Monetizing Your Website
Make Money Online and Increase Your Website Revenue
Building and operating a professional website costs money.
If you cannot attribute some revenue to your website then what is
point of maintaining it and paying for it every month? Many small businesses
want a website that will help them attract new customers or clients. This article
discusses ways of getting more people to come to your site which results in
more exposure for your company's products and services.
Other companies are looking for some revenue in addition to their own
products and services. If you are interested in creating a website that will
generate some cash on its own then you will definitely want to learn about
the advertising, marketing, and affiliate sales options discussed in this article.
Traffic, Visitors, Pageviews
The key to generating revenue on your site is traffic.
As you read the articles in the Website and SEO Planning Guide, you may
notice a common theme - all conversations about websites eventually
come back to the topic of search engine optimization (SEO). At the risk
of being annoying I will continue to harp on good SEO because I simply
cannot emphasize enough the importance your website's content being
highly optimized for search engines.
Good SEO = Free Traffic.
Check out some of the articles
on this site for detailed discussions of how to develop an SEO
strategy for your website and how to implement it and measure the results.
If you don't have a steady flow of visitors on your site every month,
then you will not be able to rely on it as a source of revenue for your
company. Getting information about how much money websites are
making from certain traffic levels is not easy since some affiliate
programs don't allow this type of reporting. Also, if you do find some
site reporting these figures, you will have no way of verifying if the
numbers are real and accurate.
Website traffic can be measured in many ways but the most common
measurements are the number of "visitors" per month and the number
of "pageviews" per month. The number of visitors per month is basically
the total number of times people come to your site in a month, it includes
new and repeat visitors. The number of pageviews is the number of pages
that people viewed or the number of links, including your internal links,
to your site that people clicked on in a month.
If someone visits your site, then that will count as one pageview,
and if they click 3 of your internal links during their "visit" then you will end
up with a total of 4 pageviews for that 1 visit. It makes sense that your
revenue should increase as your visits and pageviews increase.
Your first goal in generating website revenue is to get people to
visit your site. This can be accomplished in a number of ways:
- Search engine optimization (SEO) to bring traffic via organic search results
- Directory Listings
- Posting breif stories and article summaries on user
driven social content / media sites like Digg and Slashdot
- Blogging on topics related to your site content and including your website links in the blog entries or your signature
- Submitting article summaries to press release and news sites that are related to your site's content
- Pay per click advertising
- Other forms of paid advertising
Your second goal to improve your website revenue is to get people to
stay longer when they visit your site. If you can get visitors to stick around
and view more of your pages, hopefully they will either signup for a membership,
buy your product, or click on some of the affiliate links and advertisements on your site.
Getting people to stay longer is where the quality of the content,
visual design, and ease of use of your website come in to play.
If your content really captivates people then they more likely to
read more of your articles or look at more of your products.
If your website design is cool and visually pleasing, you can expect
users to check out a few of your pages before they bail. If your site is
really useful then people may bookmark it and come back from time to
time to see what's new - this is great for you because it means that
you are establishing some user loyalty and that means that you are
doing something right.