Monetizing Your Website

Though there are many people offering their content for free, maybe (surely if you are reading this) you are one of those willing to make a profit from your web site. You might want to make a living from your Internet experience, or just to generate an extra income instead. In any case there are several ways to earn money with your site.

SELLING PRODUCTS

Electronic commerce is the most obvious way to generate revenue from your site. Of course you need something to sell, and Internet is not the best marketplace for all products. To succeed selling you need to:

• Sell something that is not sold anywhere else: Offering a unique product is the best way to ensure that your site is chosen by Internet users to buy it. Take advantage of the lack of competition while you are the only seller and make your site the reference for that kind of product.
• Sell something that is not sold in a given area: Offer something that, even though not being unique, it is not distributed in a certain location (country, city...).
• Sell something at best price: With so much competition on the Internet and so many comparison tools, price is the most important factor in the buying decision. As selling at best price is not always possible and it depends also on external factors, make sure that you sell your product at the most competitive price you can afford.

If you meet no one of those conditions, probably selling on the Internet isn't the best option for you, unless you give some added value or you can afford a huge marketing campaign.

Even in case you meet any of the conditions before, that isn't a success guarantee; there are still other factors that can ruin your plans such as a poor design, a bad site usability (specially in the purchase process) or a lack of promotion.

SELLING ONLINE CONTENT

Selling intangible products (or services) over the Internet is often easier than selling material ones due to the ease and convenience of the purchase and the lack of distribution channels.

There is a wide range of qualified content to be sold: text (news, information, opinion...), pictures, audio, video, downloadable software... The payment basis also varies: subscription fees, pay-per-item...

Again the big competition is the main problem you'll have to face, so make sure that you:

• Sell highly specialized content: Offer something difficult to find and that has a high perceived value for the potential buyers. Otherwise bigger general sites will eat your market share.
• Sell large amounts of content: If you can't beat those big general sites, become one of them. Offer a wide range of items within your business model, so your web site will be seen as a reference for that kind of content.

SELLING ADVERTISING

If you are not selling a certain product or service, then you can sell advertising. This model will fit most people as it is pretty much easier to generate free content of any kind and sell space on your site than to offer any sellable item.

While there are many sites built with the only purpose of monetizing it through advertisements (and there are a few very profitable), this is not a wise long-term strategy. You should develop a serius, professional, content-rich web site, analyze your audience and find the most suitable advertising from among the many available alternatives:

• Affiliate networks: By participating in big ad networks like Commission Junction, Fastclick or TradeDoubler as a publisher, you will be able to browse a catalogue of hundreds of advertisers and choose the companies, products and ad units that best suit your site and also the revenue basis that you need:
  • Pay-per-click: You get paid for each visitor you send to an advertiser's site from their banner or text link on your site. This model usually works best for sites covering a specific topic and with a decent amount of visitors.
  • Pay-per-impression: You get paid for each visitor that views the page where the advertiser's banner or link is placed. It works best for general and heavily trafficked sites.
  • Pay-per-lead: You get paid for each visitor that performs a given action on the advertiser's site (usually fill out a form). It works best for sites covering a very specific topic and whose visitors have shown any interest in the product/service/company advertised.
  • Pay-per-sale: You get paid for each purchase a visitor makes on the advertiser's site. It might consist in a fixed fee or a commision (percentage). It works best for sites covering directly the product/service/company advertised (reviews sites, price comparison sites...).
• Contextual advertising: When Google entered the advertising market with AdSense, contextual ads changed in a fundamental way. Google AdSense simplified the process of choosing advertisers, placing the ads and managing them: you simply must place a code on your web site, Google reads the content of every page and provides relevant ads for them. You get paid every time a visitor clicks one of those ads.

  For most sites Google AdSense will work better than any other advertising system:

  • The click-through-rate (CTR, the percentage of users that click on a viewed ad) uses to be high because the advertisements are relevant to your content and so more appealing to your visitors.
  • The revenue generated by each click is usually higher than in any other pay-per-click model due to the great amount of advertisers using the network and the bidding system that makes high bid ads appear more frequently.
• Selling your own ads: You choose the advertiser, the revenue basis (usually a monthly fixed fee), the placing of the ad... Of course this is the most suitable advertising method, but often it will be difficult to find advertisers for your web site.

Original article published by Javier García: Basics: Monetizing your web site in Monetizing the Web
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