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How To Make Money From Your Website Or
Blog In Seven Easy Steps!
by Jay Neuman
. Print Friendly Version
This article is an excerpt from: The Complete Internet Marketer: A Practical
Guide To Everything You Need To Know About Marketing Online
Earning money from your content website or blog is easier than you might
think. Being successful at it is a matter of creating partnerships. This article
shows how to create those partnerships. Companies are offering products and
services for sale over the Internet. For them, one of the most effective ways of
reaching potential customers is to get their message out on highly targeted
websites and blogs. For most of those businesses, their products and services
are offering a genuine benefit to customers who purchase them. There are
many people and businesses out there who need what they have to offer.
This is where your content website or blog comes in.
In most cases, a content website or blog is providing information, resources and
advice on a very specific topic. Internet Marketers call this content. That
content is being delivered to a highly targeted niche audience. The same niche
audience is very likely to need or want products and services related to the
topics being discussed on the website or blog. As a website owner or blogger,
one of your jobs is to create partnerships between the visitors to your website
and the companies who offer products and services they need or want. When
you can do this successfully, you will be offering a benefit to both. You will earn
sales commissions in the process.
This is how you make money.
The secret to successfully making money from your content website or blog is
found in following these seven easy steps.
A blog is actually a bare bones content website. To make it easier to read, the
term “website” will be used in the remainder of this guide to refer to both.
Step 1:
Reach Your Niche
The first step to making money from your website is to define who your target
audience is. Then you must design your content to reach that target. This can
be summed up in one word: Focus! Content websites are effective when they
are highly targeted and focused.
This requires some further explanation.
1. Define Your Target Audience and Focus on Them
First, if you intend to make money from your website, you must realize that the
website is not for you. It is for your target audience. This may be old news to
some. But for many, it is something they just never thought about. You are
passionate about something and decide to create a website about it. It is only
natural that you will write it from your perspective and include things of interest
to you. That does not mean other people will be interested in it. You must do
some research into who will be interested in your website. Find out what topics
they are interested in. Find out what will keep their interest and what will turn
them off. Then develop content and write articles targeted to their needs and
wants.
As a general rule, the more targeted the content of your website is, the more
useful people will find it.
2. Make a Good First Impression
Second, you must win them over on the first impression. When people first find
your website, it will likely be because they were searching for a topic that your
website seemed to address. If you are successful in getting them to click
through to your website, you will only have a few seconds before they decide if
it is what they want. You must grab their attention and prove your value to
them with the very first content they see. You can only do this by knowing who
your target audience is and what they will want.
3. Have User-Friendly Navigation
Third, you must make it easy for people to find things on the website. Once
again, this is part of the change in perspective that takes place when you go
from building a site for yourself to building one for a target audience. You know
where information is on the website. But your audience probably does not. You
must take some time to design a user-friendly navigation that makes it easy for
people to find the information that interests them.
4. Bring Them Back
Fourth, you must give them a reason to keep coming back to your website. For
a blog, the most important thing you can do is to post new entries on the
schedule you set. If your blog is interesting to people, they will keep coming
back if they can trust that a new post will be there. For content sites, having
fresh content of course is important. Just as important is to have a set of
informational resources your site users find useful. They will come back when
they have a need they think your resources will help them meet.
Step 2:
Optimize for Search Engines
Once you have deigned your website to meet the needs and wants of a targeted
niche audience, then you must get them to your website. The most important
way to do this is through search engines. To make money from your website,
you must have a strong search engine strategy. Reaching your target audience
through search engines is done in two ways: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). See Chapter 6 for a detailed discussion on
search engines.
1. Search Engine Optimization
Every content website that hopes to make money by serving ads must optimize
the website for search engines. Search engine optimization (known as SEO) is
organizing the content on your web pages so search engines find them and list
them at the top of their search results. The most important thing to do is to find
out what terms your target audience are likely to be searching for, then make
sure those words show up on your website. SEO is discussed in detail in
Chapter 6.
2. Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing (known as SEM) is paying to have sponsored links
appear on search engines. Many profitable content websites advertise on search
engines to get traffic to their website. SEM can only be a profitable means of
gaining site traffic when you make more money by the paid click-thrus to the
ads on your site than you pay for the search engine click-thrus. The most
important thing is to calculate the breakeven point where you earn more from
conversions than you pay for search engine traffic. Then only pay for sponsored
links where you exceed your breakeven number. SEM is discussed in detail in
Chapter 6. Calculating your return on investment is explained in Chapter 1.
Step 3:
Choose Ads to Serve
The way you are going to make money from your website is to place ads on
your site that your target audience will respond to. The next step is to decide
what ads you want to place. To be successful, this requires some research. The
key to success is to find ads for products and services that are complementary
to the content on your website. Think of your website as offering advice or
information about a topic you are an expert in. When people come to your
website, they look up to you as a trusted source of help. While they are on your
website, they will be receptive to suggestions you make about products and
services that are related to the topic of your site.
For example, you may have a website about maintaining an active life as a
senior citizen. People coming to your website may be interested in things like
senior discounts on travel packages. In fact, if you can give a personal
recommendation about a specific travel company, they are likely to become
loyal customers of that company, based on your recommendation. On the other
hand, there is no particular reason they would be interested in buying a new
computer. You may get a high per-click payout or affiliate commission from the
computer store. But, you will not get a high response to the ad. In fact,
displaying the ad will cause your site to lose credibility in the eyes of some of
your customers. They will think you are just trying to sell things and are not
really serious about providing genuine advice.
You also need to decide what type of ads to serve. In general, you will want to
choose between serving paid search listings from one of the major search
engines or participating in an affiliate program. These are the most effective
and easiest ways for a small website owner to monetize their website. You can
also simply sell ad real estate on your website through an ad server network.
This requires much more effort to be successful. For a small website it is not
recommended.
1. Serve Paid Search Listings
The major search engines have made it very easy for small websites to display
paid search listing on their websites. The idea is a simple one. Search engines
make their money by displaying sponsored links along with their search results
listings. Companies have their links displayed when certain terms are searched
and then pay for clicks to those links. The reason they pay for these links is
because their products and services are related to those terms. They expect the
people searching for them to be interested in the ad.
When someone is visiting a highly targeted, niche website, they also are
demonstrating an interest in the topic of that website. If sponsored links are
displayed that are related to the topic of the website, then the visitors on the
website are also likely to be interested in the ad.
Search engines let you chose keywords that are related to the content of your
website. Then, they will display, on your website, the same sponsored links that
would be displayed when people search on those terms. For the sponsoring
company, the result is the same. People who are interested in their products
and services see the ad, and click on it. You will be paid a percentage of the
revenue the search engine gets for each click-thru.
Displaying paid search listings is extremely easy to do. It is undoubtedly the
easiest way for a small website or blog to earn money.
2. Participate in Affiliate Programs
A second way to earn money from your website or blog is to participate in
affiliate programs. Affiliate programs offer the opportunity to make much higher
revenues than paid search listings. They also require more work.
Affiliate programs are discussed in detail in Chapter 9. There are many
variations to affiliate programs. The basic idea is that websites will pay a
commission on sales generated from traffic on your website. You will research
companies offering affiliate programs who have products and services that are
complementary to the content on your website.
In the example above, “MySeniorDiscountTravelSite.com” may have an affiliate
program offering commissions on sales. To participate, “MyActiveSeniorsSite.
com” simply displays banner ads or text links on their website. When a
customer clicks on the link, it is recorded that they came from
“MyActiveSeniorsSite.com.” When the customer eventually makes a purchase, a
commission will be paid to the referring website.
Affiliate programs typically offer commissions on sales. So potential revenues
can be much higher than cost-per-click earned from paid search listings. That
also means that the participating website must do more than just get clicks. You
must also prepare visitors on your site to make a purchase after they click-thru.
