Your Website Strategy

4. Making Money

Even if your site is mainly designed to improve communication with your customers, it may offer revenue-raising opportunities.

4.1 You can sell products and services direct from your site.

• Once set up, a website is a cheap and efficient method of making sales.
• Margins can be unusually high, because there is no wholesaler or retailer involved.
• The best sellers are commodity goods such as books that can be sold at reduced prices, reflecting low overheads.
• The web is ideal for selling things that buyers find hard to track down.
• Service industries can also sell online. Travel agents, hotels, plumbers and dentists all take bookings on the web.

4.2 Even small sites can make money from advertising, although you will need a large audience to generate a significant income.

• Pay-per-click adverts are most common. These small blocks of text are inserted into your site by search engines. You receive a small payment each time one is clicked.
• You can also sell banner adverts. These graphic adverts link to an advertiser's site.
• Advertising rates vary widely, depending on the nature and performance of the adverts.
• You can sign up to the major search engines' pay-per-click advertising programmes online. Contact a specialist online ad agency if you think you have an audience for banner adverts.

4.3 If you offer information which is impossible to find elsewhere, you may be able to charge for access to your site.

• People are very reluctant to pay for information online, so this model is only viable for websites in specialist areas.