A whole new sphere of opportunities to make money on the web has opened up nowadays and of the various ways of taking advantage of this trend, setting up an e-commerce superstore is perhaps the best. Although it is easy and cheap, it is not the only way to make money on the web. In fact, you need not sell anything and all that you need to do is to refer your customers to other sites that sell products or services and make money in the bargain. 

You can also offer space on your web site for advertisement of the products or services of other manufacturers or providers. However, the web site must supply content for which you can ask for extra payment and other services such as e-mail, chat and forums. There are other services that you can offer for free, such as web hosting and collection of scripts. The advertisers can then display their messages in the form of banner ads and they would pay you for the same. These ads would become the mainstay of your income. 

The normal modus operandi of web site advertising is that a small banner advertisement is placed by the advertiser on your site and payment is made to you by either of the following methods: the click-through method, the impression, the sale or a combination of these methods. The click-through is the commonest method whereby when a visitor makes a click on the advertising banner and is taken to the site of the advertiser, you would get between $0.01 and $0.05 per click. This would, however, depend on the advertising program and the volume of traffic generated on your site. 

If you wish to find out how much each ad on your site will cost you when you are merely trying to recover your initial cost of the web site, you should at first work out the amount of money that will be spent on editing, design, and printing. You should then figure out how many ads you can put on your web site and then divide the above amount by the number of ads that might be sold. The result will give you the cost of each ad. However, nobody can stop you from selling the ads at a higher price and making more money, provided you can do so.  

An impression is counted when an advertising banner appears on your screen irrespective of whether there is any click on it or not. The payment for each impression might only be a fraction of a cent but the total amount can be large as the number of impressions is usually very high. Moreover, if a visitor makes a purchase from the advertiser’s site after clicking on the advertisement banner, you will be entitled to either an already agreed commission or a predetermined percentage of the sale. 

The negative impact of taking advertisements on your site or joining an affiliate program is that it might slow down your site by weakening your original message. Although these ads might be bringing in much needed money, you should be careful to steer clear of any ads or affiliations that might embarrass you and imply certain things that might make you or your visitors uneasy.