Right, so if everything has gone to plan so far, you will be getting a bit of cheeky traffic to your site and you will no doubt be wondering how you can convert those visitors into cash. There are quite a few different ways of doing this so I will tell you about the ones I use personally (because I don’t believe in preaching about stuff that I don’t know about).
So…. The majority of my income varies between 2 forms, adsense and selling my own products. These differ on a month to month basis due to the number of people that buy my products as well as the unpredictable nature of adsense earnings (some days I make £100 and other I make £10). As annoying as this is, it is still almost completely passive income so I am grateful for any amount that I earn, as long as it covers my outgoings.
How much do I spend each month?
Blog Blueprint____________________£51.42
Content Professor PRO______________£7.50
Ejunkie_________________________£3.50
Aweber_________________________£11.89
Hostgator_______________________£7.95
Namecheap (2 new domains per month)__£12.09
Adwords PPC____________________£50 (limited to)
Outsourcing_____________________£31.30 (minimum)
Total Spend______________________£174.65
This may seem like a lot but I have my fingers in a lot of pies, with the exception on hosting, the rest of his can be done for free, however it will take much much longer.
For example I buy a minimum of 10 article each month from odesk, this is because I have already filled out most of my niche sites and my thinking is that more articles = people spending more time on my sites which in turn = more MONEHS! This has proven to be true over the past few months as I add more content to my sites I seem to be attracting more visitors from seemingly random keywords, some of these keywords only have 2 or 3 searches per month, but there are over 400 of them. This adds up to a nice little income.
Okay so to break down the type of monetization I am using:
Adsense – My adsense earnings are probably the most stable although they seem to differ wildly month on month. For a long time adsense was my only source of online income, but the fact that some months I would earn a lot and other months barely enough to cover my outgoings introduced other revenue streams.
With adsense I like to keep it simple, I never put ads on my homepage because I have noticed that when people click on a site and see ads straight away the bounce rate goes straight up. By having ads on my inner pages I keep the bounce rate low and tend to get more clicks, this is not a rule so you will have to experiment by yourself and see what works best for your site.
I put a row of ads at the bottom of the header (which convert really well) and either a small banner centered at the top of the page or a medium rectangle within the post either floated to the left or to the right.
Own Products – This is by far my favourite source of income, the reason for this is that I am completely in control of my income, it’s as simple as, send traffic to my sales pages and make MONEHS, the more traffic I send the more I make. I like to be in control of things in this way because I do not have to rely on anybody else for my income.
I urge anybody who is getting some decent traffic to create your own product and be in control of your own earnings, I also find that I am more motivated to rank these sites as without my link building I do not make cash. There is also more satisfaction when somebody buys something that I made rather than selling somebody elses product.
Amazon affiliate – Saying that, it is not always the best solution, if there is already a product out there that does everything required of it, there is no point wasting the time to try to beat it, you may as well just sell the one that is already out. It saves a lot of time and you can make some pretty decent commissions if you shop around.
Amazon gives a typical 5% but this rises each month depending on the umber of products you sell, I have a few amazon sites, one of which only earns me £0.55 per sale but it sells a shit load so it is completely worth it. The product that it sells is a dvd rom that is extremely popular and a market leader.
I also have a site that sells a $200 product, this only sells a few each month so doesn’t earn as much as my £0.55 product simply because people don’t mind spending £10 on a product but $200 is a hefty wedge.
Membership site – I have one site that sells a monthly subscription service, my site is seen as an authority on this subject and so people are willing to pay me for extra content. I provide a lot of free content on the site, that I add to every week. It then has an option of signing up to the monthly membership inside which I provide a weekly podcast and webinar, with members only articles and an additional chat room, in which I have set hours that I spend a couple of hours each week answering questions from the members.
Donations – This is one that I did by accident but has earned me a small fortune. For one of my email lists I offered a free product in exchange for signing up. Ejunkie gives an option to add a donations box to the product, which I must have activated by accident. I found out when I kept getting emails from Paypal telling me that I had received a payment, now this is not unusual but when I logged in at the end of the moth to check my earning the amounts varied from $0.01 to $10.
Although this is not a huge amount of money, it is extra income that I would receive normally, it is also nice to see that people enjoy my products and are wiling to show their appreciation in dollars.
Anyways those are the ways that Iearn money online, for the most part this income is completely automated, all I do really is build some links here and there and write a few articles per month (and I only write the ones for my authority sites as that is what I’m most interested in, the rest get outsourced).
Incorporate some of these into your sites and see what works and what doesn’t, how do you guys monetise your sites?
