Part 12: Monetization.
Monetization is a big word (and one that I’m sure has only recently been made up) that describes and almost infinitely big subject.
There are just so many ways to make money online that it is impossible for me to list them all here – even if I knew them all myself! But today I’ll try to outline some of the major methods of turning a few pages of text and code into money-making machines that will pump cash into your bank account day after day – even while you sleep!
(Did you like that hype-talk? I was just having fun – I’ll try to keep both feet on the ground from here on in.)
* Active product selling
Perhaps the most obvious way to generate an income from a website is to sell a product that you have personally own the rights to. It could be something like an ebook or report that you’ve created yourself, or it could be something that you’ve bought the rights to because you think the product is good. It could even be something that you’ve paid someone else to create for you (there will be more on outsourcing later in the course).
However you’ve come by the item you have for sale, the chances are that your website will take the form of a sales letter.
The format of sales letters haven’t changed much in over a hundred years and the online versions – now often called sales pages – are just a continuation of a long tradition of tried and tested copywriting techniques.
There is no great mystery – you capture the reader’s attention with a catchy and intriguing headline, stimulate their interest in the product by talking about the problems it can solve and showing how other people have loved it, fan the flames of their desire to own the product by going into detail about the benefits owning it will bring to them, and finally, give them a reason to take action and buy it now. (I’ll talk about copywriting in more detail in a later installment of this course and explain a neat 7-step process that I use when writing sales copy.)
Selling your own products is one of the more profitable ways of marketing online and one that I highly recommend. However, not everyone is comfortable writing ebooks or even special reports – and certainly not everyone can write programs.
Which brings me to the next method:
* Affiliate selling
Affiliate selling means the process of selling other people’s products. With this method, you are not so much ‘selling’ as ‘encouraging people to learn more; your job is not to close the sale, but to stimulate interest in the reader so that he or she will go to the product owner’s real sales page.
And every time you do succeed in sending someone to a sales page where they buy a product or service, you will be paid a commission by the product owner.
The process is also ‘passive’ because it tends to work best when you don’t appear to be selling at all – merely reviewing and recommending.
Almost any web page can include some kind of affiliate sales process. there are products and services in virtually any niche you can think of that will suit your page’s content. All you need to do is go find them. Affiliate networks like ClickBank, Commission Junction, LinkShare and PayDotCom are great places to start.
* Advertisements
An easy way to make anything from a small trickle of income to a flood is to allow advertisers to place their ads on your pages. If you are lucky enough to have a lot of traffic, you can make a good income this way.
Perhaps the most obvious way to display third-party ads is through the Google AdSense system.
In case you are unaware of AdSense, it is a service run by Google that you sign up to join (at no cost). Once accepted as a member, Google will give you a snippet of code to place in your web pages. That code allows Google to ‘read’ your web page and determine what it is about. they will then place small classified-style ads on your page that are relevant to your page’s subject.
The process is called ‘contextual advertising’.
Every time one of your visitors clicks on one of the AdSense ads they are charged a small amount by Google (the advertisers bid to be displayed, and so the actual amount that each click costs varies hugely. Depending on the popularity of the keyword that your page displays for, the cost-per-click could be anything from a few cents to several dollars. Google then pay you, the site owner, a percentage of the click cost.
A year or so ago, people got rich by building sites expressly for the purpose of attracting high value AdSense ads, but as with many things, the bubble burst and Google cracked down on what they perceived as ‘made-for-AdSense’ sites. Accordingly, the income from AdSense fell to a fraction of its former glory. Many people reported a drop in their income of 90-95%.
But, even though getting rich with AdSense is now a lot harder than it used to be, it is still a good way to generate small sums from your sites with no real effort.
There are many other contextual advertising services, but until very recently, Google has banned you from displaying them on any web page that also displayed AdSense ads. That ban now seems to have been lifted, so it appears you can now mix and match contextual services.
