How to Create a Successful Web Site For Almost Nothing, Pt. 4
Thanks to competition among Web-hosting providers, and the falling costs of Web storage, it’s never been easier to get a Web site up and running — from buying the domain name to building a site to setting up a payment system to tracking traffic.
This week in a 5-part series, we’ll lay out all the steps you need to take to build your site, and present some expert opinion about getting it noticed and keeping track of customers — all with no technical background required. We’ve bought the web address, found a host and built the web site. Today we monetize the web site.
Probably the easiest way to let customers pay you online is to let somebody else handle the technical work. One popular option is PayPal, from eBay Inc. The service lets people pay you by clicking a button on your Web site, which takes them to a PayPal page where they can enter payment information. You don’t have to do any work to process the transaction.
The basic service is free, but you have to pay a fee each time someone pays you: 30 cents, plus 1.9% to 2.9% of the transaction. This basic service isn’t fancy — if you want to build a full-blown retail site, you’ll probably want to buy special e-commerce software — but to offer a basic payment option on your site, it’s enough.
To set up an account, click on the “Business” tab at PayPal.com and follow the instructions. Once you’ve done this, click on the “Merchant Services” tab. Then, choose “Website Payments Standard,” from the left-hand column.
You’ll see three orange buttons you can place on your site: “Buy Now,” “Add to Cart” and “Donate.” If your customers are likely to purchase one item at a time — say, a yoga lesson or a day-care session — click on the link under the “Buy Now” button, which will send them directly to a page where they can pay for the item. If your customers might want to browse around your site for different types of items before paying, choose the “Add to Cart” button, which lets buyers fill a shopping cart with several items before checking out. The “Donate” option is mostly for people who aren’t selling anything, like bloggers soliciting donations.
You can then follow the instructions to create a button for each item you want to sell. PayPal will give you some HTML that you can paste into your Web site to add the buttons. You should put these buttons on your “Store” page, next to a picture and description of each item.
It’s easy to add advertisements to your Web site to make extra cash. Every time someone clicks on an ad on your page, you get paid a small amount, which varies depending on the particulars of the ad.
One of the most popular services is Google Inc.’s AdSense. Advertisers pay Google to place ads on Web sites throughout the Internet; site owners, meanwhile, can sign up to host those ads on their pages.
You’ve probably seen the ads, which often appear as blocks of text along the right-hand column of a Web site. Google scans the content of participating sites to decide which ads would work best on the pages. For instance, an ad for used cars might appear on a site with car reviews.
Photo by lusi/CraigPJ.
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