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5 Ways to Monetize Any Website in Your Portfolio
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What’s Hot Today… And Why You Shouldn’t Care
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0% of Affiliate Marketers Are Female

5 Ways to Monetize Any Website in Your Portfolio

What’s the best way to make money from my website?

This is a question that lands in my inbox every so often, and rarely does it have a straightforward answer.

Monetizing a website is simple… if you don’t care for how much money it makes.

How long does it take to slap some Google AdSense in to your sidebar? About 17 seconds? Great, then that’s how long it takes to monetize a website. You can now retire rich in the knowledge that you made money from the Internet.

But how much will you make? Will your website ever fulfill its potential? Or will you spend the rest of your online career waiting by the mailbox for a $50 cheque from Google?

What I’ve noticed from speaking to so many webmasters – not necessarily affiliates – is that monetizing a website is too often treated as a one dimensional affair. The process is rarely attacked from every angle. There’s a tendency to ‘lock in’ the monetization aspect of a website, and then focus purely on content and backlinks thereafter.

Traffic is precious. Monetizing it fully should be one of your top priorities.

Here are 5 strategies to help you make money from any website in your portfolio, along with some best practice on how to do it well.

1. Promote products on a per-lead basis

Some websites are naturally great matches for CPA offers (those that payout for a simple lead, no credit card necessary).

I have several dating related websites in my portfolio. Their primary use is to generate free traffic that can be routed through to CPA offers. One of these websites generates only 100-200 hits per day, but it still makes around $1000/month on auto-pilot. That’s a huge return on investment relative to what would be considered a rather small trickle of traffic.

Pros of monetizing by per-lead offers:

  • Your income is likely to be much more predictable promoting pay-per-lead offers rather than pay-per-sale offers. With a low traffic site, you may go through months where you don’t score a single sale. But if you’re getting paid for something as simple as a form submission, you’re likely to make some kind of income. It’s psychologically crippling to work hard on a site that doesn’t seem to convert. Opting for pay-per-lead offers may prove better for your mental health in terms of seeing some immediate results.

  • The ROI is excellent if you find a suitable offer, usually surpassing what is achievable by promoting per-sale offers, or using banner exchange networks. Very few banner exchanges are going to pay you $1000/month for 100 hits per day.

Cons of monetizing by per-lead offers:

  • It requires rigorous management. CPA offers go down regularly. To maximise your revenue from promoting them, you have to schedule a weekly check-in to make sure that the offer is still converting. And if it isn’t converting well, you need to switch to a new offer. Depending on whether your ads are displaying as banners, or as contextual recommendations similar to my suggestion in Premium Posts Volume 2, this can sometimes prove difficult.

  • It gets old quick. Many of us build our own websites to break free from the vice like grip of CPA marketing. We want to feel that our assets are built on solid foundations, primed to make money passively from now until the end of time. So does it make sense to then monetize those websites with CPA offers – the most notorious whorers of time and energy in the industry? It’s a commitment to not-so-passive income.

  • Most CPA offers will only pay for leads from certain countries, whilst most websites draw traffic from all around the world. You will have to show different ads for different countries to get maximum value out of your traffic. This means you will need to have a geo-detection script. OIOPublisher is the best I’ve come across so far.

2. Promote products on a per-sale basis

We’ve all seen websites littered in ads for the latest Clickbank hype-job. Do they make money? If there’s enough traffic for keywords with the right buying intentions, then yes they do. They can make a lot of money.

So, perhaps you decide to monetize your entire website with banners for a $200 information product that nets you a $100 payout. A critical question at this stage would be “Does my website attract users that are going to like this product and be willing to spend money on it?” If not, this can turn in to one of the least efficient means of monetizing a site. In some cases, you’ll make a rosy $0/month.