Of course, contextual advertising such as AdSense isn’t the only way to put ads on pages. You can, if you like, sell banner ads (an umbrella term for all kinds of shapes and sizes of ads) on your site. As an example, take a look at the very popular blog http://www.copyblogger.com/ where you’ll see a block of six ads on the right-hand side. They cost $1500 each per month. Build up your traffic and you could find advertisers willing to buy ads from you too.
* Donations
It is even possible to just ask for money.
Many sites nowadays have ‘buy me a beer’ buttons or links and hope that visitors will value the content of the pages or blog posts sufficiently to want to show their appreciation.
I suspect that this method doesn’t bring in much money, but it certainly brings some – and with no more work on your part than placing the link there in the first place.
* Drive customers to offline businesses
Anther frequently seen method of profiting from your website is to use it as a shop window for your offline business – and to drive customers there. My friend David’s site at www.dmwoodworx.com is a great example. it is a high content site that is focused on showcasing his offline joinery business. He can send potential customers and clients there by way of his business cards, email sig lines and letter headings and the search engines will send him fresh traffic because there is a lot of real content for people to see. Both ways, he puts his offline business in front of interested viewers and generates plenty of new contracts as a result.
This short introduction can only scratch the surface of the many ways to monetize your websites and blogs. In future we will look at them in more detail, and at other great systems and methods that you can consider.
Meanwhile, before you can make money from your site, remember that you have to have people coming to view it – and that is what we’ll look at next time.
#~#~#
A Warning about AdSense – and reading the small print!
Although I have AdSense on several of my sites, and bank a nice check from Google each month as a result, I don’t obsess over my stats and rarely visit my AdSense account online.
Yesterday I did visit it and was greeted by a new terms and conditions agreement that I had to agree to in order to keep my AdSense account.
Of course, I did agree – without bothering to read any of the interminable legalese.
Then I got to thinking. I wondered what changes they had made that required a new ToS agreement. A few minutes Googling and I quickly found the answer – and it is something that everyone who has AdSense on any of their websites NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT.
Very soon (25th May) you will now have to display a Privacy Policy on any website (or property as Google now call such things) that clearly informs visitors that third party cookies and tracking beacons will be placed on their computers if the ads are clicked on.
The actual wording in the new AdSense ToS is:
“You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.”
Failure to accept the new terms, and presumably to be compliant with them, by May 25th 2008 will put you at risk of losing your AdSense account.
Not a happy thought.
I’d guess that most people who make a few bucks here and there from AdSense have no idea about the need to put up a privacy policy page – or have much of a clue as to how to put one up anyway.
Well don’t panic! It may be a bit of a fuss and bother, but it isn’t hard.
You don’t need to put the privacy statement on each page – just a link to it.
People who have sites containing hundreds or thousands of pages may have a problem if they don’t have their navigation sections in external files. Sites built with older-style site building programs (the old made-for-AdSense site builders, for example) will struggle. But modern, well-constructed websites that pull in navigation from external files, or most blogs, will be very easy to change.
If you have a big website that displays AdSense and have no clue how to put a link to a privacy policy on all your pages, get yourself a copy of a program called HTML Search & Replace. You can find it at http://www.alentum.com/htmlsr/ (not an affiliate link) where there is a 30-day free trial.
For well constructed sites, adding the link will be just a matter of changing one file, or in a blog, making a link in your blogroll.
What to put in the privacy policy?
I’m no lawyer, so can’t offer suggestions in the appropriate language, but there is a very informative blog called JenSense, by Jennifer Slegg, which offers a boilerplate privacy policy that appears to do the job very nicely. You can copy and paste her text and just change your site’s name and URL details – all with her blessing.
http://www.jensense.com/2008/03/05/adsense-friendly-privacy-policy-sample-for-adsense-publishers-to-use/
This is something that is all too easy to overlook or forget, but come May 25th you may come to regret not taking action. I plan to add the privacy policy to all my sites – whether they display AdSense or not – just to be on the safe side.
Better to get into the habit now than forget about it later.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.