adminMore and more people are taking to starting an online business and looking at ways to work from home.
When you start an online business and you create your website or blog you are faced with the big question of how do you monetize it in a way that actually makes consistent money? There is a definite “yes” to you earning a good income from your new website, but it does take time, patience and hard work. If you plough through that initial start-up stage, focus on building up a list of your audience, and you regularly publish new content onto your website you stand a pretty good chance of success.
In this article we have put together a few website monetization tips and best practices to help you as you first start up in your online business.
When it comes to monetizing, the good news is that you have many options from which to choose from.
There are many different affiliate and ad networks that you can choose to monetize from, as well as other methods such as creating your own products and services selling these on your website, private forums and membership sites, podcast monetization and others.
While monetization methods are plentiful, every individual case scenario is unique, it is therefore important to test and measure each method in order to yield the highest conversion rates, and to also diversify your earning streams – never put all your eggs into one basket!
Website Monetization Tips and Best Practices
Not all monetization venues will work well with all sites, it all depends on the market and niche you are operating in. It is crucial to tweak, to test and measure conversion rates with different ad styles, ad placements and landing page designs in order to find those that make you the most money without having negative effects on your website.
One of the biggest mistakes that online publishers make is to promote irrelevant products and offers on their site. Always make sure that anything you promote is directly related to your site’s niche otherwise the conversions will be low or nonexistent.
Some people advocate waiting to monetize a site until it has traffic or subscribers in the case of blogs. However this can be a mistake because it prolongs the testing process, and also because it’s best to let returning visitors get used to what’s on your site, instead of them suddenly popping up where they will stick out like a sore thumb.
You could place affiliate banners on your site for related products, or what actually works better most of the time, since many web visitors have become immune to banners, what is more effective these days is to do product reviews and embed your product or affiliate links within the content on your website.
This is also a good strategy because it allows for the targeting of your chosen keywords, such as the actual product names. Specific keywords are usually much less competitive to target for organic rankings and can attract very targeted traffic that yields higher conversion rates.
Some of the best conversions for affiliate products and your own products come from detailed reviews that include the how, when, why and what of the product. Make sure the reviews are well written. Provide the reader with a lot of information and also clearly define how it solves their particular problem. This method converts best because it makes the offer irresistible, and once it is so they will buy, we all do.
Trust is a huge factor in affiliate conversions when promoting affiliate products and services on a traditional blog. By traditional I mean a site that is created with blogging in mind, where you the blogger want to connect to an audience with regularly published posts and are actively seeking subscribers, versus a money site that simply uses WordPress as a Content Management System, where the target is the passing search engine surfer that will click on a link or an ad and will likely not return to your site.
Trust is very important on blogging sites because, it is that trust and relationship that often earns you more money than anything else. So, choose your promotions carefully, never recommend products that you are not sure about, or those that you know are crappy just to get a commission. This same trust approach holds true when building a list in email marketing as well.
Videos see 80% better conversions than text on sales pages, so consider making video reviews for products you are promoting. And, posting these on YouTube, and other top video submission sites, gives you viable sources of new traffic to your sites and to affiliate offers that can increase sales exponentially.
Don’t over monetize. Often you will see sites that are so convoluted with ads, banners, contextual links and the like that you cannot decipher the content from the ads. Not only is this a big issue but, it will turn off visitors to your site and may not really yield the results that you’re looking for.
Make sure the call to action is clearly defined on your landing pages. The call to action is simply what you want the audience to do, in the case of monetization it could be to click the link to go to the merchant’s site for affiliate offers, or to click on your product offer. The call to action should stand out, for example, Adsense ads and affiliate links should be of a color that contrasts with the site’s font color.
And last, but never least is the simple fact that to make any kind of real money you need traffic. Conversion rates are typically considered excellent at 3- 5%, so do the math, and focus on driving the most traffic possible.
The Bottom line, as you can see there are many ways that you can monetize your website, and with some careful consideration and testing following the website monetizations tips we have talked about in this article, you can have a successful and profitable site that will earn you passive income for long years to come!
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