Step 4 – Monetizing Your Site

Monetizing a website can be tricky. You might monetize it with affiliate products and then hear somebody making thousands with Adsense. Or you will ask 5 people what to do and get 5 different answers!

I am not going to tell you what monetization method to use. I don’t know what your site is about, how big it is, your promotional avenues, etc. What I am going to do is give you an overview of the main monetization methods. Then it is up to you!

I actually want to clarify something. There is no right or wrong method. Choose one of the below methods and test your performance. Once you have sufficient data to draw conclusions, change your monetization method and test again. Eventually you will be able to identify the most profitable monetization method for your site.

Here are the main monetization methods from least to most effort:

Google Adsense

Google Adsense is very easy to implement. You just sign up, choose your ad formats and paste in the html code on your page. Google picks the ads to show based on what your web page is about. Nothing could be simpler, right?

Wrong. In order to make a decent amount of money right from the start with Adsense you have to be very lucky or very good. You need to choose a niche where advertisers pay a decent amount of money per click. For example, I only create Adsense sites where advertisers pay at least $2 per click on average. This means I will get around 80 cents per click.

To get the most out of Adsense you will have to test everything. Your site layout, your ad block sizes, your ad colors, everything. Your goal is to increase your CTR (click through rate) to as high as possible.

Think about it. Let’s say you get 100 people per day to your site and get 80 cents per click. If you have a 5% CTR you get only 5 clicks per day = $4 per day or $1,460 per year. If you increase your CTR to say 15% (not too difficult) you can earn $12 per day or $4,380 per year!

Affiliate Products

Affiliate marketing at its core is a simple concept. You create a website and advertise other people’s products on it. When somebody buys one of these products from your website you get paid a commission by the seller.

However, there are dozens of ways of doing this. The following is a brief overview of the main affiliate marketing choices you have to make. I will explore various cool ways of selling affiliate products in future case studies and articles.

Information products are very popular affiliate products because you can get such a large commission per sale. Clickbank has the largest collection of information products online where you can pick and choose what you want to market. They also show you what you will earn per sale, very handy!

For certain sites marketing physical products will be the more logical choice. There are a lot of different affiliate networks dealing with physical products, but the more popular ones are Amazon, Commission Junction and Shareasale. The biggest downside of selling physical products is that your commission rate will be a lot lower than with information products.

Another site that is worth a mention is Ebay. You can show Ebay auctions on your site and since Ebay is such a well known brand people will be much happier buying something on Ebay. Your commission rate will be very small, maybe a dollar or two per sale, but what you are really looking for is somebody registering with Ebay before they buy something. You can get up to $25 per registration!

Let’s look at an example:You have  a site about dogs. If you want to list a dog training guide you should go for an information product from Clickbank rather than a physical book from Amazon. The difference? About £30 per sale! You can also list other physical dog products, like collars, food bowls, etc from Amazon or Commission Junction. So you can see that you don’t just have to market one type of product. Mix and match. And test!

Public Label Rights Products

A very good, but a bit more advanced, way of making money is to sell PLR products. Below is an explanation of how to incorporate this into your site.

1. You need to find a PLR product in your niche. Google is your best friend here Once you find the right product you buy the PLR. Make sure that the product includes a sales letter, graphics, thank you page and maybe an autoresponder series. It means less work for you!

2. With PLR you can change anything you want, so I would suggest creating new graphics, personalising the sales letter, personalising the product and putting your name on the product as the author.

3. Set up the sales letter, payment links (I suggest using Paypal), thank you pages and everything else you need.

4. Set up two autoresponders, one for people who bought your product and one for people who visited your sales page but did not buy. As any internet marketer will tell you, the money is in the list. You can market to these people going forward and if you treated them right (which means not bombarding them with sales pitches in every email!) they will buy from you again and again.

5. Put a nice, large ad on the rest of your site (your article pages) advertising your new PLR product. Make sure to include a graphic of the report or e-book as people will respond better if they can “see” the product.

Your Own Product

This is very similar to the PLR section, but you create the product from scratch. The advantage of creating your own product to using a PLR product is that it will be totally unique. Even if you rewrite a large part of a PLR product, it will still be similar to the PLR product being sold by other people.

 

Hopefully this section gave you some ideas on how to monetise your site. I had a bunch of cool monetization ideas that I cannot wait to share with you, so be sure to check back often! The next step in our income stream creation process is getting traffic to our site.