It is the aim of every Webmaster and website publisher that the costs of creating a website be recouped from the website itself. In other words, the website should be able to pay for itself and ultimately generate a profit. While many websites are created simply to provide information to users, many more are conceived with an economic goal in mind. But how do you design a website that converts into sales and turns a profit at the end of the day?
Website monetization, defined as converting your website traffic into revenue, can take many forms:
Contextual Ad Programs
Contextual ad programs, such as Google AdSense, show contextually relevant ads on your website and then split the revenue with you derived from those ads. You simply place some code on your site and the ad program (Google AdSense) does the rest. Google analyzes your page and places relevant text or image ads on your page. So if you web page is about baking, then the ads shown would be about baking. When a visitor to your site clicks on one of these ads, you make money.
Affiliate Programs
Another way to monetize your website is through affiliate programs. Affiliate programs allow you to earn a commission for referring someone to another site who makes a purchase. Affiliate programs are a win win proposition for businesses and affiliates. Business get promotion and sales at no cost to them and affiliates get the opportunity to earn money without the expense of selling products themselves.
Amazon.com was one of the earliest sites to offer an affiliate program and their program remains very popular today. Becoming an affiliate can be extremely lucrative if you know what you are doing.
Direct Ad Sales
For almost as long as there have been websites, there have been ads displayed on those sites. If you’ve got your own website, you can sell your own advertisements and keep 100% of the profit. There are many forms of advertising you can sell on your site. These include, banner ads in various sizes, text links, and paid reviews. Include information on your site about the benefits and costs of advertising on your site as well as your contact information. You can also choose to outsource your advertising to sites such as textlinkads.com. These sites will assess your site’s value and help you set a reasonable price for your ads. They handle all of the hassle of communicating with the advertiser and collecting the money but they also take a cut of your earnings.
Sell Your Site
Another way to monetize your site is by selling it. Once your site is earning money, it becomes an asset and has real value. A typical valuation method for setting a website’s price is twelve times a site’s monthly profit. So for example, if your site was generating $100 a month in profit, you might expect to sell the site for $1,200. You could of course get more than this amount if you found the right buyer.
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May 11th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Nice article, and really nice WordPress Theme
May 12th, 2008 at 10:44 am
Thanks Claudio. I am glad you like the article and theme. I hope you will come back and read/comment again soon.
May 30th, 2008 at 6:03 am
Great post! Always nice to read this kind of quality information, without the BS and hype
Thanks for sharing, Robert
June 9th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Some good tips their to monetize a website. Heres another for our many webmasters, how about submitting your site to web directories to get more hits and search engine visits.
I own a gaming-related website directory at http://www.GamersCommunity.net so if you have a video game site you can submit your site for free!
June 13th, 2008 at 2:24 am
Nice article, but it doesn’t realy goes deep into the subject
July 18th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
good article. Thanks
July 28th, 2008 at 5:33 am
Nice info..
August 4th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
I have always held the belief that monetizing low traffic websites is completely pointless.
When you are just starting out, promotion and content should be your sole focus. In fact, until you have a decent number of visitors, don’t put any ads on your blog at all.
August 27th, 2008 at 12:30 am
hi, very good article and tips i like your work with this niche thanx
September 9th, 2008 at 3:18 am
Thanks for listing various monetization techniques.
September 9th, 2008 at 11:21 am
I think a well balance of affiliate sales and ads is a must to get more profit out of a website. You mentioned it right. Thanks
September 16th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Nice thread.
Hope I don’t piss blogger (If yes, just remove my link) here if I post my blogpost about monetizing expired domains:
http://www.webmasterinter.net/2008/09/expired-domains-with-pagerank-and-backlinks-selling
September 23rd, 2008 at 7:42 am
What about buying expired domains at aftermarket and selling PR backlinks to people who are too new to understand PR means nothing today if it’s not made by relevant links.
That’s probably easiest way and very profitable cause You can get plenty of domains daily and sell backlinks until the pagerank vanish which will bring 300+400% profit in one year.
October 21st, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Good article. Thanks for the tips. What do you think of PPC? The work you have done on this page contributes to the overall purpose ofSEO optimization. Crown SEO, Ltd. specializes in SEO optimization with many Google successes for its clients through reading and understanding excellent articles such as this.
October 23rd, 2008 at 2:52 pm
I’ve started a new way for a blogger to get paid — direct payment from the audience on a per-minute basis.
December 2nd, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Thanks for a great post, especially the bit on selling your site.
http://www.top-share.com
December 16th, 2008 at 7:41 am
Great article, interesting points on selling your site.
December 22nd, 2008 at 11:07 am
Thanks a lot for sharing this useful information. Affiliate programs seem to me a good option.
January 12th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Great blog!