Of course, pay-per-sale programs extend far beyond the shady realms of Clickbank. You’ll typically find that digital products aside, the most reputable products come attached to the lowest payouts. Amazon is a popular pay-per-sale program. But have you tried paying the mortgage while making 4% on CDs and DVDs? If this is the only means of monetizing your site, alarm bells should be searing your ears.

Pros of monetizing by per-sale offers:

  • If you nail down your targeting, leverage a demographic in ‘buying mode’, and have the luck to find a program offering good payout terms and a stable conversion rate – it can be both lucrative and long-term, which is the sacred cocktail of success for any Internet Marketer who values his healthy blood pressure.

  • There’s no such thing as a quality score. A sale is a sale, right?

  • It requires very little management. Products that pay commission by the sale tend to survive much longer than offers from the CPA world. They also present a good bargaining position for the affiliate, who is clearly adding some real-world value to the sales funnel by supplying real-world customers. The question of “Who’s Your Daddy?” is turned on its head.

Cons of monetizing by per-sale offers:

  • By the very laws of economics, non-converting users are going to be much more common than those who are happy to bust out Mr. Plastic Fantastic. Are you happy monetizing a tiny segment of your website’s core audience? Do the payment terms make this sacrifice worthwhile?

  • If your website is built around an obscure niche and there is only one product that you can sell, your situation is just as precarious as the rogue CPA cowboy cloaking Facebook. What happens if the merchant drops its affiliate program? Tough break for a small fish. My suggestion if you find yourself hoarding lots of traffic in an unsaturated market is quite simple: build your own product

3. Launch your own product

In my opinion, if a website doesn’t have a feasible product that it could sell, it’s probably a waste of time, or a non-profit venture that isn’t suitable for increasing your income.

Whether you build a website to promote affiliate offers, reap banner sales or simply monetize via Google AdSense, the reality stays the same. If the website doesn’t produce a customer for somebody somewhere, it’s not going to be worth the hair on my arse.

Before building any website, ask yourself – “What could I sell on this site?” If you find yourself struggling for an answer, drop the project! It’s the same question any advertiser will be asking when he stumbles across your page.

If he sees no market, you are no more than a webmaster with a hobby – a servant to the information age. Either way, the road to riches veers off a cliff, and you would be a complete sucker for hopping over the edge on a whimsical hope and prayer.

A suitable product can be anything from an instant download ebook, to a rolling monthly subscription for private forum access, to branded merchandise. Pretty much whatever you can muster the balls to charge for.

Pros of monetizing by launching a product:

  • Gain complete control over the direction and future of your product. It can be adjusted to meet the very specific demands of your target demographic, which you define, while psychotically whispering “Who’s The Daddy, now?” and trawling the web for affiliates…

  • You control the affiliate equation. Affiliate marketing is an incredibly effective sales model, especially when you are at the head of the chain. How many dating website CEOs do you suppose would spend their time in the trenches learning how to advertise on Plentyoffish cost-effectively? Not many. But thanks to the art of delegating to small fish like us, they don’t have to. Plenty of fish, indeed. CPA marketers are highly skilled traffic resellers who will fight hard for a few scraps. When you control that equation, you’ll regain much of the sleep you lost as an affiliate (aka ‘Guy with the Sore Arse’).

  • The issue of trust becomes a benefit rather than a constraint. If your website’s readers are faithful followers of your regular content, selling a premium product to them is natural progression. Premium Posts have been very successful for me, but that platform was built in the 2 years prior where I was dedicated to churning out decent posts for free. Trust goes a long way if you can resist the urge to exploit it.

Cons of monetizing by launching a product:

  • Taking the plunge is hard. Deciding to offer a paid product to your readers requires a certain deal of courage in the relationship you’ve built. You don’t want to be seen as cheap, or trying to make a fast buck from those who gave you a platform to be heard. The pressure to deliver is unmistakeable. A bad product will sour the taste of a loyal following.

