Website Monetization

My Website Dream : Chapter 1 : Making a Website

24th November 2015 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Wow, I have to admit, that was one heck of a month and I feel that I have learnt an awful amount of stuff around my key topic of how to make money online. I also gave up drinking for a month as part of ‘Go Sober for October’, so I had an incredible amount of energy and ideas flowing, that it was actually difficult to try and focus on my core themes.

Focus

Well, I’ve obviously taken the first few steps and started up www.mylifestyledream.com and even though I’ve worked in Digital Media for the past 15 years, I’ve realised this month that there is soooo much to learn and that if you want to do things well, then you’re going to have to invest a lot of time into it.

The other thing I’ve learned is that even though there is a lot to learn, it is actually really exciting stuff, and you find that because all of your efforts are going towards your own business, you will have a lot more drive and enthusiasm to learn and create. In fact, the hardest thing that I have found this month is deciding what to focus on as there are so many things I want to learn and master right now!!!

WordPress Set Up

Getting WordPress up and running was really simple and painless and I’ve described the process in my article: Setting up a Website – 3 Simple Steps

It was really tempting to start messing around with lots of different plugins, themes and bells and whistles, but for now my goal was to get the basics in place and move on to more valuable things. My thoughts were that I can easily come back and make changes once I have the core of the site up and running.

Keyword Research

After going through and setting up the basics of this website, the main curve ball that has taken up most of my time this month has been keyword research.I hadn’t actually thought about this much before at all, and the more I read about it, the more valuable I realise this subject is. The key learning that I have taken away from this month is that you really, really should try to understand your market before you head off writing articles and basing your whole business on a whim that you might have had.

Doing detailed keyword research really helps you to understand whether there is a market at all, how many visitors you think you could get for a potential market and most importantly what your potential returns will be. You’ll probably find that the market that you thought you could enter is already saturated with high ranking sites, that you’re never going to compete with, so you need to look at alternative strategies.

The best approach that I have found this month is focused on ‘Long Tail Keywords’. These are keywords that have less traffic and less competition for them, but means that you are more likely to be able to rank well for them. Rank well for a number of these long tail keywords and your site will start making money.

For example, you might be passionate about ‘Basket weaving’ but you will find that this keyword is heavily competitive and will be difficult for you to get onto the first page in Google. The long tail approach would mean that you would curate articles specifically around similar topics but your keywords (typically 3+ words) would be things like “A beginners guide to basket weaving” or “What are the most popular basket weaves”.

I’ve written an article on this, but have to say that my head nearly exploded this month, trying to figure out what I should target for both this website, and other website ideas that I have.

All of this keyword research led me on to the concept of ‘Niche Websites’, which I hadn’t really come across before either, but is another great way to make money online. This all backs off of the idea of doing keyword research to uncover niche markets that have a decent amount of traffic, low competition for the Top 10 slots on Google, and are sought after by advertisers.

The idea is that you then set up a basic website specifically targeted at that niche and make money through the Adwords banners that you put on the site. This is a really exciting angle that I am dying to get started on soon, but will probably need to focus on this a little further down the line. If you’re interested in learning more about this then I’d recommend heading over to http://www.nichepursuits.com/ and following the Niche Site Project 2, where you are taken through a series of tutorials on how to set up a Niche website that makes you over $500 a month.

There are some great tools out there as well that can help you with your keyword research and I signed up to trial versions of Long Tail Pro and SECockpit, both of which can give you invaluable data that you need to start your websites, but be warned, you are likely to sink hours of your life into this activity, which is often compared to sifting for gold to find the right keywords.

Website Hacked!

The other key thing that I’ve learned this month is about WordPress security. I previously ran another website for many years on Drupal, that never had any issues, but to my surprise one of my test sites got hacked last week. I’m still not really sure what happened, as I just set up a test instance of WordPress on one of my domains in my hosting account and then got alerted from my hosting company that I may be involved in some kind of phishing scam! Needless to say, I deleted my test accounts as soon as possible and then beefed up the security on my other sites.