I’d also like to warn webmasters that are using affiliate programs to monetize their website to beware of toll-free numbers on their landing pages. I have lost sales in the past by linking to affiliate landing pages that feature a toll-free number. If it’s not too obvious it’ll probably have little effect but landing pages that feature them may be stealing sales.
Roger
January 31st, 2009 at 8:04 pm
You could also add upsale to the list. For instance, I offer a free hosting service to anyone. Now when they reach the set limits on their account, we tell them they need to upgrade to a paying term in order to continue the website. This can only work in some situations though
February 11th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Consigli molto utili…articolo molto interessante!
February 18th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Out of all the options you listed, Google Adsense is my favorite. Great article, and great blog.
March 16th, 2009 at 2:06 am
I did not get your point on this.
March 16th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Thanks Claudio. Great Post!
April 27th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
I dont usually reply to posts but I will in this case. WoW
April 28th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
Wow! Thank you! I always wanted to write in my site something like that. Can I take part of your post to my blog?
April 28th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Thanks Alejandro. Sure, you can use the info from my post. Just be sure to include a link back to my site/post.
June 5th, 2009 at 12:29 am
I think low traffic sites can still monetize if some thought is put into how they wish to monetize.
With ranges from direct sales, affiliate sales, PPC, CPM, microtransactions, donations, etc……there is always something out there that will fit neatly with your website and its target audience.
Also, use of such monetization methods are important. For instance, if you have PPC ads on the top and bottom of your site, you may get a few clicks as people pass over them…….but this situation could be improved if……(a bit of shameless promotion now)…….you used an API like that found at tag-box.com, you would generate a focal point for your users to pool to. Couple that with your PPC code in the API header and you could start paying back the cost of your website in no time!
June 20th, 2009 at 7:36 am
i reached this informative link by search engine. nice post
June 20th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Thanks Waseem. I appreciate it. I hope you will come back and read some more.
June 27th, 2009 at 2:24 am
Great information,i will always looking these like information,nice dear,its amazing
July 1st, 2009 at 5:40 am
Great post for sure, I agree 100%. It seems however, that there are different times to sell sites some might be a lot more profitable and others may not. I’m actually in the process of selling another site.
Cheers
Eric
July 7th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Bonjour! nice stuff you have up there, check out my blog too
July 16th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
Traffic exchange is an example of a way to get noticed also. Not sure how many people use them but they still work.
August 10th, 2009 at 5:00 am
it is the best step by step way of monetizing your website…this article will be very useful for all the programmers in the world…. if you follow this rule…your website will be very successful…
August 29th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
Great article, i use some of these on both of my sites a great way to bring in money.
August 29th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
Thanks for the comment. Glad you liked the article. I hope you will return and explore the rest of the blog.
September 25th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
For my part, I think that the best way to attract visitors to your website to increase his value is by giving free stuff or free tools.
October 5th, 2009 at 5:01 am
The biggest issue in monetizing the websites is having strong and targeted traffic which would in the long term assist the portals gaining visibility shares across the net.
When you have a site being visited by many people on a regular basis, you would have a lot of solutions and ideas in mind for generating cash from it.
October 25th, 2009 at 2:51 am
It’s also possible to auction off ad spots on your site at Bidswamp.com
October 27th, 2009 at 12:15 am
Great tip. Thanks for joining the conversation. I’ll check out the site you mentioned. Thanks again.
January 1st, 2010 at 2:26 pm
Great article! Monetizing your site by making space available for advertisers is always a good way to earn money with a site. I need to work on that a bit more myself.
Thanks for the info.
-Becca-
January 22nd, 2010 at 8:41 am
Thanks for the sweet tips, loooking more from you bro. Thanks
April 16th, 2010 at 6:32 pm
Good writing, got some ideas from you, thank for sharing!
April 25th, 2010 at 2:04 pm
I have to agree 100% with the author of this article. Monetizing a website is almost every webmasters primary goal. I recommend not monetizing immediately as I have found that the search engines favor new sites who are ad free.
I usually add contextual ads after 6 months of operation – I did this here http://www.jdmag.com
As a Long Island SEO Company I have a lot of experiences with how Google and other engines index sites. This fact I mentioned above stands true for many of my clients so I can speak with confidence on this topic!
May 19th, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Great, thank you admin for this.
May 22nd, 2010 at 9:44 am
I think that for websites with good traffic it will be good choise to use ad networks which pays for displays of ads in CPM model like poponclick.com or others, it depends offcourse of preffered type of ad.
June 11th, 2010 at 4:25 pm
i love your blog,really nice
June 15th, 2010 at 10:25 pm
Thanks for posting this. I have another question, does google adsense work in sub-domains? For example sites under freewebs or webs or weebly.
July 16th, 2010 at 9:46 am
I find only google adsense is worth it!