Creating a business website will be a cost and it can become a high cost too, however all successful businesses are aware of a process called "Cost/Benefit" and they should adopt this process when planning and operating their websites. The finance team should be able to ensure that every development of the site has a fiscal benefit to the company, they should regularly review the cost/benefit and instigate changes to ensure a continuing return of investment (ROI). The Sales Department should have management control of the website, as it only just another part of the retail sales area of the company, with the Marketing, IT team and others providing the required resources.
Even the non-retail corporate presence type website has a fiscal benefit that can be calculated. For example the company pays other publications for advertising space based against a potential circulation/viewing figure as part of its normal marketing operations in a manner that is difficult to directly determine the ROI. With a website ROI is much easier to analyse as the web team should be able to tell management exactly how many people visit each page, how long they stay on each page, whether or not they follow a link to the company's retail site or indeed if they communicate to the company, why and to whom. These actions have value not the least being to raise ones corporate profile and that the number 1 position on Google, Yahoo and MSN for your chosen business type will go along way to achieving this on a world-wide scale.
Businesses are however unlikely to want to advertise anyone other than themselves on their sites but some do, an accountancy firm could carry adverts for their clients businesses, etc., however the revenue from this is will be very limited and raises the risk of diverting your own website visitors from the primary purpose of doing business with you.
The object of a commercial site is to make money from ones own existing customers or to add new customers to that list and it should not deviate from this objective in any way shape or form. If you need to deviate then you need another website for that purpose.
Businesses are more likely to have the added expense and potential benefit from the use of Click-though or PPC advertising to drive customers to the site.
There are exceptions if your site is very, very good and you have loads, and I mean loads of visitors, you may be able to sell advertising space to other businesses in your location but this is a very rare occurrence as most of the sites that do make money from this have already taken all the 'easy to find' clients.
Click-through advertising is where you, the webmaster, join an advertising provider's programme. They provide you with advertising code that you display on your site and they pay you commission for the number of adverts that your users click on and view, that is providing you generate over the minimum amount of funds each month. One of the common sources of affiliate advertising is Google and indeed we display adverts from Google on many pages of this site including the bottom of this one.
You will get paid a few pence for each advert that is clicked upon. You can work out yourself that your users will have to perform many clicks for you to earn a decent amount of money. This type of advertising however is the most common form that you will find on many websites.
This is similar to the above but in this case you only get paid if someone clicks on an advert and then subsequently does business with the advertiser. The earning potential of commission advertising can be far greater than the PPC described above but once again it relies upon your user buying things so it is much more difficult to build up a decent amount of business. Only 1%-2% of your visitors will click on an advert and only a very few of them will go on to do business with your advertiser so don't expect to earn a fortune. You will however get nice surprises every now and again.
Some websites do have a great deal of retail information on them and they do actively market products where they have commission advertising agreements. With a great deal of constant effort over time it is possible to drive up the amount of business that can be achieved but I have yet to meet anyone that has become wealthy doing this.
Although you can generate a few pounds a month from advertising you MUST take care that your site must has more unique content than it has advertising or once again you will fall victim to the search engine robots and the site will be automatically removed from the listings.
Respectable advertising agencies limit the number of adverts that you can display on any one page to help prevent you from falling into this pit of despair. If the advertiser does not limit what you do then you must as covering your pages with adverts not only risks the wrath of the search engines but it will drive away your visitors, they came to see unique content not loads of adverts.
There are other forms of revenue that you may wish to experiment with. This site has lots of information about nearly everywhere in the UK and that fits well with advertising hotel accommodation in those locations. We also display information about many thousands of events being held around the UK at any one time and that fits well with a ticket sales agency. We also advertise employment vacancies and there are many other advertising opportunities that we don't do as they do not fit well with our content.
Remember that in nearly every case you will only get paid if you generate more than the minimum amount of revenue each month as detailed in your agency agreement. If you go a number of months without generating any revenue then the agreement may be cancelled so do not jump into advertising until you can guarantee you will regularly exceed these limits, the agencies will be reluctant to give you a second chance.
Not a lot!, we have been around 10 years, have nearly a million pages and around 40,000 user session per day and we are still working and not lying on a beach somewhere. It is doubtful that you will generate as much traffic as us so don't get your hopes up of buying that luxury yacht. What income you do make will however go along way to covering some of the costs involved with running your website,
What's next?, well now that we have covered the basics you can get down to creating the unique content