How To Monetize Your Website
Do you know how to make your website bling bling?
In the midst of the internet age, it’s never been more important to make your business website work for you – the need to be profitable is a constant pressure. Some of the most prominent rappers of today – Wyclef Jean, Wu-Tang Clan, Akon, Lil Wayne – have waxed poetic in their work about the universally recognized importance of the “dolla dolla bill y’all”. Those same seminal artists would no doubt recommend you monetize your business website to produce a cash flow. Below, we offer a few tried-and-true methods to monetizing your website, as well as a few out-of-the-box tricks you can use to generate online income:
Sell Ad Space
This is perhaps the most common, old-school, go-to method of making money on a website. Whether you offer banner ads or sidebar spots, you can sell your site’s prime real estate and reap the benefits. The heavier your site traffic, the more you can charge, so don’t forget to optimize your SEO and make your site navigation easy to follow to increase eyeballs on screens and entice more advertisers to buy.
Google AdSense
As with everything they do, Google has a slightly different take on digital advertising. Here’s the gist of how Google AdSense works: you give Google a spot on your website, pop in a piece of Google code, they place advertisements that are relevant to your site in those spots, and each time one of your visitors clicks that ad then you get paid. This is another advertising method where site traffic matters, so make sure you have plenty of visitors to your site in order to increase clicks.
Branded Content
This is a burgeoning market that’s taking off very quickly. Branded content provides a more subtle way for advertisers to get seen on your site. By using branded content, the advertiser not only pays for space on your site but also for your talent in producing creative content – they use your voice to talk about their product. With this method you produce digital content, whether it be a blog post, a video, or any other digital media, and place the focus the content on the advertiser’s brand. Consumers are less aware that they are looking at an ad, which might make them more likely to show interest.
Sell Products or Services
If you have a product, use your website to sell it yourself instead of going through a separate business. Again, this may seem pretty obvious, but by cutting out the middle man you increase your profits. Why use someone else to sell your product when you know it better than anyone?
Affiliate Marketing
Put very simply, this is allowing an advertiser space on your website to sell a product that specifically relates to your business. For example, if you run a blog all about beauty products, you could have an ad for a cosmetics brand. Depending on how you set it up, you can either get paid each time someone clicks on the ad, or each time someone buys something from that company. Just be sure to keep content relevant – you want to keep your readers coming back to your site, and if things don’t jive then they may lose faith in your brand. You can become a Midphase affiliate today! Find out more here.
Premium Content
Do you have a large following? Is there a part of your site that you think readers just can’t live without? Do you offer some kind of content that no other company can? If so, you may want to consider charging a subscription fee for premium content. This won’t work if you offer something on your site that readers can get elsewhere, so take good stock of your competition and how your business stacks up. Or if you don’t want to charge money for premium content, you can require readers to sign up to your newsletter in order to access part of your site, then use that email address to market to your readers and increase site traffic. In the digital world, email addresses are another form of currency.
You worked hard to perfect your business website, so now make your website work for you. Just like Wyclef Jean said, “Money, money-money-money. Money, money-money-money. It drives the world crazy.” Use these tips to keep the crazy away and get the almighty dollar on your side!
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