3 Ways to Monetize Your Website or Blog

There are many website and blog owners out there who have a website that generates a fair amount of traffic and are not currently doing anything to monetize that traffic.  Of course the main purpose of a website is to provide valuable information on a subject you are interested in so you can educate those who are also interested.  However, what if you could also generate some pocket change from that traffic?

There are many different programs available to help you do such a thing.  Offering up real estate space on your website is a great way to generate money off of ad impressions as well as clicks on ads.  So here are three excellent and proven successful methods to generate income off of your website:

 

  • ·        Banner Ads:  Banner ads are display (image) ads, which are usually positioned at the top of the web page.  Usually you generate income for each impression as well as each click through.  It can be easy to find advertisers or affiliate marketers who want to use that real estate on your website because the banner ad is displayed right in front of the user.
  • ·        Affiliate Links:  This is another great way to generate some income off of your website.  Affiliate links are links placed on your website that market another product or service.  And if a user that was on your website, clicks on the affiliate link and ends up purchasing something you generate a certain percentage of commission from the sale.  The key in affiliate advertising is to choose products and services to market which are in the same interest category as the content on your website.  If a user is on your website to learn about a particular product or service, obviously you’ll want to choose an affiliate product or service that the user would be interested in.
  • ·      Text Advertising:  Text advertising is another effective method of monetizing your website.  This involves displaying text ads in different areas of your website real estate with the hopes that visitors will click on the text ad and you’ll generate revenue off of each click.  Although it’s more difficult to get the visitor to click on the text ad compared to display advertising, you can generate more revenue through cost per click text ads.

 

Generating traffic to your website is not an easy, but once you get a particular amount of traffic you can begin to utilize display advertising to generate some income.  Of course the mort effort you put into driving traffic to your website such as utilizing social media channels and search engine optimization techniques, you will be able to drive even more traffic to your website and therefore, generate more revenue.

The key to getting as much organic traffic as possible is to work on your search engine optimization.  So you choose a specific amount of keywords and key phrases and work on getting your website to page 1 of all major search engines.  By doing this you have a large amount of traffic going to your website simply because you are on the first page of results.  To learn more about how you can monetize your website, check out LookSmart’s Advertising information section.

3 Tips on How to Monetize Your Blog

So many wonder what the benefits of running a blog are, either for personal use or for business purposes.  I can’t stress enough how important it really is.  A blog is a space for you (whether personal or business) to show off your knowledge, your skills, and find others who are interested in the same topics.  Blogs also boost your search engine optimization so your target audience can find you online.

Another great aspect about blogging is that once you build up a following, you can begin to monetize your blog.  I wouldn’t suggest plastering your blog with ads and pop-ups everywhere as you don’t want to “spam” your visitors.  Here are three tips on how you can ethically and successfully monetize your blog:

Pay Per Click Advertising

Many people assume that pay per click advertising is only a strategy for those interested in acquiring traffic to their blog, but you can actually make revenue as a publisher with pay per click ads.  To do this, you would create an account as a publisher and insert the code onto your website that will generate ads. You can control where the ads will be positioned, what types of ads you want (text, image, video), and what ads you want to show or not (you can block certain ads if you wish).  You can make revenue off of these ads based on either cost per view or cost per click.

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Selling Advertising Space

You can advertise real estate space on your blog to others who might be interested in paying a set fee per month (or affiliate link) to advertise.  For example, you could offer a header ad position on your blog to a firm whose visitors would have similiarties to yours.  A great example would be if you blogged about health, fitness, and nutrition, you could off advertising space to fitness clubs, fitness wear, etc.

Paid Reviews

This is a great way to get freebies!  You can offer the service of reviews and giveaways on your blog.  For example, if you run a fitness website you could offer a fitness club to give away a free gym membership and in return they can either pay you for doing a review or they will also provide you with the free product/service.  Word of mouth is one of the most common and successful advertising strategies so if a well-known blogger with substantial followers writes a blog discussing how happy they were with a product or service, brands consider this highly valuable and are usually willing to pay or provide you with lots of free products.