At some vague level, we all understand that websites somehow make money. Obviously the ads are involved somehow, but what exactly creates a success blog or website monetization strategy? You can’t simply begin blogging about their daily commute & what you had for dinner then slap a few advertisements and expect to get rich. But if you’re serious about making money online, you can research & create a strategy to monetize a website or blog that will pay off and allow you write about things you’re interested in.
Identify your Website Topic:
Identify the subjects and topics you enjoy: The first step to take inventory of your interests. You can’t be an effective writer about a topic that simply doesn’t interest you. See more about this in “Write what you love”
Identify busy and valuable keywords within the topic: Busy keywords are ones that people search for a lot. The more often a keyword on your website is searched for, the more often you will get a visitor. A tool like Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool can show you approximate monthly search totals, and it can even show you in a relative sense how much advertisers are paying for these keywords.
Find the “Hot Product:”
Use Keyword Analysis and Sales Research: Study the keywords with high search traffic and high advertising competition. Find out what the advertisers are selling, and look for direct-sales programs that allow website publishers to monetize their websites with referral links and compensation tied to sales. Ideally, the “hot product” is something that is actually useful to the customer. If you try to sell snake-oil, you won’t be able to build a long term business out of it.
Create the Website or Blog:
Write content expanding on the valuable keywords: Establish the website and you, the author, as an expert worth reading on the topic. If you picked the right topic, you’ll already have the niche-knowledge required to accomplish this, so you just need to build up the site with content and back links.
Write content related to “hot product” keywords: Once your monetization options are open, do some more keyword research for the actual product you’re trying to sell. Find out what long-tail versions of this product name are common searches, and which ones indicate that a surfer is more inclined to make a purchase. Write content related to the product keywords.
This isn’t exactly rocket science, but no one really spells it out either. I’ve been figuring out this path and stumbling along it for a while now, and after a lot of hard work I can finally call it a full-time occupation. It can be tough making the transition to relying fully on a website or blog’s income to pay bills, but a little creative effort, focused planning, and a lot of late nights can make it happen.
Leave a Reply