  • You’ll need time, vision and patience to launch successfully. It’s not hard to fill a whiteboard with ideas for great products. And it’s not hard to upload the completed PDF to your server. But the road in-between is a confusing, testing and challenging fist up the jacksy. Your vision must prevail.

4. Join an Ad Network

Many webmasters opt to hand over the monetizing aspect of their site to banner exchanges and ad networks. Google AdSense is perhaps the most popular of the bunch. But there are many others, far too many for a guy of my attention capacity to list. See here for a comprehensive list.

Platforms like AdSense will pay you by the click (or by impressions), which is naturally a smaller slice of the cake than per lead or sale. It may not be the most lucrative method of monetizing a website, but it’s by far the most hassle-free. The question is simply, “How much money are you missing out on?” If a third party advertiser is making good hay from your website, why aren’t you?

Pros of monetizing by joining an ad network:

  • There’s very little management involved. Turning your ads over to an ad network pushes the matter about as far out of your hands as any other suggestion in this post. Out of sight and out of mind? Perhaps, but out of sight and likely out of pocket too.

  • If you have a brilliant brand and a lot of traffic, the likelihood of generating good revenue from ad networks increases tenfold. When your website appeals to a broad and large audience, the volume and consistency of display revenue outmuscles the benefit of using your inventory to promote products – whether they are somebody else’s or your own. Promoting products is still smart, but as a secondary source of income.

  • If your traffic is low quality and there’s no obvious outlet, it’s better to have some money than no money. Whether you’re getting paid by CPM or CPC, you will receive more than you would by promoting a questionable product with a 0% conversion rate. When your conversion rate is 0%, the banner networks are a guaranteed improvement.

  • Using an ad network allows you to blame somebody else when an undesirable ad flashes up on your site.

Cons of monetizing by joining an ad network:

  • Unless you have a lot of traffic, your income is likely to remain minimal. It’s like following a stock index fund, knowing that the index represents the lowest quartile of growth in the market. It’s stable and predictable. But for low to mid traffic sites? The alternatives are usually more profitable.

  • This could happen:

    Fear of Ducks Fail

  • If ads stating ‘1 Weird Trick…’ swarm your site, you could potentially damage the relationship of trust with your readers – which is dangerous if you are also selling your own products. Mmm, death by association.

  • Payment terms are not always the best for low traffic sites. If it doesn’t take you forever to reach the minimum payout threshold, it will take forever for a bumbling intern accountant to process the bloody cheque. More waiting by the mailbox.

  • Many ad networks want 100% control over your entire inventory and will not deal with other networks on the same page. It makes sense from a business perspective, but it still sucks to be on the losing end of the stick when it’s your own website.

5. Sell your own banner space

Finally, we have a strategy that is particularly rife across blogs in the affiliate marketing space, this glorious creation included.

If you hate the idea of an ad network pocketing a slice of your hard work, or of ‘1 Weird Trick…’ being slapped across every inch of your hallowed HTML, there is always the option to sell your own ads (as well as tweets, sponsored posts, paid reviews, daughters, wives and dignity as a whole).

Pros of monetizing by selling your own banner space:

  • If you run a site in a crowded marketplace where there are a lot of brands fighting for attention and manpoints, auctioning off your ad spots to the highest bidder will nearly always trump the rates achieved through ad networks. You can multiply your CPMs overnight by taking on advertisers of your own finding.

  • It’s very easy to do, especially with software like OIOPublisher. Automate the entire process from start to finish and you won’t spend half your working hours flapping around the inbox sending emails about renewals.

  • By controlling placements manually, you can keep a close rein on any ads that might be harmful to your brand, or designed to ‘game’ your very own readers.

Cons of monetizing by selling your own banner space:

  • Finding advertisers is not easy if you operate in markets where the majority of product owners would rather use affiliates than buy ad space out of their own pocket – unless those affiliates are hot on your heels. Affiliate activity is a good marker of how likely you are to be able to sell your ad spots. Got a dating, bizopp or weight loss themed website? There’s likely to be strong demand for good quality inventory that ticks these boxes. But if your website is an information portal of the best mahogany rocking chairs from 1954… good luck, happy fishing.

