How to Monetize

How to properly monetize a web site. Monetize for those of you who may not know means to make money from.

1st thing is to assess your goals, where your traffic comes from, and your long term goals. Is your goal to make lots of money, a little money, or no money. If you are doing this as a hobby you may not be looking to cash in, right? What are your long term goals? Are you trying to build up a user base and then monetize? Where does your traffic come from? Does it come from people typing in your url because they know and love your site, or is it mostly search engine referral traffic?

Traffic Sources

All of these are important questions, ill explain my reasoning on this issue.

If your goal is to make lots of money, and your traffic is nearly 100% from search engine referrals, and you have no long term goal for the site. You will want to load your site up with ads. This will help you quickly capitilize on your traffic, and since you will most likely never see the user again try your hardest to make a quick $ off of them.

If your goal is to make a great site, your traffic mostly comes from return visitors, and your goal is to be the best resource in your field. Then you want to use minimal ads, that are very related to your niche.

These are 2 very different examples/approaches to advertising.  It’s your job to figure out what you want from your site. Have a game plan of some sort.

The next big question is what to monetize with? Do you integrate Google adsense, chitika, infolinks, tribal fusion ads? Do you sign up for an affiliate account at affiliate.com or regnow.com ? Do you sell ad space on buysellads.com ? If you are looking to make money the answer is yes.

There are 3 basic types of ads. CPC Ads, CPM Ads, and CPA Ads. CPC stands for cost per click and in this model you get paid when someone clicks on an advert and is directed to another site. In the CPM model you get paid a flat rate per 1,000 views. If your page serves up 5,000 ad views and your are getting a flat $1.00 cpm then you just made $5. In the CPA or cost per action model you only get paid when someone performs a specific task. This task could be registering, buying a product, or signing up for a newsletter.

All in all monetizing a site is a little complex. If however you break it down and figure out what your goals are, then it becomes easier.

Hopefully you can use this model to help monetize or not monetize your site. Thanks for reading.
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