This is sometimes called pre-selling.
Step 4:
Optimize Site Content for Pre-Selling
To be effective with the ads on your website, it is not enough to just display the
ads. You must integrate them into your site content so people respond to them.
Web users have a tendency to tune out advertisements on the websites they are
visiting. You must get past this barrier. The way to do it is to build the
product/service promotion into the content of the website, so it is part of the
user experience. In essence, you are creating for your site visitors a user
experience that introduces them to the products and services being promoted on
your website and that invites them to make a purchase. This can be called pre-
selling. There are three key things you must do to optimize your website
content for pre-selling.
1. Relevance
First, ads must be relevant to the content on the page where they are
displayed. The closer you can align the ad to the content, the higher your click-
thru and conversion rates will be.
Consider a web page that contains a review of the Canon Rebel digital camera.
What kind of ad would be most successful there? You could include an ad for a
consumer electronics store like Circuit City. That would be pretty good. It
would be even better if you included an ad that said something like, “Buy Digital
Cameras at Circuit City” and the ad sent customers directly to a category page
dedicated to digital cameras. Better still would be an ad that says, “Buy the
Canon Rebel XT at Circuit City” and the ad lands customers directly on the
product page for the specific product. Of course, this assumes the review is a
positive one.
2. Context
Second, ads should be built into the context of the web page where they
appear. The more closely the ad is integrated into the informational content of
the page, the more likely readers are to see it as something being
recommended by the website as a complementary resource to the article itself.
This will result in both higher click-thrus and conversions.
In the example of the Canon Rebel product review, let us assume that the
review begins on the bottom half of the page. You could place a banner ad at
the top of the web page. It would be much more effective, though, if you place
the ad on the right column of the web page directly next to the product review.
That way people see the ad while they are reading the review. Including ads in
the right hand column is a common approach. Ad real estate is separated from
page content by placing it in a separate column.
You could improve your click-thru rate by inserting a content element, that does
not look like a typical banner, inside the content of the review. The text of the
article would then wrap around the ad. The ad, in a sense, becomes part of the
product review. By taking this approach, you are giving a stronger endorsement
of the product and store than if you clearly separate the ad from the review. If
you have done your research and believe this store truly offers a good deal for
your readers, then this is a perfectly ethical thing to do. An even stronger
approach is to include a text link for the store directly in the actual body of the
review. Once again, you can increase your click-thru and conversion rates, but
are taking on a higher level of responsibility for the products and stores you are
recommending.
3. Promoting the Product/Service
Click-thru and conversion rates can be increased even further by actually
promoting the products and services within the content of the page itself. In this
case, you are clearly giving your endorsement and recommendation for the
products or services being advertised. This is pre-selling. You are consciously
writing the content of your page content with the intent of leading readers to buy
the products or services you are advertising on the page.
In the example of the Canon Rebel, a positive review of the camera is already
pre-selling the product. If you go farther and say that you researched prices
and found the best price at Circuit City, then you are also pre-selling the store.
It is not hard to see how this prepares your site visitors to become customers of
the partner store.
By taking this approach, you will send prospective customers to the merchant
website with the intent to purchase. Your website is a trusted source of
information and advice. Readers will follow your advice by purchasing the
products you endorse. You are acting as an online sales person for the store
you are promoting. This will produce the highest sales commissions for you.
This also represents the highest level of responsibility on your part. If you are
actively promoting a product or company, you must also make sure your
website readers have a good experience when they take your advice. If they do
not, you will experience a backlash. They will not only stop coming to your
website, they will spread bad news about your site to others.
Step 5:
Create a Newsletter or RSS Feed
If your website content is particularly valuable to your target audience, there is
no reason it has to stay stuck on your website. Send it out!
Many content websites are offering information, education or guidance that
people would like to receive on a regular basis. If you are able to provide
valuable information on a regular basis, then give your customers the
opportunity to receive it on their own computers. Do not make them have to
come to your website to get it.
