One of the biggest questions raised by novice webmasters, such as yourself, is how to go about monetizing your web site. How can you make money from your site? We sort of covered one way in the previous lesson, i.e. to build a mailing list of those who visit your content site.
This lesson will cover another three main ways to monetize a content web site:
- Advertising
- Affiliate programs
- Paid content
Advertising
Advertising is probably the most obvious way to monetize a site. And right now the most popular advertising program to be involved in is Google Adsense. You’ve probably seen Adsense ads all over the net.
Adsense is really simple to add to your site. Just sign up for an account, log in and get a piece of code to add to your web pages. The code will then allow Google to determine what your web page is about and to display ads from advertisers that are relevant to your content.
Everytime someone clicks on an ad, you get paid. This type of advertising is called pay per click (PPC) advertising.
When you have established a website with plenty of traffic coming in, you can remain with Adsense or introduce advertising where your advertiser has to pay a fixed amount a month. This could be in the form of a text ad or a text link ad or a banner ad. The type of ad you choose really depends on what type of content site you have. The best way to determine which way to go is to test, test and test.
Here’s a list of other ad programs you may want to check out:
Affiliate program
Affiliate programs are another way to monetize your site. Most affiliate programs are free to sign up for. What essentially happens is:
- You sign up for an affiliate program.
- You are given a special URL to use when you promote the products.
- When someone clicks on your special URL and purchases the product, you get paid.
How much you are paid depends on the terms of the affiliate program. More commonly, you would get paid a percentage of the price of the product. Sometimes, you get paid a fixed amount per sale.
Affiliate programs work well with content sites. There are many ways you can weave your affiliate link into your content. To learn more about how to do this and maximize your affiliate earnings, have a read of this free Affiliate Masters Course.
You have a choice of joining individual affiliate programs or joining an affiliate network. The advantage of an affiliate network is that you have a large choice to affiliate programs to choose from but your statistics remain in one place. Your commissions also add up quickly if you promote several programs. This means you get paid faster and you can get bigger checks.
Here’s some popular affiliate networks where you can look for affiliate programs that will match your content:
Paid content
Another way to make money from your content site is to sell access to your content. For this model to work, you have to have content that’s valuable. That your visitor’s are willing to pay for. A niche with constant news updates is the best candidate for this model.
One way of doing this is to have a special section for paid subscribers. You will have to password protect this section so that only paid subscribers with the right password can use it.
I’m not sure how you can go about this using SiteBuildIt.
If you’re using XSitePro, just publish your ’special’ content in a folder of its own. You can then, just password protect that folder using your hosting control panel. Or if you’d like a more advanced password protection, you can purchase a script such as aMember.
If you use WordPress, you can find plugins that will restrict access to part of your content to registered users only.
Once again, if you’d like a more advanced protection, you can check out aMember. To use aMember though, you will need to purchase the WordPress add-on.
