What kind of website that might monetize would you recommend to someone who is a beginner at that? Or to just simplify the question: if I want to make money from a website, but I am a beginner with no too much experience in that, what type of website do you think I should start with? Affiliate marketing site, Adsense site, a blog? something completely different than that?
12 Popular Types of Websites You Can Create. The web is vast. ... eCommerce Website. Business Website. Entertainment Website. Portfolio Website. Media Website. Brochure Website. Nonprofit Website.
Given that you will be learning while you work hard to eventually produce results on such a project, you might as well put your efforts into a website that covers a topic of interest to you. What subjects are you passionate about? By answering that question, you will start to narrow down your focus as to what you should consider working on. Once you have settled on a subject/market to work on, your choices as to how to monetize will make more sense to think about.
I personally started making money online through my own blog. I also had not a lot of experience, but while you start gathering information to write your own articles, you learn a lot about the niche you are in. Or the best thing would be that you create a website/blog in a niche you are passionate about. That would make it much easier but is not necessary. I can only recommend starting a blog. It is really easy to start with a blog and WordPress makes it very easy to start your own website. Just put in some work and try to suck up as much information as you can and you are good to go! The best thing is learning by doing. Just do the first step and take action and the rest falls into place step by step.
While monetizing your website, it would be wise if you opt for multiple monetization options even if you are just starting. For instance, if your primary monetization method is affiliate marketing; you can also include banner ads to monetize your website. The main advantage of using multiple monetization techniques is that you will be able to understand the exact monetization technique which is yielding better results. Accordingly, you can choose the preferred monetizing networks.
Like @jrbiz said, start something which interests you, that way you will never run out of new content. When I started, my interest was coding and designing. So as I developed new templates, I gave them as free download from my website. That became the primary source of traffic on my website at that time, and I monetized the website with adsense. Traffic became quite high and daily income from adsense reached above $10 This was when google closed the adsense account saying that there were ads on empty pages. I tried CJ affiliate, but the affiliate products they had at that time did not interested my website visitors or may be visitors were only interested in free stuff, or may be I chose the wrong products to promote, whatever the reason, affiliate sales did not happened. CJ also shut down the account after 6 months. Some policy of theirs, if you do not have sales in 6 months, then they shut down your account. I was using their XML feed to populate products. Same year, I landed in some troubles, and decided its not worth keeping those websites up, since there was no source of income from them. Shut down the websites. I restarted 2 years later from scratch. Now I have decided I will not use a third party provider to monetize my websites. Its either going to be a product of my own, or else it will be a free website. I'd suggest the same to you. For now, you can put up an adsense etc unit to monetize, but in a longer time frame, come up with something more stable and independent. If promoting someone elses products, its better to go into a joint venture with someone you know on a personal level, rather than signing up with big affiliate networks. This will take slightly longer to setup, but is completely worth the trouble.
I do believe that it would be better for you to build a blog first. That's how I got started. I made a blog, got a ton of followers and then converted it into a full website. I went with affiliate marketing since it was easy to make money with it alongside adsense. then I went full ecommerce selling stuff..
With the various sizing options that Google AdSense provides and the variety of templates and themes that you can use with different blogging platforms, monetizing your site with Google AdSense is the easiest way to go for most beginners who want to make money with Google.