So What’s All This Talk About Website Monetization?

Introduction

In this article, I am going to discuss one of the biggest buzzes on the internet and why it is absolutely essential for your success in the online world.

I have a long-standing background in business and in information technology and have focused much of my efforts on internet software development since the very early days when the internet first went public back in 1994. Since 1994, I have learned the in’s and out’s of website development. I have personally built more than 300 websites during that time. Each of those sites progressively grew more complex and utilised all the latest cutting edge of technologies of their time.

I have built many websites that were designed for e-commerce, but with all the technical knowledge, I was missing one key ingredient to ensure even greater success of those websites: monetization.

Sure, the websites made money from the sales of their own products and services, but normally the conversion rate of vistors to customers is a fairly low percentage. On average, any given site would be elated to convert a mere 3% of their traffic. There are many methods employed to increase the conversion rates, but that still leaves a massive percentage of untapped potential in the traffic that was on the site in the first place–and right now traffic is an extremely precious commodity in the on-line world. We need to leverage existing traffic to generate even more revenue. And if there isn’t enough traffic, generate more (I will discuss traffic generation in a future article, as it is extremely important)!

What is Monetization?

Monetization, in its simplest form, means to generate revenue from something. When we are talking about websites, this means leveraging your existing traffic to provide income from a revenue stream outside of your primary product or service. Some common examples of monetisation include: direct paid advertising, network advertising and affiliate marketing.

Direct paid advertising – Advertisers pay you directly for placement of their ads on your website.

Network advertising – An aggregator of advertisers allows you to display advertisements from their network of advertisers. Each click on those displayed advertisements makes you money (PPC, or Pay per click), or they may pay per 1000 impressions of advertisements (PPM). Google AdSense is one such program and is very popular.

Affiliate marketing - Agreements with individual companies that pay you commissions for any sales that originated from a link on your website, through the use of tracking codes or referral ids embedded into those links. A few well-known companies who offer aggregated affiliate programs are: Clickbank and  Commission Junction. There are also individual companies who have their own private affiliate programs (who actually service website owners), such as: Traffic Swarm, Article Marketer, AWeber and many others.

Think of these as additional revenue streams generated by your existing website visitors whether or not they choose to buy your products or services. They give you a number of different opportunities to generate revenue from every single website visitor. Obviously not every visitor will take actions that will generate income for you, but it certainly increases the chances that they will.

Who can do it?

Anyone can build a website and make money online. A complete novice can setup a complete website, with step by step instructions, in a matter of a few short hours. Companies like Site Sell specialise in turnkey website development solutions and completely remove the complexities. In the old days, when the internet was just getting off the ground, it was a general rule that only technical people could create and manage a website. However, with the newer technologies that have been developed recently, this is no longer a requirement.  The average person now has nothing to prevent them from creating their own website and generating additional streams of passive income.

Why Should we do it?

In today’s economy, a single income stream is not only risky, due to corporate dowsizings, but the cost of living seems to continually creep up without associated increases in earnings from our normal 9 – 5 vocations. Multiple income streams are now viewed as the only real viable answer to current global trends. Obviously there are a myriad of ways of generating these additional income streams (and I will be covering many of these in subsequent posts), but with the power of the internet, there simply has never been any vehicle in the history of the human race that provided such an overwhelming surge of growth and new business. And the great thing is: things have only just begun!

Here’s to your success!

Bill