Profiting From a Website: Where to Begin?

So your website has started to build up some significant traffic, every post gets a good number of comments and your feed subscriber count is going up and up every day? Good. It sounds like you are ready to start making some money from those visitors.

A lot of people worry too much about profiting from a blog or a website. It is usually a bad idea to start up a blog or website with the sole intention of making money from it. There seems to be a perception that making money online is easy. Unfortunately this is not true. it is important to be passionate about the subject and have something new and different to say.

Some may disagree, but it is my personal opinion that it is pointless trying to make money from a website unless you have significant traffic. Here I will outline the most popular money making programs that people use, as well as the pros and cons of each.

Google Adsense

This is listed first as it is the easiest to implement and is all over the Internet. This service from Google scans your page for keywords and displays ads that are relevant to these keywords. The service is contextual, meaning that different ads show up on different pages and even refreshing a page will often bring up a different set of ads. When Google identifies a set of relevant ads, the ones that pay the most for a click are put at the top of each ad block.

Adsense works best where you have very specialised content. They also work best on less tech-savvy audiences as they tend to not realise they are ads. Sites about celebrities, cooking, health and beauty and electronics are good topics.

One thing that is very important with Adsense is experimentation. You should play around with the number of ad blocks you use and their positions. What works well on one site will not work well on another, so experimentation is essential. Google tells stories of people literally doubling their revenue overnight by moving an ad block to the top of a page.

Resources

• Google Adsense

Affiliate Programs

This is definitely the one with the biggest potential to make money. You refer a customer to a company and when they make a sale, you are paid a commission. Affiliate programs are superb when they are presented as recommendations or product reviews, so they are great for consumer electronics, games, web hosting and many other topics. There are affiliate programs out there for practically every type of consumer product.

The most important thing about being an affiliate is to research the programs that you join. Make sure that the services you promote are relevant to your target audience and website topic.

Resources

• Commission Junction
• Trade Doubler
• Click Bank - specialists in digital products

Text Links

Text links are an increasingly popular way for publishers to make money from their websites. It involves linking back to a website with anchor text defined by the advertiser. This is mainly used for boosting PageRank but if you have a decent amount of traffic and the link is in the right place, you can attract visitors too.

Bear in mind that selling a text link that passes PageRank (ie. does not use “nofollow”) is against Google’s guidelines and you may find your site being penalised in the search rankings. Many people disagree with this stance and hiding paid links from search engines has almost become an industry in itself.

Some people sell text links themselves but there are a few brokerage services that will locate advertisers for you. Most of them take about a 50% cut. Text links tend to be priced per month and you have to be specific about where you are going to place the link. Some advertisers will pay for a permanent link, but having a monthly agreement gives you the flexability to remove the links if you aren’t happy with them.

Resources

• Text Link Ads

Paid Blogging

Paid blogging involves posting an article about a particular product or company. Essentially you are advertising them through your blog or website.

The main advantage of this is that you pick and choose which products to review. A lot of them also pay quite well and it doesn’t seem like “advertising” to your visitors.

The negative aspect is that you essentially have to sell your soul to the company you are advertising. The reviews must be positive or else they won’t be accepted by the company when they come to review it. Unless the review is of a product or company that is very specific and useful to your visitors, they are being short changed too. They come to your website to read your quality content, not to have an advertising post shoved down their throat. I also feel that advertisers are getting a good deal out of this too. A lot of the opportunities require a certain PageRank or Alexa ranking. They are essentially getting a permanent link from your website and they get to choose the anchor text. This helps them out in the search engines.

For example, on PayPerPost there is currently an opportunity that pays $125. Only blogs with a PageRank of 7 or above are eligible to apply. Considering the cheapest ad on Text Link Ads for a Page Rank 7 site is $140 for a month, the advertiser is getting a very good deal for their $125 for a paid review.

It is also essential that you add a disclaimer notifying people that a review is a paid review.

Resources

• Pay Per Post

Banner Ads

The traditional banner advertisement has been around for decades. Users are used to seeing 468×60 pixel ads everywhere on the Internet. With the recent blogging revolution, ads are still commonplace, but they have certainly come of age.

What many prefer now is the 125×125 pixel “button” ad. They can be easily accommodated down the side of a page rather than at the top as required by a traditional banner. It is also very easy to add multiple ads on a single page without interrupting the flow or layout of the page.

In the earlier days of the Internet, banner ads were often sold by a fixed number of impressions. It is now more common to see them priced per click, or, more commonly, a fixed price for a fixed period of time, regardless of the number of impressions or clicks the ad receives.

Traditionally, banner ads sales were sold directly by the website but, as with text link ads, using a broker is now quite common. You can list your site and the number of available ad slots on a marketplace for thousands of advertisers to browse. One such broker is buysellads.com. They take a quite reasonable 25% commission. Again, as with text links, prices are set per month so you can remove an advertiser if you are not happy with them.

If you are planning on selling your own ads, you should set up a dedicated ad sales page. Let the advertisers know what size ads you support and where they can be placed. Mention page views if you like but it is not necessary to quote prices. You should be honest about your statistics and be prepared to provide some proof to potential advertisers.

Resources

• BuySellAds

Summary

These are the main ways to convert your visitors into money. My advice is that making money should never be your sole reason for maintaining a website or blog. In addition, never expect to make any significant money unless you have significant traffic.

One thing I really hate to see is a relatively new blog with some good content that is totally overcrowded by Adsense adblocks. In my opinion, half and hour spent tweaking your ad blocks is better spent writing a quality article. Then, once you have built your traffic and can sustain the numbers, should you start with the advertising.

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