Once you've figured out the topic of your website and what need you plan to solve, the next question is how you plan to earn revenue from the website.  The typical ways to earn money from a website are by selling ad space, referring people to other sites, selling products or services, or charging a subscription fee.

Selling Ad Space

This is the easiest to get started and tends to have a lower payout than the others unless your site becomes an authority site.  The quickest way to get started is to sign up with Google Adsense or Yahoo Publishing Network.

Once signed up, you add a little bit of JavaScript code that they provide, and then they take care of the rest.  Google has a program that reads the content of your page, determines what it's about, and then serves ads related to that topic. You're paid when somebody clicks on an ad a variable amount which is based on how much the advertiser bids for that search term minus Google's cut. The name of the game for ad revenue is to get a lot of people that's interested in your topic looking at your site. Certain topics are worth much more per click than others and the purpose of your site helps determine the average number of people that will click on an ad.

Paid Referrals and Affiliate Links

Lead generation and affiliate programs exist for almost every industry.  The basic idea behind them is that you'll get paid for the traffic you send to their site when that traffic does an action that they want.  They typically pay when somebody purchases something, fills out a lead form, or some other action.

There are two mindsets with affiliate sites: organic and pay-per-click.  Organic affiliate sites get people to their site through organic means such as natural search engine rankings, links from other sites, etc. This is a slow and steady process where they don't expect to gain much traffic in the short term; however, they plan on eventually having enough free organic traffic to earn decent revenue with lower costs.  It's the safer but slower approach to affiliate sales.

The other mindset is the pay-per-click route.  Really, this involves all types of paid advertising, but pay-per-click is one of the more common. In this game, the affiliate site pays for traffic in hopes that they will earn more from the affiliate sale than what it cost them for the traffic.  It's a numbers game where those that play well can earn very well; however, play the game wrong, and it's easy to lose money. Expect to lose money the first few months until you start to figure out the right average conversion rates and cost per click.

E-commerce and Contact Us sites

If you have a product or service to sell, a great way to increase your sales is by having a website that sells your products directly or drives people to your contact us form and/or phone number. In both of these cases, your website needs to be set up in such a way that everything on the site directs them towards that goal. Using multi-variant testing is a great way to determine what combinations of text, colors, and graphics produce the best conversion rates.

Subscription Fees

For sites that have unique content or features, it's possible to sell a subscription fee for advanced features. This might be for full access to a game, restricted content, or additional bandwidth or storage. Often, the best subscription based sites are geared towards helping a business solve a problem or make a process more efficient. Some examples include project management software, customer relations software, website monitoring, backup services, tech support solutions, and file management. Generally, a site needs to be fairly popular before people will be willing to pay for a subscription, so this revenue stream is usually implemented during a later phase of the project.

Next Step

Once you know where your revenue streams will come from, the next step is to figure out how you're going to market your website.