“How Do I Make Money Online?”
PART #3
I created this mega-article as a special free gift - to give a helping hand to anyone who is asking the question "How do I make money online?" There's no catch! This article is completely free - and is, essentially, an ultra-condensed version of what you will find in the 99-page Internet section of my 330-page eBook. However, make no mistake - the information in this article packs a punch! I've done my best to make it the ultimate summary of the current playing field. If you apply these principles well, they could get you off to a very good start with making money on the web. If you like what you find here and are serious about learning more about how to make money online - check out my eBook. Enjoy! - Alex Newman, January 2009 ***** This article on making money online is divided into four separate PDFs: PART #1 - TRAFFIC PART #2 - CONTENT PART #3 - MONETIZATION PART #4 - TWELVE "RULES OF THUMB" THAT I LIVE BY Read / download the other three parts now - absolutely free - at: http://www.money-while-you-sleep.biz/how-do-i-make-money-online.html *****
PART #3 - MONETIZATION
Ok. So you have the content and the traffic strategies down. You are getting visitors. Now you need to capitalize on these visitors and make sure you are getting the maximum return on your investments. (Note - if you are selling your own products, you may well be working the other way round and designing a traffic / content / advertising system to suit the products you have already envisaged or created. Ultimately, there are no hard and fast rules as to what you must begin with; but it is usually good to design the whole system before you begin - and make sure that it is coherent. (I have discussed this in part #2 - content - in the section on "campaign synergy.")
Ways to monetize your traffic can be broken down into the three below. 1) Selling your own products. The best products to sell online are typically digital downloads. This is because they cost practically nothing to replicate, nothing to ship, nothing to store, and you can you can sell unlimited numbers of them without the need for a second print run! The other thing worth noting about products, is that if you create incredible products, you can get others to do the work of sending you the traffic! So if the product is a hot seller, you can for example investigate the possibility of acquiring affiliates. In such a case, however, you will need to set up the monetization and marketing system first and be able to demonstrate some success selling your own products. Affiliates are always looking for the best converting products - and if you are going to go after them you will need to develop top quality advertising and make the system as "plug and play" as possible from their point of view. 2) Promoting your own services. Of course, this only applies if you are a professional in a service industry of some kind. Typically, professionals hire others to build their web sites. However, you can achieve an advantage if your site goes a step beyond being just an "advertising brochure" and has some useful, related, free information or products for visitors. 3) Advertising. I always think of the monetization part as the easy part. This is because with the modern generation of advertising systems, you don't really need your own products any more. You don't need products, manufacturing, shipping, product returns, or any of those things. You don't even necessarily need to create the advertising materials! Fact is, you don't need to get your hands dirty at all, if you have the traffic. There are now some beautifully elegant systems out there for converting web site visitors into money. There are countless advertising systems out there. From the old favorite Google Adsense through to CPA (Cost Per Action) and other affiliate offers - the number of ways to monetize a site through advertising is pretty much unlimited. The good thing about Google Adsense is that Google's advanced algorithms automatically place ads which are related to your content. You provide the traffic - and they will bring the party. Such "content-matching" systems are a minority but there are several others out there. Other systems often require that you select advertisements yourself from what is on offer and you will of course want to match the ads to your content in order to get the best clickthrough and conversion rates. This will mean that you should test various ad systems and ad placements on the page to ascertain the top performers. And there can be a huge difference in performance. Some of these systems are fantastically simple to install. Let's take a few examples that I use on many of my sites: Kontera, Widgetbucks and Neverblue Ads. In each case, the method is similar. You sign up with the company; there are usually a few logistics such as W9 taxpayer information to deal with - and then they review your sites (this is why it's good to get the content and traffic first) ; if you are approved, you can choose the ads to place on your page and they give you snippets of code. You drop the code into the relevant part of the page and boom! You can start making money, either when the ads are
clicked by visitors or when they perform some other action (typically submitting information to a company or buying a product). If you have high traffic - implement a system such as Kontera and you will start making money, pretty much overnight. That's why I think of this as the easy part. Each of these advertising systems keeps statistics of campaign performance and there are numerous ways to tweak your campaigns to maximize your online earnings. One of the interesting things about monetization systems is that there are always ways you can tweak your campaigns. Whether it is experimenting with placement of ads on the page, or trying out different ads, there's always something to do. I would suggest, however, to put your energy into getting the traffic. Messing around with ad placement etc can make a real difference to revenue... but if you're only earning two bucks a day off the site, you're wasting time. Concentrate first on getting the number of visitors really high - and then not only will your tweaks make significant difference, but because of the higher volume of data, your statistics will be more meaningful anyway. Trying to optimize campaign performance when you only have low-volume statistics, is a frustrating exercise - and the more data you have, the less the unpredictability. One thing I like about Neverblue's system is that you can implement what's called a "banner ad rotator". Let's say you like the look of five different campaigns but are not sure which will perform best on your site. You can create a "rotator script" with a few mouse clicks and they will automatically provide the code that changes the ad every time the page is viewed. So, essentially, this is a free form of split testing! You simply let the rotator run for a while, look at your stats, and keep the best performing ads, discarding the others. END OF PART #3 ***** This article on making money online is divided into four separate PDFs: PART #1 - TRAFFIC PART #2 - CONTENT PART #3 - MONETIZATION PART #4 - TWELVE "RULES OF THUMB" THAT I LIVE BY Read / download the other three parts now - absolutely free - at: http://www.money-while-you-sleep.biz/how-do-i-make-money-online.html ***** © Alex Newman 2009
DISCLAIMER: “How Do I Make Money Online?” by Alex Newman (“This Article”) is provided for the purposes of general information, ideas and entertainment - and is not to be considered as, or as a substitute for, specific business advice or any other form of professional advice. No guarantee is made as to the accuracy, timeliness, usefulness or profitability of This Article and its contents, nor of the suitability of This Article and its contents for any purpose whatsoever – and Alex Newman (“The Writer”) specifically disclaims all liability arising in
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