There are bloggers or web masters who prefer to monetize their sites by selling banners, placing paid text links or Google ads in their content. What are the differences between these three methods of making an income?

Selling ads is not that easy and one has to wait that a request is made. If the site has a lot of traffic, this gets easier and ad spots are sold at a higher price. Advertisers will prefer a banner space in order to make their brand known and receive traffic in the process.

Placing paid links is a good source of income as advertisers are not very concerned about branding but more in improving their Google page rank and generating traffic. There are Networks that can automatically place ads on their member’s sites. The site usually has to have a Google PR of 3 to be accepted and host paid links.

Affiliate marketing has the following main advantages over the three methods above:

- Web masters decide which product and merchant to promote according to the commission they want to earn.
- Affiliate programs can be publicized just after the Affiliate Manager has approved the affiliate.
- Affiliate programs can be promoted in different ways: text links, banners, data-feed, content links and widgets.
- Income from affiliate programs can be of a much nicer level.

Affiliate Marketing is a nice way to monetize a blog or website that has already been around for some times. The best results are for the sites that promote affiliate programs related to their vertical. If the website is about Travel, does well in search engines and has targeted traffic, placing text or product deep links in the Travel category adds value to the site and generates income.

For recent sites, it is best to focus on content and SEO before including affiliate programs. After the site receives decent traffic, affiliate programs can be added progressively. The problem that most newbie affiliate marketers meet is that they are too impatient and expect to have results in a very short period of time.

Making money online with a website or blog takes time and knowledge of what to do to get results. Fortunately, affiliate marketing can auto-finance a website pretty quickly, and give the owner an additional income to pay bills, cable TV or a mortgage. Making a living with it takes evidently more time and work to acquire the experience just like any other occupation.

As a conclusion, while affiliate marketing is the best way to go in order to monetize a new website, older websites would benefit using intelligently all methods available.