  • This could happen:

    Cannot join EWA

    Yes, Ryan Eagle will swallow your inventory for breakfast with his motley crew gradients and epileptic fit inducing flash photography. Kidding, I love them Ryan. They’re like mini-Picassos.

  • Income is variable. Many advertisers love to buy traffic for a month, see how it converts, and then cull where necessary. This means you have to be offering a good deal for the ad spot to be worthwhile (and if that’s the case, why not just use the spot yourself?). The result of having lots of advertisers ‘passing through’ is a lurching income that could be great one month and barren the next. The best way to solve this is to focus on selling your ad spots to brands that are less performance-driven and more perception-orientated.

Conclusion: “What’s right for me?”

These five monetization strategies share the quality of being potentially good choices, or very bad choices, depending on the situation and the mechanics of the website you’re trying to monetize.

There’s no reason to suggest you should only use one method. This very blog implements four of the five approaches. In my case, the ‘creating a product’ route blows the others out of the water, as I suspect it might for many other webmasters in a similar position.

My takeaway advice is to be flexible. Look beyond designing entire websites with the intention of promoting a single product, or littering the damn thing in Adsense and letting it collect dust.

And I also have to go back to the question you should be asking yourself before starting any web project.

What could I sell on this site?

If your answer is muted, how can you expect to generate income from other webmasters and advertisers asking the exact same question?

You can survive with average content (anybody who tells you otherwise is an idealist dreamer), but with no market, you have no value. It doesn’t matter which strategy of monetization you choose. But there better be at least one option available to you.

Good luck! Any questions? Feedback? Fire away.

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What’s Hot Today… And Why You Shouldn’t Care

CPA marketers like to divide the affiliate world in to six continents: dating, health, careers, gaming, mobile and zip submits.

These are the verticals that get talked about almost constantly. If you log in to an affiliate network’s control panel, it’s likely that the hottest offers – those pushed above the fold – will fall in to these categories.

If you’re launching CPA campaigns, it makes sense to stick to the tried and tested, because you’re likely to get better support from your networks – most of whom are very familiar with the six continents of markets above.

Networks are better at providing support for offers they know, the offers they see a million other publishers promoting. Naturally, there’s a downside. Saturated offers are also seen as ‘past their peak’. By the time Average Joe is throwing his money at Offer X, the initial conversion rates are likely to have tapered to compensate for the demand. The best time to promote an offer is nearly always before everybody else.

There are many reasons why you might look at the state of the CPA world and draw the conclusion that it’s a shrinking pond with an overflow of hungry fish. That’s my view, and it’s why I’m spending most of my time diversifying away from CPA. Product creation is my number one focus right now, shortly followed by the development of websites that cash in on trends ahead of time.

Stop asking “What’s Hot?”

In the last round of Premium Posts, I included a section on tax season offers. Tax offers are the perfect example of a money machine that materialises as surely as the sun rises. It solves a real-world demand… every single year.

Everybody hates taxes, nobody likes filing them, and many will shit bricks at the thought of making a mistake and somehow ending up in the slammer on fraud charges. A resource that takes the pain out of filing taxes is a nailed down success, year in year out, for as long as taxes remain a pain in the arse.

But for many affiliates – the short term thinkers – this is a real-world demand that passes them by. They’re far too slow to react. And what they’re doing wrong is precisely that: reacting.

The affiliates who pocket the most are those who are planning ahead. While the rest of the world is busy scrummaging for festive tinsel borders to drape on its dating creatives, the long-term planner is already working on tax season creatives. And not just creatives, but entire websites.

I’m not normally the greatest advocate of search engine traffic, but what would you give to have a site at the top of Google for a tax-related keyword right now? Unfortunately, ranking on Google takes time, patience and a painful self-awareness of your small man syndrome.