For content websites, a common way to do this is to create a newsletter. You
can send out a monthly, or weekly email with articles, tips or other useful
information for your target audience. If it is truly useful, they will be glad for it.
Along with the content, you can include ads, just like you do on the website. If
you are careful to only advertise relevant and worthy companies, then your
customers will be happy to click on the ads and buy their products.
Another common technique for getting your word out is an RSS feed. This is
especially popular with blogs. An RSS feed is basically a small snippet of
information that gets sent to your customers’ computers. You can think of it as
a ticker tape headline. If they like what they see, they can click-thru from the
RSS feed to your website. RSS feeds are discussed in more detail in Chapter 11.
Step 6:
Create a Viral Marketing Campaign
Is your content good enough that people will want to pass it around to their
friends and colleagues? If so, you can turn it into a viral marketing campaign.
Viral marketing is simply creating something worthwhile and then giving people
the ability to forward it on to others. If it is good, people will keep forwarding it.
It spreads exponentially, like a virus. It is not a bad virus. It just spreads like
one. Thus the name.
Let us say that you have a website offering advice to Internet Marketers. You
have written an article called, “Make Money from your Website or Blog in Seven
Easy Steps!” You have posted the article on your website and monetized it with
related ads. Well, this article turns out to be pretty popular. You can put the
article into an email with a Forward-to-a-friend link. This is a basic viral
marketing campaign. People who get your email love the article and keep
sending it around to their friends and colleagues. Each time someone gets your
article, she also gets the ads that you included along with it. Bingo! You not
only make money from people coming to your website. You also can make
money by sending your content out as a viral marketing campaign.
If your article is particularly good, you may want to turn it into an eBook. Then
you can put it on free download websites. People will download the eBook and
be able to forward it along to others. You reach an even larger audience. Of
course, this only works if your eBook is good and people want to forward it to
their friends. This works the same way as your website. If your eBook is worth
reading, then people will value you as a trusted source of information. If you
include recommendations for products and services, they will be likely to click on
them.
If your motivation is to genuinely provide something useful, then you will also
check out the companies who you are advertising. If you believe they are
worthy, then the entire experience you offer your readers is a positive one. This
generates goodwill with your audience. As you continue to offer benefits to both
your audience and your advertisers, you will also be creating opportunities for
yourself to continue reaching out to them in the future.
Viral marketing campaigns are discussed in detail in Chapter 10.
Step 7:
Monitor and Improve
The final step is to monitor results and improve.
The key to continuously increasing your website revenues is to identify the
levers that impact the success of your efforts. Then you can measure
performance related to those levers and make adjustments to them. It is a
balancing act. You will learn to do it better and better as you work with it.
We have already discussed what these levers are. Your site content must be
highly targeted and useful to your target audience; otherwise people will stop
visiting your site, or never come in the first place. Your ads must be closely
matched to the needs and wants of those interested in the content of your
website. Otherwise, they will not respond to them. The companies you serve
ads for must pay a commission that provides you with a rate of return that
meets your revenue goals. If they do not, you may need to switch what you are
promoting. You can also increase the response to ads on a page by pre-selling
them through relevance, context and promotion. Finally, if you are buying traffic
to your website, through search engine marketing, you must more than cover
the cost of traffic bought through commissions earned.
There are five key metrics related to earning revenue through serving ads on
your website.
By collecting information about these five metrics, you will know what is working
and what is not. You can use this information to continuously improve the return
from monetized links on your website or blog.
==========================
This article is an excerpt from The Complete Internet Marketer: A Practical
Guide To Everything You Need To Know About Marketing Online by Jay Neuman.
Since 1994, Jay Neuman has been helping businesses as varied as Fortune 500
companies, startup Dot-Coms and nonprofit organizations overcome their
Internet Marketing and Database Marketing challenges. Jay is currently Sole
Proprietor of the KnExT Consulting Group. - www.knextconsulting.com.
