Monetizing Your Traffic and Supplementing Your Income

A guide to performance advertising and the sale based advertising scheme.

Steve Smith, host of your Technology Questions Answered, talks about generating supplemental income by monetizing visitor traffic.

Episode #2-08 released on November 6, 2011

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Hello, my name is Steve Smith, aka Zed Axis. If you have a web-site, blog or online business and your looking to monetize your traffic and supplement your income? Listen, learn, and apply the techniques and services that I'll be talking about, today, on Technology Questions Answered.

There are two ways of supplementing your income by monetizing your traffic on a web-site. These include earning commissions on sales by posting relevant links and banners on your web-site to entice your visitors to buy products, therefore allowing you to earn a commission. Or, by placing targeted advertising to generate impressions by redirecting your traffic to web-sites of similar content and appeal. One way or another, the resulting effectiveness of your campaign will be largely dependent on the location, traffic and relevance of the advertising. Simply put, you may need to tinker with your advertising campaigns over a period of time to be able to generate the sales or redirections required to generate sufficient income over time.

Let's talk about commission based sales income. This is a very good way of generating income on your web-site. This technique is successful when using products and services that are relevant to your web-sites content. This is important to note because the biggest issue causing such campaigns to fail, if you can generate the necessary traffic, is non-relevance. No one wants to see a dating web-site link on a technology oriented blog.

Now, if you have a community, or you run a largely successful blog, you may want to generate income by creating merchandise for your web-site. You can use services like Cafepress.com. When you have many fans of your web-site, blog or business, it is often a good idea to use this concept in order to generate income to monetize your web-site, and it has the good fortune of also increasing your total visibility by allowing you to get paid for advertising on other people. Think of a t-shirts, coffee mugs, cellphone covers, etc... as a mobile billboards to continue promoting your business and / or web-site.

Now, interested in promoting products you like or talk about in your blog or web-site. I have several suggestions for you on those, as well. You have Link Share, Commission Junction, The Amazon Associates store, etc... to name a few, links in the show notes, of course. These services allow you to link to stores, and / or products that you may want your visitors to purchase from. When your clients buy such services or products from web-sites like Amazon, Link Share or Commission Junction, your given a percentage based commission rate, that potentially increases exponentially with each sale. Some services like Amazon also increase your commission rate based on number of sales.

Now, what of these Adword or Adsense programs we hear about on television, websites, or other podcasts. What does it do, and how does it work? The Adword program, from Google, allows your business to promote itself on the internet, making it easier to find, and connect with new users, and potential clients or subscribers. The Adsense program, is the back end of the Adword program. Adsense is the publisher side that allows web-sites like yours and mine to promote similar content and services. We get paid by the number of our visitors being redirected to other web-sites when they click the banners or advertisements. Adsense generates the income by allowing Adword clients to bid on advertising spaces, generating higher click through income from web-sites that have more traffic. In other words, the more businesses there are bidding on advertisements of similar appeal to your web-site's content, the more you stand to make when you generate redirected traffic.

Now, what does it take to make money off these programs? Traffic, content and visibility. You need to make your content stand out, and generate enough new, continuous, interesting content to allow you to gain enough visibility so that you can generate enough traffic. You need to make your web-site or blog easy to navigate and share. This means allowing visitors to post their favourite articles, blog posts, videos, etc... in any social network or forum, on the internet. Do not try to convince your visitors to change to your service, allow them to use theirs. This is important to succeed. With time, and great content, you will generate higher volumes of traffic and generate sufficient income to pay bills off, or pay for your hosting, maybe buy new gear or go on vacation. This is all dependent on the work you put into your web-site.

Now, what works the best on web-sites? What kind of advertisements generate the most sales or impressions? This is something you need to discover for yourself. It is all dependent on your web-site. Keep in mind, text links and videos have more appeal to visitors. Bigger advertisements potentially mean higher impressions, however, place the advertisement wrong, or use one that is too big, and your visitors will acquire banner blindness. Skyscraper advertisements, like those on the sides of pages, often have more click through impressions that horizontal advertisements. Then again, it all depends on what your content is, and what you have to offer.

Now, in order to generate the maximum amount of income being monetized from your traffic, you may want to include infolinks.com in your business plan. They allow you to generate income by using your content as an advertising campaign. The words on your page will allow you to make more income by having targeted advertising generated from all your content. This means you can generate visibility from merchandising, generate sales from products you talk about in your blog or website. You can generated impression based income through redirection of traffic to similar web-sites, and generate more impression based income by using the very words on your page. This covers everything you need to know to start generating income on your web-site. Do not be afraid to experiment with the placement of your advertisements, and continue making great content for your visitors, this will allow search engines to index you higher and you will in turn, be able to generate more and more income over time.

Next week, I'll be covering the process of monetizing your podcasts. If you wish to submit your questions, comments, suggestions or stories, please visit ask.zedaxis.net. To do our weekly survey, go to survey.zedaxis.net. Don't forget to subscribe, share and like this episode, thank you for listening. Stay safe and online.

Host : Steve Smith | Music : Jonny Lee Hart | Editor : Steve Smith | Producer : Zed Axis Productions

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