Most high volume tax keywords have been swept up already by publishers on far greater budgets than your own. It’s one thing to spot and prepare for a future trend, it’s another to launch a website that gets the traction necessary to capitalise on it.

Target the trends within seasonal booms.

When Michael Jackson died in June 2009, my first reaction was to register a domain that welded his name with Halloween. I knew right away that Jacko themed Halloween costumes were going to be all the rage in 4 months time, so I acted as fast as I could to lay the groundwork before most other affiliates even turned their attention to the season.

It sounds like a slightly disturbed mindset to adopt. The greatest pop icon of all time dies, and I’m already pillaging his legacy for commission. But if you don’t look forward, you will constantly find yourself reacting to ‘What’s Hot’. And when you react to what’s hot, it’s too late.

Sure enough, I was able to pocket a lot of money from my Jacko costume groundwork. By the time Halloween rolled around, I was in ‘sucking up traffic‘ mode, while anybody reacting to the trend would have been dawdling in the planning and execution phase.

Even when planning in advance, you have to be realistic. Had I focused my efforts on targeting Halloween 2009 as a whole, I’d have been swept aside by many other companies with bigger budgets and the same foresight. So I focused all my efforts on one angle instead – a dead Michael Jackson.

Competition decreases as your focus increases.

The same concept applies to tax season, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas and virtually any seasonal trend. If you don’t have a planning cycle that runs several months ahead of the average consumer, good luck reacting fast enough to make money from him.

You will make life a lot easier by specialising on a trend within the trend. It’s unrealistic to think that even 4 months of preparation is going to be enough to dominate tax-related search engine traffic, which is why you need to segregate keywords and target the low hanging fruit.

Get a whiteboard and list every conceivable concern related to tax season, from every possible angle. You need only target one angle effectively to make a lot of money, and you will reduce the competition by doing so.

Use the AdWords Keyword Tool to find the highest trafficked keywords with the least competition. These are your low hanging fruit.

Once you have your trend within a trend, it’s time to make a commitment to work that isn’t going to produce an immediate return, but hopefully will produce a steady passive income in the future.

Register a domain closely tied to your chosen angle (exact match if possible), and get your sales funnel in place – either by building your own product, or promoting a stable offer that isn’t going to cap out when the season arrives. Then inundate the site with fresh quality content and a constant barrage of quality backlinks.

If this sounds like donkey work, it’s because that’s precisely what it is.

I hire small armies of Filipinos to do the SEO labour for me.

Your goal should be to have a legitimate presence on the web, somewhere close to the top of Google, for a high volume keyword that brings in money on autopilot. With this animal of free traffic at your disposal, you can be much more flexible than the average CPA affiliate when it comes to payouts and margins.

Clearly, it’s too late to build a money-machine for 2012’s tax season. But you can certainly build one for 2013. In fact, there’s no harm in reacting to seasonal trends in 2012, so long as you’re expecting to make a profit next year – rather than next week.

Seasonal trends are sometimes a turn-off for affiliates. Not everybody likes the idea of making their money in one small boom period. So… cover more than one trend. Build a website for a trend in each quarter. With good execution, you’ll never be more than 2 months away from your next money tap, and the cruel satisfaction that comes from watching everybody else rush to build what you have in a fraction of the time.

Most importantly of all, learn to stop reacting to ‘What’s Hot’. Focus on getting to market before the crowd reacts.

Recommended This Week

  • Behold 98 pages of ‘Outside The Box Marketing’, conversion boosting strategies and tips that can actually make you money. Snatch up my Premium Posts Volume 4.

  • If you’re running ads on Facebook or Plentyoffish, FBAdsToolbox is an excellent little time-saver. Simply upload photos, crop to size, and choose from over 80 variations to split-test. Very nice tool.

  • If you’re a new reader here, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading.