He can be reached at jay.neuman@knextconsulting.com
Blog In Seven Easy Steps!
by Jay Neuman
. Print Friendly Version
This article is an excerpt from: The Complete Internet Marketer: A Practical
Guide To Everything You Need To Know About Marketing Online
Earning money from your content website or blog is easier than you might
think. Being successful at it is a matter of creating partnerships. This article
shows how to create those partnerships. Companies are offering products and
services for sale over the Internet. For them, one of the most effective ways of
reaching potential customers is to get their message out on highly targeted
websites and blogs. For most of those businesses, their products and services
are offering a genuine benefit to customers who purchase them. There are
many people and businesses out there who need what they have to offer.
This is where your content website or blog comes in.
In most cases, a content website or blog is providing information, resources and
advice on a very specific topic. Internet Marketers call this content. That
content is being delivered to a highly targeted niche audience. The same niche
audience is very likely to need or want products and services related to the
topics being discussed on the website or blog. As a website owner or blogger,
one of your jobs is to create partnerships between the visitors to your website
and the companies who offer products and services they need or want. When
you can do this successfully, you will be offering a benefit to both. You will earn
sales commissions in the process.
This is how you make money.
The secret to successfully making money from your content website or blog is
found in following these seven easy steps.
A blog is actually a bare bones content website. To make it easier to read, the
term “website” will be used in the remainder of this guide to refer to both.
Step 1:
Reach Your Niche
The first step to making money from your website is to define who your target
audience is. Then you must design your content to reach that target. This can
be summed up in one word: Focus! Content websites are effective when they
are highly targeted and focused.
This requires some further explanation.
1. Define Your Target Audience and Focus on Them
First, if you intend to make money from your website, you must realize that the
website is not for you. It is for your target audience. This may be old news to
some. But for many, it is something they just never thought about. You are
passionate about something and decide to create a website about it. It is only
natural that you will write it from your perspective and include things of interest
to you. That does not mean other people will be interested in it. You must do
some research into who will be interested in your website. Find out what topics
they are interested in. Find out what will keep their interest and what will turn
them off. Then develop content and write articles targeted to their needs and
wants.
As a general rule, the more targeted the content of your website is, the more
useful people will find it.
2. Make a Good First Impression
Second, you must win them over on the first impression. When people first find
your website, it will likely be because they were searching for a topic that your
website seemed to address. If you are successful in getting them to click
through to your website, you will only have a few seconds before they decide if
it is what they want. You must grab their attention and prove your value to
them with the very first content they see. You can only do this by knowing who
your target audience is and what they will want.
3. Have User-Friendly Navigation
Third, you must make it easy for people to find things on the website. Once
again, this is part of the change in perspective that takes place when you go
from building a site for yourself to building one for a target audience. You know
where information is on the website. But your audience probably does not. You
must take some time to design a user-friendly navigation that makes it easy for
people to find the information that interests them.
4. Bring Them Back
Fourth, you must give them a reason to keep coming back to your website. For
a blog, the most important thing you can do is to post new entries on the
schedule you set. If your blog is interesting to people, they will keep coming
back if they can trust that a new post will be there. For content sites, having
fresh content of course is important. Just as important is to have a set of
informational resources your site users find useful. They will come back when
they have a need they think your resources will help them meet.
Step 2:
Optimize for Search Engines
Once you have deigned your website to meet the needs and wants of a targeted
niche audience, then you must get them to your website. The most important
way to do this is through search engines. To make money from your website,
you must have a strong search engine strategy. Reaching your target audience
through search engines is done in two ways: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). See Chapter 6 for a detailed discussion on
search engines.
1. Search Engine Optimization
Every content website that hopes to make money by serving ads must optimize
the website for search engines. Search engine optimization (known as SEO) is
organizing the content on your web pages so search engines find them and list
them at the top of their search results. The most important thing to do is to find
out what terms your target audience are likely to be searching for, then make
sure those words show up on your website. SEO is discussed in detail in
Chapter 6.
2. Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing (known as SEM) is paying to have sponsored links
appear on search engines. Many profitable content websites advertise on search
engines to get traffic to their website. SEM can only be a profitable means of
gaining site traffic when you make more money by the paid click-thrus to the
ads on your site than you pay for the search engine click-thrus. The most
important thing is to calculate the breakeven point where you earn more from
conversions than you pay for search engine traffic. Then only pay for sponsored
links where you exceed your breakeven number. SEM is discussed in detail in
Chapter 6. Calculating your return on investment is explained in Chapter 1.
Step 3:
Choose Ads to Serve
The way you are going to make money from your website is to place ads on
your site that your target audience will respond to. The next step is to decide
what ads you want to place. To be successful, this requires some research. The
key to success is to find ads for products and services that are complementary
to the content on your website. Think of your website as offering advice or
information about a topic you are an expert in. When people come to your
website, they look up to you as a trusted source of help. While they are on your
website, they will be receptive to suggestions you make about products and
services that are related to the topic of your site.
For example, you may have a website about maintaining an active life as a
senior citizen. People coming to your website may be interested in things like
senior discounts on travel packages. In fact, if you can give a personal
recommendation about a specific travel company, they are likely to become
loyal customers of that company, based on your recommendation. On the other
hand, there is no particular reason they would be interested in buying a new
computer. You may get a high per-click payout or affiliate commission from the
computer store. But, you will not get a high response to the ad. In fact,
displaying the ad will cause your site to lose credibility in the eyes of some of
your customers. They will think you are just trying to sell things and are not
really serious about providing genuine advice.
You also need to decide what type of ads to serve. In general, you will want to
choose between serving paid search listings from one of the major search
engines or participating in an affiliate program. These are the most effective
and easiest ways for a small website owner to monetize their website. You can
also simply sell ad real estate on your website through an ad server network.
This requires much more effort to be successful. For a small website it is not
recommended.
1. Serve Paid Search Listings
The major search engines have made it very easy for small websites to display
paid search listing on their websites. The idea is a simple one. Search engines
make their money by displaying sponsored links along with their search results
listings. Companies have their links displayed when certain terms are searched
and then pay for clicks to those links. The reason they pay for these links is
because their products and services are related to those terms. They expect the
people searching for them to be interested in the ad.
When someone is visiting a highly targeted, niche website, they also are
demonstrating an interest in the topic of that website. If sponsored links are
displayed that are related to the topic of the website, then the visitors on the
website are also likely to be interested in the ad.
Search engines let you chose keywords that are related to the content of your
website. Then, they will display, on your website, the same sponsored links that
would be displayed when people search on those terms. For the sponsoring
company, the result is the same. People who are interested in their products
and services see the ad, and click on it. You will be paid a percentage of the
revenue the search engine gets for each click-thru.
Displaying paid search listings is extremely easy to do. It is undoubtedly the
easiest way for a small website or blog to earn money.
2. Participate in Affiliate Programs
A second way to earn money from your website or blog is to participate in
affiliate programs. Affiliate programs offer the opportunity to make much higher
revenues than paid search listings. They also require more work.
Affiliate programs are discussed in detail in Chapter 9. There are many
variations to affiliate programs. The basic idea is that websites will pay a
commission on sales generated from traffic on your website. You will research
companies offering affiliate programs who have products and services that are
complementary to the content on your website.
In the example above, “MySeniorDiscountTravelSite.com” may have an affiliate
program offering commissions on sales. To participate, “MyActiveSeniorsSite.
com” simply displays banner ads or text links on their website. When a
customer clicks on the link, it is recorded that they came from
“MyActiveSeniorsSite.com.” When the customer eventually makes a purchase, a
commission will be paid to the referring website.
Affiliate programs typically offer commissions on sales. So potential revenues
can be much higher than cost-per-click earned from paid search listings. That
also means that the participating website must do more than just get clicks. You
must also prepare visitors on your site to make a purchase after they click-thru.
This is sometimes called pre-selling.
