methods as a key driver in site revenue. While I was checking del.icio.us today, I noticed a great blog post titled Beyond AdSense: A Business Model Checklist. It features a rather extensive list of revenue generation methods. Hopefully, some of these may strike some great ideas on how you can make more money from your blog or website. I especially like the concept of using a site to promote professional services. Someday, I could see using MonetizeTraffic to promote consulting services.