III. 5 Tips for Monetizing a Site
Monetizing a website is the key to it’s survival. Lets face it, if you cannot see that a website is making you money, there is no way you will continue to invest time and money into it over time. Slowly and surely, it will become old and irrelevant and die off like a memory of old time. My suggestion is that you study how to monetize your website so that you increase your probability of success. Also, understand that as with anything, you will have to invest a significant amount of time and money to generate a significant amount of money. Simply wishing for money to pour from your website and into your PayPal account is not going to get the job done. However, I am going to recommend four primary ways for you to make money from your website. I would suggest that you focus on one at a time. The key is to get one setup as a profit center and then to move on to the next one while still maintaining the first system.
Monetizing a Site Strategy #1: E-Commerce
The best way to make money with a website in my opinion is to sell a product or membership. Selling a product or a membership allows you to pay for advertising and scale out campaigns that generate a healthy rate of return on your investment. The beauty of a membership site is that you can generate what we call recurring revenue. Recurring revenue is revenue that repeats itself month over month. The benefit of recurring revenue is that over time, not only can you calculate your immediate return on investment for your internet campaigns but you can also calculate the average lifetime value of a customer. In doing so, you can scale out your advertising efforts even further, knowing what your average return is going to do. This allows you to outbid competitors for top search positions and generate even larger returns. Be careful though, when you increase your bids, you may be cash flow negative on the first bill and may not become cash flow positive until the second or third billing cycle.
Monetizing a Site Strategy #2: Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a great way to monetize a simple,content based website. The benefit of going this route is that the cost to developing the site is much cheaper. However, you typically do not have the benefits of the e-commerce or membership route and have a lot of out pointing links. However, there are many affiliates on the internet that generate millions of dollars a year promoting other people’s products. Think about it. How great is it that you can promote other people’s products, get a substantial portion of revenue (often 25-50%), and have no overhead or support costs associated with that (aside from your website).
Monetizing a Site Strategy #3: CPC Advertising
Placing content ads on your website can be a good way to make OK money. I never agree with any website business model that relies completely on content advertising as it takes a lot of content and a lot of views to generate even a mediocre amount of income. My suggestion however, is to place advertising on pages that you find do not convert for other monetization strategies.
Monetizing a Site Strategy #4: Lead Generation
One of the great things about an e-commerce or membership site are that people are often times willing to fill out information to solve their problems or needs. There is an active lead generation market that allows you to capitalize on this. When people fill out this information, you can present them with suggestions (such as, would you like to have a website design company contact you for a free consultation). If you were to click on such an offer combined with your information, that information could then be sold to a trusted partner. These leads can often times be worth up to $20 each.