Step 4:
Optimize Site Content for Pre-Selling
To be effective with the ads on your website, it is not enough to just display the
ads. You must integrate them into your site content so people respond to them.
Web users have a tendency to tune out advertisements on the websites they are
visiting. You must get past this barrier. The way to do it is to build the
product/service promotion into the content of the website, so it is part of the
user experience. In essence, you are creating for your site visitors a user
experience that introduces them to the products and services being promoted on
your website and that invites them to make a purchase. This can be called pre-
selling. There are three key things you must do to optimize your website
content for pre-selling.
1. Relevance
First, ads must be relevant to the content on the page where they are
displayed. The closer you can align the ad to the content, the higher your click-
thru and conversion rates will be.
Consider a web page that contains a review of the Canon Rebel digital camera.
What kind of ad would be most successful there? You could include an ad for a
consumer electronics store like Circuit City. That would be pretty good. It
would be even better if you included an ad that said something like, “Buy Digital
Cameras at Circuit City” and the ad sent customers directly to a category page
dedicated to digital cameras. Better still would be an ad that says, “Buy the
Canon Rebel XT at Circuit City” and the ad lands customers directly on the
product page for the specific product. Of course, this assumes the review is a
positive one.
2. Context
Second, ads should be built into the context of the web page where they
appear. The more closely the ad is integrated into the informational content of
the page, the more likely readers are to see it as something being
recommended by the website as a complementary resource to the article itself.
This will result in both higher click-thrus and conversions.
In the example of the Canon Rebel product review, let us assume that the
review begins on the bottom half of the page. You could place a banner ad at
the top of the web page. It would be much more effective, though, if you place
the ad on the right column of the web page directly next to the product review.
That way people see the ad while they are reading the review. Including ads in
the right hand column is a common approach. Ad real estate is separated from
page content by placing it in a separate column.
You could improve your click-thru rate by inserting a content element, that does
not look like a typical banner, inside the content of the review. The text of the
article would then wrap around the ad. The ad, in a sense, becomes part of the
product review. By taking this approach, you are giving a stronger endorsement
of the product and store than if you clearly separate the ad from the review. If
you have done your research and believe this store truly offers a good deal for
your readers, then this is a perfectly ethical thing to do. An even stronger
approach is to include a text link for the store directly in the actual body of the
review. Once again, you can increase your click-thru and conversion rates, but
are taking on a higher level of responsibility for the products and stores you are
recommending.
3. Promoting the Product/Service
Click-thru and conversion rates can be increased even further by actually
promoting the products and services within the content of the page itself. In this
case, you are clearly giving your endorsement and recommendation for the
products or services being advertised. This is pre-selling. You are consciously
writing the content of your page content with the intent of leading readers to buy
the products or services you are advertising on the page.
In the example of the Canon Rebel, a positive review of the camera is already
pre-selling the product. If you go farther and say that you researched prices
and found the best price at Circuit City, then you are also pre-selling the store.
It is not hard to see how this prepares your site visitors to become customers of
the partner store.
By taking this approach, you will send prospective customers to the merchant
website with the intent to purchase. Your website is a trusted source of
information and advice. Readers will follow your advice by purchasing the
products you endorse. You are acting as an online sales person for the store
you are promoting. This will produce the highest sales commissions for you.
This also represents the highest level of responsibility on your part. If you are
actively promoting a product or company, you must also make sure your
website readers have a good experience when they take your advice. If they do
not, you will experience a backlash. They will not only stop coming to your
website, they will spread bad news about your site to others.
Step 5:
Create a Newsletter or RSS Feed
If your website content is particularly valuable to your target audience, there is
no reason it has to stay stuck on your website. Send it out!
Many content websites are offering information, education or guidance that
people would like to receive on a regular basis. If you are able to provide
valuable information on a regular basis, then give your customers the
opportunity to receive it on their own computers. Do not make them have to
come to your website to get it.
