How to Monetize a Website

As an internet marketer, your main goal is to make money online.

For new internet marketers, deciding just how you are going to make money online can be a tough question to tackle.

There are simply so many excellent options for monetizing a website.

In this article we will take a look at some of the more viable methods for turning a website into a money making business.

PPC Advertising

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a term used to describe the process of selling advertising space on a website, with advertisers paying for every click on the advertising unit.

This is possibly the easiest way to get set up and making money online quickly. There are a number of excellent PPC networks, which deliver an entire framework for serving and tracking PPC clicks and charges.

Click on the links below to see the best of these PPC networks:

Google AdWords

Microsoft AdCenter

Chikita

adBrite

http://www.adbrite.com/

Each of this is an established PPC network, with a whole range of tools to help both publishers and advertisers gain the most benefit from PPC advertising.

PPC is quick to set up, and can begin earning revenue almost at once.

Affiliate Sales

Becoming an affiliate for other peoples products and services, and receiving a percentage of each sale as a commission, has long been one of the top money making schemes favored by internet marketers.

Affiliates sales schemes can be found to cover a massive range of products, from hotels and other travel products, to the entire Amazon product range.

However, one of the best ways to start out as an affiliate marketer is to begin promotingClickbank products.

Clickbank does a great job of helping new internet marketers learn how affiliate sales work. Clickbank also links affiliate marketers with product vendors who work within the same niche.

It also provides excellent analytics and a fully detailed report on sales, just like this:

Regardless of the type of website you operate, you should be able to find some kind of affiliate scheme which will fit for you.

Advertising Sales

This is as old school as it gets, and dates back to the days of selling advertising space in newspapers and magazines.

With this monetization method you will be actively finding advertisers who wish to rent space on your website to place their advertisements. This will usually be in the form of a graphical banner.

These advertising banners will almost always come in one of a standard set of shapes and sizes; this is pretty much the definitive list of these:

So website owners need to consider carefully where they are going to place advertising content.

Most advertisers will want a prime position, definitely above the fold (the top part of the website visible without scrolling down), and usually in a dominant position in the header, or navigation on the sides of the page.

Selling banner space can be very lucrative for a high traffic website, and as this is regular income, not based on clicks or other visitor actions, it is easy to estimate income budgets.

List Building

Collecting the contact details, specifically the email addresses of visitors, is a fantastic way to build long-term revenue.

There are dozens of uses for a healthy mailing list, including selling products, and also selling advertising space within your newsletter/mailshot.

In fact, most internet marketers agree that having a large mailing list is the best way to make high volumes of cash in the long run.

Every website should have a vehicle in place for collecting at least the name and email address of visitors. Most website owners will use an autoresponder service to manage their mailing list, and the top autoresponder services are:

Aweber

GetResponse

iContact

Paid Membership

If you are lucky enough (or have worked hard enough) to build a recognized authority site, with great traffic, you may be in a position to begin charging a membership fee to access your premium content.

This technique works well for sites which provide tips and guides which offer real, tangible benefits to readers, and thus making them worth paying for.

Membership sites also need to be updated regularly, to ensure that members maintain their subscription.

Membership sites are not easy to set up and make profitable, but if you can manage it, this is one of the best ways of monetizing a website, although it only suits a very narrow range of sites.

In Conclusion

Most internet marketers will combine two or more of the methods outlined above to monetize a website.

This is to ensure that should one method begin to lose profitability for some reason, they still maintain some revenue from other sources whilst they address the problem.

Join Affiliatex PRO and discover how easy it is to start profiting online today.

What is the PPC Gap Tool?

Before we get into this subject fully, it is probably best to explain that this article presumes two things.

Firstly it presumes that the reader is familiar with what PPC is, how it works, and what the pros and cons are. Secondly it presumes that the reader will go on to read the full details of the PPC Gap Tool here.

This article is intended to be a top level primer on the concept of a PPC Gap and how a PPC Gap Tool can be used to identify hot keywords to exploit using the tool.

What is a PPC Gap?

A PPC Gap occurs when a specific keyword or key phrase is heavily populated on one PPC platform, and under populated on another.

A PPC Gap can also occur when a keyword or key phrase is heavily populated in one location (localized search) on a specific PPC platform, and not on another.

A PPC Gap can also occur as a combination of both of these situations.

Let us demonstrate a hypothetical example. The key phrase “make money online” may have 100 advertisers making use of this key phrase using Google AdWords, and only 10 advertisers making use of this key phrase using Microsoft AdCenter.

Here we would have found a considerable PPC Gap. Because this is a popular key phrase on Google AdWords, we can also be fairly sure it will also be a profitable key phrase using Microsoft AdCenter. Of course, this is a very hypothetical example; real figures would be far different.

Finding a PPC Gap

So, now that we know what a PPC Gap is in broad terms, let’s define the process we would use to locate one.

Well, we would begin by using standard keyword research techniques, to build a list of possible keywords. There are some great free resources for helping with this, including the Google Keyword Tool which can be found by clicking here.

We will assume that you are familiar with keyword research and that you have been able to put together at least a small list of possible keywords at this stage.

For example, let us use the key phrase “make money online” again and run it through the Google Keywords Tool, to get the following results:

So we can see that the competition (number of advertisers targeting this keyword) is high.