Summary

I definitely see potential online income streams from setting up niche sites in the future, which looks like a great revenue model to help me with my lifestyle dream of travelling the world and working as little as possible. I like the concept of doing some hard work up front to set up something that will continually reap you rewards for months after. Feels a little bit like digital gardening!

The only downside at the moment is that there is sooo much to learn and it is so time-consuming, without providing any short-term financial reward. Some potential other online income streams that have come out this month are looking at affiliate sites for Amazon products and the concept of drop shipping…. But we’ll save them for a later date

Next Month’s Goals

Finalise the structure of www.mylifestyledream.com (At the moment I can’t decide whether to have a site based on posts which are structured by categories and tags, or a more traditional page based site)
Choose a suitable theme (I need to understand more about themes and how they can be customised, because I can already see the limitations of my simple ‘Atomic’ theme that I am currently using)
Understand backlinking strategy (As soon as I have got the core of my site together I am going to need to start generating traffic towards it)

Tools and Sites Used:

How do you Make Money from a Website?

24th November 2015 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Internet millionaires have sprung up everywhere, but have you ever wondered how do you make money from a website or blog?

You may have read about people who have set up successful blogs and are living off of the proceeds of these digital goldmines. Well I expect you’ve also wondered, ‘How do websites or blogs actually make money?’

The truth is there are a variety of strategies and methods of doing this, but in this article we are only going to look at 2 key areas, that will help the money flow into your piggybank once you have set up a successful website:

Pay Per Click Advertising
Affiliate Marketing

Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)

Do a few searches in Google and you will inevitably come across a site, which has a Pay Per Click banner, usually prominently positioned towards to the top of the page.

For example if I do a quick search for ‘Asian Cuisine’ then pretty much every site on the first page of Google has a PPC ad banner included. Examples of these are shown below:

People are making money from websites using different advertising programmes such as Google’s Adsense programme.

The idea behind this is all about ‘contextual advertising’ and providing advertisements targeted towards the content that the user is searching for.

For example there may be a company that has just released a new brand of wok, so they’re going to want to advertise on a website related to the content, in this case ‘Asian Cuisine’.

The advertiser will use something called Google Adwords ,where they bid in an auction style to have their ads shown on sites and pages, which rank well for a particular keyword. So for each keyword like ‘Asian Cuisine’ they put in a price that they are willing to pay Google every time that someone clicks on the banner. This is often referred to as the ‘Cost per Click’ or ‘CPC’.

The website will need to sign up to the Google Adsense programme, and then dedicate a section of it’s site to display the Google Adwords advertisements. Depending on which keyword the page ranks well for, depends on which advertisements are displayed here.

The advertiser pays a fee to Google for placing its add and every click through received
Google receives a commission for every click (32%)
The website receives a commission for every click (Currently 68%)

So you can see already, that if you have a popular website receiving a lot of traffic for a keyword that advertisers want to display their ads on then you can receive a steady stream of income.

Example Earnings

In the case above, the keyword ‘wok’ has a cost per click of ‘£0.86’ and has 8100 monthly searches in the UK.

Lets assume you got number 1 position in Google for this. This would mean that approximately 32% of visitors who search for the keyword ‘wok’ would click through to your site from the search results page = 2592 visitors per month coming to your site.

Lets then assume for this example that you get a click through rate (CTR) of 5% – so out of your 2592 visitors, only 5% will click on one of the Google Ads on your sit = Approx 130 visitors per month will click on the ad.

This brings in a total revenue of £111.80 per month (130 x £0.86 )

However, after Google has taken its cut this leaves you with a grand total of £76 per month

Now, this may not sound like an insane amount of revenue, however, if you multiple this across a number of keywords and potentially a number of sites, then the numbers start to add up.