For content websites, a common way to do this is to create a newsletter. You
can send out a monthly, or weekly email with articles, tips or other useful
information for your target audience. If it is truly useful, they will be glad for it.
Along with the content, you can include ads, just like you do on the website. If
you are careful to only advertise relevant and worthy companies, then your
customers will be happy to click on the ads and buy their products.
Another common technique for getting your word out is an RSS feed. This is
especially popular with blogs. An RSS feed is basically a small snippet of
information that gets sent to your customers’ computers. You can think of it as
a ticker tape headline. If they like what they see, they can click-thru from the
RSS feed to your website. RSS feeds are discussed in more detail in Chapter 11.
Step 6:
Create a Viral Marketing Campaign
Is your content good enough that people will want to pass it around to their
friends and colleagues? If so, you can turn it into a viral marketing campaign.
Viral marketing is simply creating something worthwhile and then giving people
the ability to forward it on to others. If it is good, people will keep forwarding it.
It spreads exponentially, like a virus. It is not a bad virus. It just spreads like
one. Thus the name.
Let us say that you have a website offering advice to Internet Marketers. You
have written an article called, “Make Money from your Website or Blog in Seven
Easy Steps!” You have posted the article on your website and monetized it with
related ads. Well, this article turns out to be pretty popular. You can put the
article into an email with a Forward-to-a-friend link. This is a basic viral
marketing campaign. People who get your email love the article and keep
sending it around to their friends and colleagues. Each time someone gets your
article, she also gets the ads that you included along with it. Bingo! You not
only make money from people coming to your website. You also can make
money by sending your content out as a viral marketing campaign.
If your article is particularly good, you may want to turn it into an eBook. Then
you can put it on free download websites. People will download the eBook and
be able to forward it along to others. You reach an even larger audience. Of
course, this only works if your eBook is good and people want to forward it to
their friends. This works the same way as your website. If your eBook is worth
reading, then people will value you as a trusted source of information. If you
include recommendations for products and services, they will be likely to click on
them.
If your motivation is to genuinely provide something useful, then you will also
check out the companies who you are advertising. If you believe they are
worthy, then the entire experience you offer your readers is a positive one. This
generates goodwill with your audience. As you continue to offer benefits to both
your audience and your advertisers, you will also be creating opportunities for
yourself to continue reaching out to them in the future.
Viral marketing campaigns are discussed in detail in Chapter 10.
Step 7:
Monitor and Improve
The final step is to monitor results and improve.
The key to continuously increasing your website revenues is to identify the
levers that impact the success of your efforts. Then you can measure
performance related to those levers and make adjustments to them. It is a
balancing act. You will learn to do it better and better as you work with it.
We have already discussed what these levers are. Your site content must be
highly targeted and useful to your target audience; otherwise people will stop
visiting your site, or never come in the first place. Your ads must be closely
matched to the needs and wants of those interested in the content of your
website. Otherwise, they will not respond to them. The companies you serve
ads for must pay a commission that provides you with a rate of return that
meets your revenue goals. If they do not, you may need to switch what you are
promoting. You can also increase the response to ads on a page by pre-selling
them through relevance, context and promotion. Finally, if you are buying traffic
to your website, through search engine marketing, you must more than cover
the cost of traffic bought through commissions earned.
There are five key metrics related to earning revenue through serving ads on
your website.
By collecting information about these five metrics, you will know what is working
and what is not. You can use this information to continuously improve the return
from monetized links on your website or blog.
==========================
This article is an excerpt from The Complete Internet Marketer: A Practical
Guide To Everything You Need To Know About Marketing Online by Jay Neuman.
Since 1994, Jay Neuman has been helping businesses as varied as Fortune 500
companies, startup Dot-Coms and nonprofit organizations overcome their
Internet Marketing and Database Marketing challenges. Jay is currently Sole
Proprietor of the KnExT Consulting Group. - www.knextconsulting.com.
He can be reached at jay.neuman@knextconsulting.com
The Complete
Internet Marketer
Internet Marketer
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