Making money with websites

Sorry, but you won't make any money from just uploading a site to the web. In fact just to do that usually COSTS money. You need advertisers or a product to sell to make any money. You might want to look around this forum for some ideas

http://forums.smallbusinesscomputing.com/index.php?

Let me use an analogy...

If I lease a piece of property and put a building on it, will I make money?

Nope.

As JPnyc stated -- you'd have to pay for the land, you'd have to build the building, and then you'd have to pay taxes each year for having the property and building. A web site is similar, you lease some web space (getting an ISP usually), you build a site (just like a building), and then you pay your ISP for continued use of their servers and/or bandwidth.

To make money, you have to do some things with that building. You have to get people to come into it as a starting point (that would be the same as getting people to view a site). You then have to do something on the site that will cause a transaction to occur. If they come, look at your site, then leave, it is just as if they came to your building, looked around and left. All they did was track some dirt in... :)

If you decide to turn your building into a store... then you need products, a register (shopping cart), and all the stuff that goes with selling. The same is true with a site.

In some cases, you can post notices to other sites. If people then go from your site to those other sites, then you might get a "finder's fee". In other cases, it may be that if people go to the places you have notices posted about, and if they mention you or your site when they buy something, then those sites may also pay you a "finder's fee". These finders fees can be based on you simply getting people to come to the other site (less likely) or by you getting people to buy something from these other sites.

The first case is a "pay per click" model and you'd probably need quite a few people coming to your site before this amounts to anything. The second is an "affiliate" program.

For either of these to amount to much, you need lots of people coming to your site first and then you have to compell them to go to the corresponding site.

Hope this helps.

Good luck...

Hi,

The questions you are asking, you must realize, are extremely broad. It's not a simple thing to just give you a list of URLs and (poof) your questions will be answered. I'd recommend that you start at the bookstore. I don't have a specific book to recommend to you, but if you go to Amazon.com and do a search for "Internet business" you will see there are a TON of books that will give you the step-by-step logistics as well as help you visualize your business plan. I'd say you'll want to give yourself several months of time strictly dedicated to research before you make any monetary investments. Once you're more familiar with the basics, sites like www.clickz.com will help you learn more about the jargon of Internet marketing and www.searchenginestrategies.com is a good resource for learning about search engine optimization (which you'll learn is quite important if you are to find an audience).

In short, the best advice I can give you is to buy yourself a few books and throw yourself into your research.

HTH,
Lori

(By the way, you can set up and adminster your own web server if you want, but you still have to pay for bandwidth. There's little reason I can think of to host your site on your own hardware, as it just causes headaches for you.)