0% of Affiliate Marketers Are Female

How’s this for a mind boggling gender statistic? There are 70 affiliate marketing blogs listed on Affbuzz, and precisely zero of them are run by a female.

Admittedly, I’ve only just found out that Nana Gilbert-Baffoe is the President of Tracking202, and not the sweet grandma posting articles in a rocking chair that I originally suspected.

70 male blogs vs. 0 female blogs is a staggering depiction of our industry.

In any other industry, Affbuzz founder Justin Barr would be eating lawsuits for his sexist discrimination and Victorian principles. He’s saved by the evidence that affiliate marketing is a raging sausagefest that shows no sign of abating anytime soon.

I’m using an ambiguous example. Just because there are so few female bloggers, doesn’t mean there are no female affiliates. Maybe they prefer to keep busy in the trenches? Maybe they don’t want to be terrorized by their WickedFire peers?

Have you seen how affiliate marketers flirt with the fairer sex? I don’t want to spoil the surprise for you, but the phenomenon is best described as a bull in a china shop; or a teaspoon of honey in a beehive.

I do know a few female affiliates, and they are certainly capable. But they are exceptions to the rule. If you go to a trade show, the large majority of women are working on the corporate side.

I doubt there’ll ever be a shortage of female account managers.

Just like the male counterparts, their competence ranges from awful to excellent. You can shoot me for slander if I’m wrong, but it seems pretty obvious that some networks hire their account managers not only for their technical skills, but for their ability to inspire the loins of the young, testosterone-driven males they’re obliged to serve.

If I ever had to translate my dating ‘fantasy ads’ to the affiliate demographic, I’ve no doubt that “Would You Like to Date an Affiliate Manager?” would trigger a monster CTR.

We are working in a male-dominated industry. That much is clear. But why do men have such a stranglehold on the business? The qualities necessary to succeed are available just as readily to women as they are to men.

I have to confess that the gap in the market for an excellent female CPA blogger often keeps me awake at night. I wish I’d called this blog Charlotte Sells, or that I had the arse of Kim Kardashian, or that my tits weren’t so hairy.

Eventually I accept reality; that a gasbagging machine-gun of expletives like myself would struggle as a feminine brand. But it still hurts.

When you look away from CPA, and turn your attention to Internet Marketing as a whole, you’ll find lots of female bloggers. I mean, Christ, the ‘work at home mom‘ gimmick is one cow that keeps on giving milk. It’s a monster niche with huge scope for profit, but it rarely seems to push the envelope.

WAHM blogs will typically focus on low-risk, low-reward enterprise. I’m not knocking them. Such ventures make perfect sense when you have kids biting your ankles, and less time to spend in your basement. I find work hard enough with two puppies. I don’t even want to think about fathering an ankle biter that doesn’t have four legs.

In fact, many of the newbies reading this blog, those with no budget, would perhaps gain more from copying the tricks of the ‘stay at home moms’. They may not promise the same rewards, but at least those blogs are grounded in some kind of reality.

I sometimes wonder if affiliate networks could one day level the gender playing field. So much of our industry is branded around fast cars, a testosterone-driven ‘grind’, and strip clubs in Vegas. You can’t knock the networks for appealing to the majority of their clients. But is there an opportunity being missed?

How many more networks do we need with essentially the same brand in a different skin? And how many more male blogs will jostle for position on Affbuzz before a female presence bucks the trend?

It’s tough to say if affiliate marketing is dominated by males because of some natural gravitation in the male mindset, or whether it’s because 99% of the networks and blogs are conforming to the status quo.

Would more women get in to affiliate marketing if there were more female personalities blazing the trail? What if a network came along with feminine branding rather than the usual ‘hoes and dough‘?

I think the appeal of affiliate marketing as a business has no reason to be slanted so heavily towards males, certainly not on a scale of 70:0. But it could change very easily. As is so often the case, whoever acts first will stand to profit the most.

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