PPC

A Year Learning Website Monetisation

31st October 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

I remember that I read somewhere that it would be easy to set up a travel blog and make money from it, which kind of got me started on this whole adventure in the first place.

So over this last year, I’ve been furiously looking into what it takes to monetise a website or a blog and the different strategies you can employ to create an ongoing stream of revenue.

3 Things I learned about Website Monetisation in 2016

I was really keen to find out how that’s possible and whether I could do the same thing, so here are the key things I’ve learned this year

Keyword Research Is Key

If you’re going to start a blog or a website then you have to remember that this is a huge investment of your time, so you really need to get an idea of whether this is going to make you any money at all before you head off writing content.

The first thing that you’re going to need to do is to research a niche.

I’ve written about this in detail before, but they key is finding a niche that:

• You’re interested in

• Has low competition and high volume keywords

• Is a broad enough niche that you can potentially expand this into an authority site in the long term

Get any of these things wrong and you’re going to end up with a blog that is going to be nothing but hard work giving you very little in return.

For any website venture that you’re about to start on I would recommend that you invest up to a month in planning the growth of your website.

• Create a keyword matrix and identify long tail keywords that you will target initially and higher volume keywords that you might want to target in the future

• Consider how your site is going to generate revenue. Are you going to be using Adsense, Amazon Affiliates or other affiliate programmes to earn your bucks?

• Check out the competition in your niche and look at how you could potentially improve what they have created

• Think about how much time your website will take to manage in the future and whether this could be outsourced. The worse thing is that if your site becomes really popular and you have set up systems where you need to be involved in all parts of the business, then the more popular it gets, the more of your time it will use

You can’t Take Shortcuts

Unfortunately, there are no real shortcuts that you can take to building up a successful website.

I’ve read a lot about Grey and Black Hat SEO tricks such as using Private Blog Networks, however, whilst these might get you success in the short term, in the longer term you’re likely to get banned from Google, and ruin your business.

If something looks too good to be true like a gig on Fiverr promising 50 top quality links for $5, then you know it’s going to be dodgy so steer clear.

Yes, there is nothing for it, but hard work and putting in the hours initially.

You’re going to need to write a lot of your content to develop your own voice, manage your own website and then most importantly learn how to market your website and generate traffic, all of which can be hugely time-consuming.

On top of this, you can’t expect instant results as your new website will go into Google’s sandbox and won’t start ranking for 3 – 6 months anyway.

Content is King and Links Are the Queen

The days where you could just throw up an article of a few hundred words for niche keywords and expect to rank easily are long gone.

Now you’ll need to put a lot more work and thought into this.

The content that you generate will need to be:

• Unique (Either a fresh idea or a vast improvement on existing content)

• Interesting (Needs to be made shareable)

• In-depth (Minimum of 1000 words per article)

• Answer a question / Solve a problem

The digital landscape is now so crammed full of content for every conceivable subject, you’ll even find in depth 2000+ word reviews of toilet seats, so you have to make sure your content sticks out somehow.

Once you’ve written this killer content, the hardest part is generating links to this content, which seems to be the biggest single factor in 2016 for ranking your content.

There are plenty of strategies all over the internet on how to do this, but once again, this will just consume a lot of your time.

What Did I Achieve?

On a positive note I have to say that I achieved a great deal in this sphere over the last year:

• I set up 2 websites, www.mylifestyledream.com and a niche website

• I have learned a good understanding of SEO and different tactics

• I’ve learned a lot about internet marketing

• I’ve learned about affiliate marketing and the different tactics that people use to monetize websites

Overall I’ve got a great foundation now in both my knowledge and my websites to build on over the next year.

I haven’t been able to focus as much of my time as I wanted to on the niche website, but plan to switch focus back on to this next year.

Low Light of the Year

I think I’ve found a great niche with low competition keywords, however, it’s not the most exciting niche and is quite hard to write articles for.

I’ve written about 8 so far, however, have kind of lost heart a little bit, because even though some of the keywords that I am targeting are sub 20 Keyword Competitiveness, I still don’t rank in the top 100 for these keywords, which I find really bizarre.

I think the answer to this problem, is that I just need to put in more work, build out more articles and start my link building activities then the site should start to grow in traffic.

Highlight of the Year

The best thing for me with building out these sites has to be the amount that I have learned about SEO.

I find this dark art really interesting and is definitely something that I want to learn more about and spend more time perfecting in the future.

How much Time did I spend?

With a full time job in front of a computer screen, I’ve also needed to research and practice these 3 ways to make money online as well as write about them, all of which takes a huge amount of time.

In reality I’ve needed to just focus on one thing at a time, or free up more time, which I intend to do next year.

How much Money Did I make?

A big fat £0

In fact, by the time I take hosting and themes and domain names into account I’ve probably invested about £150 so far.

However, I feel that I’ve put in a lot of the groundwork with which to monetize these sites in the future.

Was It Worth the Effort?

Yes, absolutely. I feel that I’ve started a new path that I’m interested in and could potentially reap rewards in the future.

Out of all the things I’ve looked at this is most likely to be the idea that comes closest to giving me real passive income in the future.

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/