Lesson 5: Monetization Models For Your Site

You’ve been through every step by now, and researched your in-demand niche, designed your site to be functional, professional and eye pleasing. You’ve added some top-quality content and made your webpages search engine friendly. Now you’re ready for ways to monetize your new website so you can make some profit.

Putting Google AdSense To Work

One of the quickest and easiest ways to earn some income from a website is the addition of Google AdSense – and you can join for free and then add a variety of different ads you create at the AdSense website to your own site using the code you generate at the AdSense site.

Be sure to read up on it if you haven’t yet gotten an account, they have some simple rules and regulations in place that MUST be followed and if you don’t follow them, you’ll get booted out of their program and you don’t want that to happen!

One tip I’ll offer is that when you set up your advertisements, choose colors that blend in with your website rather than stick out like a sore thumb, that way the ads are much more likely to get clicked on. People are becoming ad-blind these days, so you want your adverts to appear to be part of your site if at all possible.

Banner Ads Are NOT Dead

Banner advertising is another good way to monetize your site, regardless of the naysayers. The clickthrough rates are still phenomenal for many people, or else they wouldn’t continue to use this venue.

There are several banner exchanges available, as well, just look for them on the net along with your keywords to find the most applicable to your site. Using our crafts theme as a base, I typed “banner ads + crafts” in Google (without the quotes) and the search results yielded 296,000 results – one of which let you post a classified ad on their site in exchange for displaying their banner.

You can find many similar ways to advertise your site – there are also banner rotator scripts that rotate a number of banners on your page so they change with each visitor, so options here are fairly limitless. By inputting (no quotes) “free banner rotator script” I found several immediately. Most scripts come with installation and usage instructions, so I won’t cover that here.

I would advise reading the terms of use on whatever banner exchange or banner affiliate program you sign up with to make sure they can’t toss in something unsavory like a triple X-rated site you probably do not want shown on your website.

Affiliate Marketing

Using affiliate programs is one of the most-used methods of monetizing a website that I know of, and it works especially well if you know a few tricks.

Ok, one tip is to create a review page for a product you’re avidly promoting (of course, it helps to own the product or be intimately acquainted with its features and benefits) so that your review contains the positives and any negatives you found regarding the product.

It’s much more real sounding if it isn’t ‘hypey’ and all awesome and wonderful. There is no such product that I know of. Everything is imperfect in some way and it endears you to your readers when you can show that. You really increase your credibility when you aren’t afraid to say what you don’t like about a product.

Mix your affiliate links in with your content. Make sure it flows well, of course, and it helps to add a story about how it helped you with your marketing or whatever it helped with, making it more personal, and then add a link right in the paragraph to allow your visitors to check it out and see if it fits their needs. You can place small banners in the middle of content too, as long as they are related to it... it would look rather silly to put a banner for auto rims in the middle of a basket-weaving tutorial for example.

Besides, if your affiliate links, banners and other forms of advertising are not related to your niche, it’s very unlikely that anyone would click on them so it makes sense to be sure you find plenty of related links. ClickBank has over 12,000 products to choose from, so you very likely will find something cool to offer your visitors.

Create A Membership Site

This is the most effective way to monetize any website these days... provided that you have top-quality content to offer your private members, they will keep coming back month after month to get your goods, while they stay subscribed to your membership site.

You can create a password-protected area right inside your website if you don’t want to invest in a membership script, but when you’re ready to do that, I highly recommend Amember because it does just about anything you need it to do.

A couple of very good reasons to have a membership site (even if you wait until you feel more experienced, I believe they are truly beneficial (which is why I have one I’ll be telling you about very soon).

Once you start your own free or paid membership site and you can secure your member's area, making it restricted to only paid members. It’s said that free membership sites can also generate some very good money, but that’s a whole lesson all by itself.

Another benefit of having a membership site is that you build your list from those more devoted members, thereby reducing your un-subscription rate in the process and keeping your list more responsive toward your future offers. This is, of course, providing that you are continuing to give them what they joined for along with a few extra perks now and then to keep them happy.

So, now you have some of the most used ways to monetize your sites, and as you can see, it’s a bit of work to set everything up, but once you do... it’s an ongoing source of recurring income you can count on.

Next up, I’m going to show those of you who have absolutely no web creating skills how to create a top-notch, beautiful content website without knowing a bit of HTML or how to use a template. You’re going to LOVE it!