Reviews - Making Money Online

We've only just started using Template Monster, but thought it may be beneficial to some readers to provide a review of their service so far.

What is Template Monster?
Template Monster provides professionally designed websites for almost any category/genre you can think of. The business has many designers working for them and submitting new templates daily to expand the catalogue, which at present contains nearly 6000 templates to choose from.

Types of Template
Templates include regular HTML Website Templates, Flash Templates, Flash Intro Templates, SWiSH Templates, Dynamic Flash, Photo Galleries, E-commerce Templates (osCommerce, ZenCart, CRE Loaded), CMS & Blog Templates (PHP-Nuke, PhpBB, WordPress, Joomla!, Mambo), and many Corporate Design templates (Logos, Corporate Identity, Logosets, Icon Sets).

Each of these types of templates has many categories to search within, and so finding a template for whatever look you want for your website should be no trouble at all, whether you are building a sports website, or a dating website.

The Website
The main Template Monster is fairly easy to navigate with a simple search option to use, or seperate website sections if you prefer to browse. The templates themselves are clearly layed out with a small preview image that when clicked on will lead you to a preview page showing the website in full, and a list of what is included with the template (images, flash version, html version, etc.) and of course an option to buy the template.

Pricing
From what we have found, Template Monster offers templates at very reasonble prices for the level of professional design you get. Basic website templates range from £30-£70, and e-commerce templates range from £70-£100. These are non-exclusive prices though, so other people will be able to purchase the same template for their website too. Each template also has a 'Unique Price' (usually 8-10 times the regular price) whereby you will be the last person to be able to buy that template (someone else may have already purchased this template before however).

What can I do with the Templates?
According to the terms of use, you can modify the templates however you like, and can use them once for a single website, but you can't redistribute or resell templates no matter whether you paid the regular (non-unique), or UNIQUE price.

Who can use Template Monster?
Any individual can purchase templates for their own use, and according to the terms of use, web developers are allowed to use the website templates for client websites too - this saves times for the developers, and their clients get a very professionally designed website.

Support
Template Monster provides many different types of support including live chat, online help guides, a ticket support system, and phone support (should you prefer the traditional method!).

Overall
We are very impressed with Template Monster overall, and would be happy to recommend the website/service to anyone building a website, or web designers who need a quick template for a client.

Affiliate Program
Template Monster runs an affiliate program too, where it is possible to earn commission (up to 20%) for selling templates to others. The affiliate program is free to join and takes just a few minutes to create an account. Once you have sold a certain number of templates (5 at the time of writing), it is also possible to reduce prices, thereby offering discounts to your customers, although the larger the discount, the lower your commission.

The affiliate program is very good in our opinion, not only due to the range of templates you can offer, but due to the excellent tools Template Monster provides its affiliates, and the ease with which affiliates can integrate the templates into their own websites. Affiliates can even recruit sub-affilates and earn commission on templates that they sell too.

Affiliates can setup white-label shops using their own logos, or incorporate only certian features such as a template search box, or template from one category.

See our template shop

Affiliate Program Overall
Overall the affiliate program makes an excellent addition to any web design, or online business website (that's why we added it just recently!), and we would at least recommend website owners having a look at it as an addition to services they already offer.

Join Template Monster Affiliate Program

Google's Adsense program is a very simple method of monetising websites. The principle is that website owners who publish content can provide adverts targeted towards their content, and each time a visitor clicks on one of these adverts, the website owner gets a commission paid to them.

We've used Adsense on a number of websites (including this one), and have found it extremely easy to include targeted adverts with very little effort. Basically, as long as the content has been good enough, Google's contextual ad filter do the rest. So, for example, as we are talking about the Adsense program in this article, the adverts displayed by Adsense on this page should be about Adsense. If we were to talk about web hosting, the ads would be about web hosting, and so forth.

The value of a click can vary massively from just a few cents (all clicks are measured in US Dollars) up to tens of Dollars, and will depend really upon what your content is about. Pharmaceuticals tend to pay highly for example, whereas small niche topics will tend to pay much lower amounts (there are always exceptions however).

The beauty of Adsense is that it automatically provides relative, targeted ads which are even localized. So wherever your website visitors are from, the ads will be targeted towards those visitors. This in turn means more clicks on ads, and so more money for the website owner, you.

Another brilliant aspect of Adsense is that no matter what your website's traffic levels, as long as you can provide some content for the internet (that doesn't infringe on any of the program's terms and conditions), you will more than likely be accepted into the Adsense program. Many other advertising programs require minimum traffic levels before being accepted, and finding individual advertisers can be extremely difficult if your traffic levels are low.

Adsense allows a large amount of tracking to be setup so that you can see which ads are being clicked on, and by using the statistics from this tracking, website owners can quite easily try out different ad positioning, and thereby optimize ad placement.

Setting up an Adsense account is a very simple process if you already have a website up and running, and takes just a couple of days whilst your website is assessed for its content (just to check it doesn't infringe on Google's Terms and Conditions).

Once you've been accepted into the program, you can go ahead and add some ads to your website. There are many varieties available so you should be able to integrate the adverts in some way. Just make sure you read the Terms and Conditions well, and DON'T break them for any reason whatsoever!

As well as the many different sizes and colour variations available for the adverts, Adsense provides different types of adverts including referrals (getting others to sign up for Adsense), and more recently, the mobile and video adverts.

Adsense provides much written support to help with advert integration into your website, and even provide features such as 'heat maps' to show which areas of websites or blogs tend to work better for adverts.

All in, we have always been very impressed with Adsense, mainly due to its simplicity and easy of use, and although it's not going to make you rich beyond your wildest dreams, there are many success stories out there where people have made money from Adsense (you can read about some on the Adsense website).

We would recommend the Adsense program to any content publishing website owner looking to supplement their income a little or maybe just to pay for hosting costs.

As a very big word of warning however - NEVER CLICK ON YOUR OWN ADS, as this will result in an immediate ban from the Adsense program.