I’ve written another article specifically around keyword research, that goes a lot deeper into this topic, but there are 3 key factors that you need to look at:

How many visits per month does the keyword receive?
What is the value (CPC) for each keyword?
How easy is it for you to rank in the Top 10 in Google for this keyword?

This is definitely something worth looking at an there is a whole industry in creating ‘niche websites’, which focus solely on making money through advertising, but we’ll come back to them in another article.

Things to remember

AdWords is the programme that advertisers use to promote their products and
AdSense is the publishing network, which pushes the AdWord advertisements to the relevant websites
AdChoices is just a link on the advertising unit to find out more information about the advertising network and how to set your advertising preferences.

Affiliate Marketing

What is affiliate Marketing?

According to our friends at Wikipedia, affiliate marketing is “a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.”

In laymans terms this means that you get paid for promoting someone else’s product on your blog or website.

Usually this works by placing an ad or affiliate link on your site, which links to the affiliates site where the visitor will either enter the purchase funnel for a product or register for a service.

The affiliate links on your site will have your own id so you track the user through the purchase funnel and will usually receive a percentage of whatever they spend on the site.

There are usually 3 types of affiliate marketing programmes available:

Cost Per Sale (CPA)
This is where the visitor who is referred to the affiliate then goes ahead and purchase a product or service from the affiliate, and receive a percentage of the sale in commission

Cost Per Lead (CPL)
This is when the user of your site is then taken to the affiliates site where they complete some kind of form. This could be as simple as leaving your email address or as complex as filling out a longer survey, but each time this is fulfilled on the affiliates site, you will receive a commission

Cost Per Click (CPC)
We discussed this earlier with Google Adsense, but in this case, this is where you get a commission from the affiliate as soon as they click through from your website and land on the affiliates website

How do I become an affiliate?

In most cases there are no barriers to entry to joining an affiliate programme. You simply need to:

1 – Find an affiliate programme that is related to your product.
You can either do this by joining one of the affiliate networks that a lot of the big brands use like Commission Junction or you can try searching for an independent affiliate programme (Just type in ” [your topic] affiliate”)

2 – Join the affiliate programme and create your unique affiliate links.
Am example of a Commission Junction link would be:
http://www.samplesite.comt/click-123456-789789

In this example, the number ‘123456’ will be your affiliate site ID and the number ‘789789’ will be the destination page on the affiliate site

3 – Add your affiliate links to your site
Try to avoid plastering these all over your site and only add them in places, which will be useful to your visitors. Otherwise your visitors will get annoyed and you’ll end up with loads of affiliate links, but no-one to look at them!

Setting up affiliate links on your site really is as simple as that, but of course, they key is getting enough relevant traffic to your site in the first place to click on those links. If you haven’t done it yet have a quick squizz over my Keyword Planner article, which gives some useful tips in getting the right traffic to your website or blog.

So how much can I earn through my affiliate links?

Well, how long is a piece of rope??? This depends on so many factors that it’s hard to put an estimate on this, however, there are some things that will help you get a feel for the type of online earnings you will be taking home

1) How much traffic is coming to your site, to pages where you have the affiliate links?

2) Earnings per click (EPC)
You should be able to get this from most affiliate programmes and is a simple formula (Commissions received divided by referral clicks), which tells you how many of your visitors that you send to the affiliate programme go on to purchase. For example if you send 100 visitors to a site and 1 person purchases something worth £10, then you have an EPC of £0.10

3) Average Order Value (AOV)
This isn’t freely available with all affiliate programmes but if you can get the information it is a useful metric to understand your potential earnings.

4) Commission Levels
The amount that an affiliate is willing to pay your varies wildly between products and affiliate programmes. It can be as much as 50% for some digital products, but generally, it will be a lot less than that.