In fact, something this screenshot cannot show, is that by hovering over the word “high” a popup would tell us that the competition weighting for this keyword is 0.67.

We could then use the same keyword as a seed for generating a new Microsoft AdCenter campaign to find out the competition using the Bing/Yahoo PPC network.

If it is either considerably lower, or considerably higher than the competition for the same keyword using Google AdWords, we have found a PPC Gap.

However, there are two distinct disadvantages to this basic way of finding a PPC Gap:

a) it is slow, we would need to check each of our potential keywords, across possibly multiple locations, on two or more PPC platforms and

b) it can be difficult to judge the differences in competition across PPC networks, as each calculates and displays competition a little differently.

What we need is some kind of automated way to compare competition for a range of keywords, across multiple PPC platforms. Well the good news is that help is on hand, we can use a PPC Gap Tool.

Using a PPC Gap Tool

A PPC Gap Tool is a specialist software application (usually run as a web page) that can locate PPC Gaps quickly and easily. One such tool can be found on the AffiliateX website here.

How this tool works, is that you can feed in a number of keywords or key phrases, and the PPC Gap Tool will analyze each, comparing traffic across multiple PPC platforms, and across multiple locations within these PPC platforms, and return a comparison table, something like this:

In this example, we can see that a PPC Gap exists for both of the displayed key phrases, with a much lower number of advertisers using the Bing search engine.

Therefore, it would almost definitely be profitable to target these key phrases using the Microsoft AdCenter PPC platform.

In Conclusion

Locating PPC Gap for a high profit keyword or key phrase can give an internet marketer an incredible advantage, but locating them can be a tiresome, if not impossible task without using a PPC Gap Tool.

Join AffiliateX today to get ahead of the competition with your own PPC Gap tool.

What is Article Marketing?

Internet marketers have traditionally been very good at finding alternative ways to sell products. One of the simplest and most effective methods developed by internet marketers is that of article marketing.

Article marketing in its simplest form revolves around publishing quality articles to high traffic article directories, which link to product pages on the internet marketer’s website.

Article marketing is almost entirely free to begin implementing, and still remains an effective way of driving potential customers to a sales site to this day.

In this short article we will take a look at the basics of article marketing.

Articles Drive Traffic

The basic concept behind article marketing is that by publishing an article on a high traffic site, such as an article directory, it will receive more page views than had it been published on the internet marketers own site.

Each article published will contain one or more links to the article marketers own product pages.

The idea is, that any visitor reading the article, can be persuaded to click one of these embedded link, and be take straight to a sales page.

Articles will be written around one or more keywords or key phrases that relate to the product or service which the internet marketer is hoping to sell.

This combination of keyword focused content, published on high ranking sites, ensures that the article gets viewed, and by plenty of visitors.

This might sound like an odd idea; surely it is better to publish content that will directly attract visitors to a sales site?

Well, if all were equal when it comes to search rankings, then this would be true. However, an article will receive far more traffic if published on a well ranked site, than it would on an unranked one.

So we work on the premise that if 100 visitors view the article, a percentage will click through to the sales site from one of the embedded links.

Take a look at the screenshot below showing article views and clicks.

We see almost 20,000 views with 2,500 clicks, and that 13.64% of all readers did in fact click an embedded link. It would be hard to match this performance with self-hosted articles.

The real trick is publishing articles on only the most high traffic article directories. Although these change from time to time, there are a handful of article sites that have always been the top performers, and this list would include:

EzineArticles

GOArticles

iSnare

Amazines:

There are hundreds of more article directories available, but these four have always been rated in any top 10 list of article sites for the last several years, and make a good starting point for internet marketers who are new to article marketing.

Articles Can Convert

Although the primary goal of article marketing is to drive targeted traffic to a site which sells a product or service, the usefulness of the published article does not stop there.

A well written article can act as a pre-sell, priming the potential customer, to make them more likely to make a purchase.

This form of pre-sell requires an amount of direct sales copywriting skill, as we will want to convince the reader that they want to buy the product before they are even taken to the sales page.

A good indication of how well an article is written is the value given to it by readers. Most article directories allow readers to rate articles, the higher the rating, the more relevant and factually correct the article is, and the more likely it is to act as a good pre-sell.

Check out the screenshot below which shows this kind of article rating in effect.

Quality versus Quantity

This has been one of the most common debates in article marketing circles. Do you publish a low number of extremely high quality articles, or do you publish a high number of less well written articles?

Most successful article marketers will opt for the first option, as a well written article can also act as a pre-sell, as explained above.

Currently, most of the good article directories will check each submitted article before publishing it, and low quality articles will often be rejected.

Outsourcing Articles

Many people struggle to write a good article, and see this as a barrier to leveraging value from the power of article marketing.

Whilst this may be true for people with little or no marketing budget, it is not so for those who are willing to invest a little working capital into hiring a good article writer.

Outsourcing article writing can be a great way to acquire top quality articles, whilst freeing up your valuable time to concentrate on other aspects of your internet marketing business.

In Conclusion

Article marketing has been an incredibly powerful tool for internet marketers to exploit for several years.

Although article marketing is not as effective as it once was, it can still provide heaps of tightly targeted traffic, and thus sales, if done right.

Click here to learn how easy it is to get started with your own articles.