There are a number of people out there making a good living from their websites. Here are two of them.

http://www.stevepavlina.com
http://www.problogger.net

Steve Pavlina is American and has a personal development site, thousands of people read his articles every day. The other link is a guy name Darren Rowse, Darren is Australian and makes a good living out of blogging about how to make money about blogging. I have just been reading his site, and he has gone through a great deal to get to this point, there is no quick and easy way it appears.

For my own story now, I started like this.. first of all I came up with the idea for the kind of website where instead of Employers posting their jobs, people looking for work could advertise themselves. This ended up with the birth of the http://www.jobhunters.co.nz website.

Initially I thought that the best way to earn money from this would be to eventually charge employers to be able to contact the applicants. (and this may still happen in the future). I did however place some Google ads on the site, in the hope of earning enough to help pay for the hosting costs.

The surprising thing was that due to the initial popularity of the jobhunters website, the Google ads not only paid for this but also enabled the setup of the http://www.aussiejobhunters.com website and more recently the http://www.eurojobhunters.co.uk website, (this happened along with assistance from my web business partner Mark from Perth, Australia.)

Once those sites were set up I decided to start up the jobhunters blog, this was in an effort to add some value to the jobhunters websites in terms of relevant articles for employment throughout Australia and NZ. This Blog initially doubled the daily visits to the NZ website in about a month. It has since levelled out although continues to help with both visits and search engine recognition of the sites.

Other methods used for advertising the jobhunters websites included advertising them for sale on trademe, classified adverts on smilecity and placing links to the site wherever I could.

There is certainly money to be made from websites, and hopefully eventually this blog which is really about the million dollar experiment in NZ will also start to pay for itself. The key seems to be don't give up, as a lot of people start out trying to do this, but don't stay the distance which could be a couple of years or more.

If you are looking to do something similar yourself my advice is...

Create your website.
Find well priced hosting
Join Google AdSense
Launch your website
Promote, promote and promote.

It will take a lot of time, but hopefully will pay off long term if and only if you are prepared to stick at it, take any knocks on the chin and understand that this is no get rich quick scheme.

Overtime however an income can be earned that can be turned into a passive income eventually.