Your first Top Tips for Affiliate Marketing:

We’ll look into affiliate marketing in more detail in a later article but some of the key rules are:

Only ever promote products that you are genuinely interested in or would buy yourself
Don’t try to sell the products, but recommend them instead
Make sure that any affiliate links are placed in the right context. They should be related to the theme of the article, rather than just strewn around your site
Always be clear that you are getting a commission from these links

Resources

http://websitesetup.org/33-ways-to-monetize-website/

My Website Dream : Introduction

24th October 2015 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

For sure there are ways to make money online from a website. At the moment I have no idea of how to do that, so this series of blog posts is going to explore this topic and look at what is involved in setting up an running a successful website.

I’ve worked in the digital space for the past 15 years so I have a good enough understanding of websites and digital technologies. I’ve also run a small online business in the past selling Snuff Tobacco when the smoking ban was introduced in 2007. This was a really useful exercise in learning how to set up a website and how to run a small business. I didn’t make a fortune out of it and packing up all of those orders became quite labour intensive, so I eventually closed it down a couple of years ago.

What I did notice from that experience is the power of the internet and if you can tap into the right market and provide the right product at the right time, then you can make a lot of money.

In this series of blog posts I want to look at some of the different ways that you can make money from a website and see how I can grow that income over time. One thing that I know very little about at the moment is making money through advertisements on a website and how to make money with affiliate marketing, so I will be exploring these themes as I go along.

I don’t want to dive too deep into the mechanics of setting up and running a website as there are lots of really great resources out there already, but I will give you practical tips on things that I have found useful from my experiences.

I’ve never used WordPress before, but have heard a lot of good things about it recently and am looking for something that is easy to set up and use. The last thing that I want to do at the moment is get tied up in coding, as I’m sure that I’d sink many, many hours into that particular rabbit hole, with potentially very small reward.

My efforts are going to focus on www.mylifestyledream.com and I may potentially look at setting up another example site to see where that leads us.

Some of the initial themes that I am going to look into and learn about are:

SEO
Content Marketing
Affiliate Marketing

Each month I’ll give you updates of what I’ve worked on that month, provide links to any cool articles or resources and hopefully we all get to learn from my mistakes.

First 3 Ideas to Make Money Online

23rd October 2015 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

So I’ve got loads of ideas going around in my head of things that I want to try out, but having a full time job, means I’m time poor at the moment so I need one key thing…. Focus!

I’ve already started looking at a few ways of making a location-free living, so here’s a quick summary of the top 3 ideas standing out at the moment:

Social Trading

If you haven’t heard of it, this is a relatively new phenomenon that has developed over the last few years, which allows you to copy the trades that traders themselves are performing on the stock market, currencies, indices and commodities.

The idea is quite simple…You don’t need to understand a lot about any of these things, because it’s the traders that you’re investing in.

You can see detailed stats of each trader’s performance, which helps you to filter and choose who you invest in. When you ‘copy’ a trader the programme will automatically mirror the trades that the trader has done, but only proportionally to the money you invest.

There are a number of Social Trading platforms out there, but the one I’m starting with is Etoro, which has a very straightforward usable interface, and is ideal for beginners.

Blogging

I love writing, I’ve worked with websites for many years and I believe that there’s definitely a good lifestyle to be had by running a successful blog or website.

I’m going to take you through all of the basic steps to setting up a website, and then gradually molding it into a hopefully profitable venture, that will help me towards the lifestyle I’m looking for.

Matched Betting

My Dad always says, “There’s nothing free in life son!” and most of the time he is right and there’s usually a catch.

However, on the face of it, this idea looks like it is a risk free way of earning a few pounds with minimal input.

Again, it’s a simple idea, where you take advantage of the plethora of free bets that the different Online Betting Shops are advertising. You place one free bet on the outcome of the event happening, and another bet (in a different account) backing that this event will not happen. If the odds are very close to each other then you will win one bet, and lose the other one, but the difference between the two bets will only be very small BUT you get to keep the value of the original free bet.

So I’m going to focus on these 3 ideas to start with over the next couple of months, and see if we can start filling up that Dream Fund!

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