One of the most beautiful things about being an internet marketer is the fact there are so many different revenue streams.  Whether it’s contextual ads, affiliate marketing, advertising deals, you name it, there shouldn’t be any reason you can’t start to make a little bit of money from your websites.

So, how to most people do it?  The answer might surprise you a little bit.

Despite claims of its death and lack of “real” revenue generating power, Adsense is still the preferred way of making money for most website owners.

Here’s how nearly 100 people responded when asked: What is your primary source of online revenue?

• Adsense – 70%
• Affiliate Sales – 15%
• Private Ads – 9%
• Product/Service Sales 6%

The reasons Adsense is still incredibly popular are pretty clear: it’s easy to sign up for and integrate into your site, you don’t have to continuously promote it, and all it takes is a simple click to make money from it.

Affiliate marketing is also a great source of revenue for many website owners, and it certainly has the potential to be much more profitable than Adsense.  But with the added complexity of having to deal with people following through and purchasing the product you’re promoting (or, in the case of CPA, provide their information), you’re not “guaranteed” to make money.

That being said, the more involved with affiliate marketing I get the more I realize I will eventually shift most of my revenue generating focus from Adsense to affiliate marketing.

Private advertising deals are pretty nice because they’re sort of a set it and forget it system, especially if you can lock in to long-term deal, say six months to a year.  However, unless you have lots of targeted and unique traffic these deals are pretty hard to come by or simply aren’t very lucrative.

Don’t get me wrong, $10 a month is still more than what you had, but if you can make more focusing on other revenue streams, you’re better off doing so.

Finally, direct sales is the toughest revenue stream, mostly because you actually have to have a product or service you’re selling.  It also involves much more interaction with vendors and customers, so it’s a pretty time consuming process.  If you’re just starting out online, or are doing it simply to make supplemental income, direct sales probably isn’t the way to go.

The best way to monetize your online ventures is to simply combine as many of these revenue sources as possible.  For example, since adding affiliate marketing to my revenue streams, I’ve grown my monthly online income by roughly 65%, which makes me want to kick myself for waiting so long!

Until recently, I was more than happy to simply have Adsense as my primary revenue generating stream for my websites.  I mean, it’s requires very little work to set up, even less work to maintain and you get paid just for people clicking links that show up on your site.

That being said, the more serious I become at trying to make a little bit of money running websites, the more I would like to become less reliant on Adsense as my primary revenue generator.

The reason being is because Adsense, while simple to use, can be pretty hit or miss, and for many non-niche sites (like all of mine) you pretty much have to generate a lot of traffic in order to generate any substantial amount of money.

Not only that, but despite the fact that I said Adsense was easy to set up and maintain, like anything else, it requires a lot of work to optimize the code for your site, testing different locations on your site to optimize click-thrus, all that fun stuff.

So, recently I decided to start pursuing individual advertising deals for my sites in the hopes of generating recurring monthly income, with the possibility of additional “affiliate” payouts.  Unfortunately, because I’m new at this sort of advertising, I wasn’t really sure where to start.

In order to get the ball rolling, I inserted dedicated advertising pages into my sites’ navigation, essentially to just let people know that I was now accepting private advertising deals for my site.

On these pages I listed out the following information:

• That I was now accepting individual advertising deals. 
• Where on my site I was selling advertising space.
• Prices would be determined by advertising location and type.
• My contact information.

The only information left to be added is my pricing structure for each of the locations, but because I’m relatively new at this, I don’t really know what price to associate with these spaces. 

For the most part, I trust people and believe they’ll offer me a fair and competitive deal.  If they don’t, they’re not worth doing business with.  However, once I get a better grasp of what’s going on and how much to charge, I’ll probably add a pricing structure.

Simple enough, right?

After getting these pages up on my site, I have received several advertising offers that I’m currently mulling over.  And the other day, I accepted my first deal, which is up on Daily Fuel Economy Tip, so that was pretty cool.

Anyway, for people like us who run small-time sites, we shouldn’t expect to fund our retirement with these individual advertising deals.  That being said, if you can get a couple of these up on your site, it’s a great way to supplement any other non-recurring advertising revenue streams (Adsense, Amazon Affiliate) that you might have.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

I’ll be the first to admit, I was wrong to resist the power of Google. I never had any intention of including Google AdSense on The New Business Blog. I really didn’t.

I also didn’t know how much I would come to enjoy blogging and how my longing to be a writer, mixed with all of my interests, could all be taken care of by by simply starting many, many different blogs.

Unfortunately, I also didn’t know how expensive it would all turn out to be.

I figure, with my latest round of domain names and hosting plans, I’ve spent probably over $100 on items dealing with blogs. Thankfully, Blogger.com is still free, otherwise we could be talking about even more money.

Anyway, back to the point.

Google AdSense has given me a quick and easy way to try and earn some of that money back.

By simply placing a couple of AdSense banners around my various sites, I’m setting myself up to make enough money to hopefully cover the cost of hosting and maintaining my sites.

I don’t really have any grand illusions of being one of those people that make $10,000 per month from their sites (to be honest, I don’t know if those people really exist, but I’ll let you know if I become one, trust me). A couple of bucks never hurt though.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is if you’ve had any reluctance to add Google AdSense to your site or blog, get over it. It’s easy and as long as you get some traffic that pokes around and clicks on the ads, you’ll make a couple of bucks, too.

Not a bad deal for essentially doing nothing, huh?