By Yaro Starak
You have managed to get your website to that magical pointwhere you have established popularity, traffic, loyalty and acommunity of fans. Your site contains a wealth of information,resources and services that you provide free because that's justthe kind of person you are. You may not have intended to makemoney from your site but now that you have an audience yourealise that it's possible, or perhaps you have to startthinking about generating income because your costs to managethe site have increased and it's starting to hurt.
You have been diligent over the years to build up your communityand wonder how to go about making some revenue by leveragingthis audience (as the marketers would say, you want tomonetise your site). Maybe you have some big dreams andplan to one day generate advertising income from your new webproject. This is a very common plan for online business givenpeople tend to expect information and services to be free.Advertising may be one of the only revenue generation strategiesavailable to you.
How much traffic do I have to have to make money?
In my experience once you have about 500-1000 unique visitorsper day to your site *at least* before you can start to makereal money. You can make chimps change from day one from your 50hits, but this article is targeted at those that have a largeraudience, or perhaps are constructing a business plan (eitherreal or in your head) and would like to know how to go aboutmonetising your website. If you get more then 1000 uniquevisitors a day chances are you already make money from your site(if not you should be!) but my points are still relevant.
As per usual I will illustrate my article using real worldexamples from what I did to make money. Over about five years Imanaged a hobby site that started off as a very local sitefocusing on people in my area that played the game Magic: TheGathering. I wrote reports and did news coverage for the game.Later I expanded the site to Australia and eventually opened itto the world although it remained mostly Australian with a goodchunk of Asians and New Zealanders.
Banner programs
At around the time I was getting 500 unique visitors a day Idecided to start playing with advertising methods. This wasbefore the advent of Google Adsense (more on this later) butthere were many banner programs available that paid either oncost per click (CPC) or per impression basis. An impression is abanner being displayed to a user once, a click is someoneclicking the banner and visiting the site being advertised.
These networks act as a middle man between business that want toadvertise and people like me that have an audience and want tomake some money by displaying banners. Unfortunately theseprograms display banners that often don’t match your audience. Itried a few but it was a short lived experiment that made me afew dollars if that.
I recommend you avoid any banner programs. If you are confusedabout what I am talking about regarding banner programs do asearch for Burst Media to get a grasp of how they work. Forsmall sites they just don't make much money. For large sitesthere are much better ways to make money. There are people outthere that make good money from these programs (I'm sure theprogram owners do!) but in my experience a little effort to findthe right type of advertising can yield much better results.
I decided the best way to make money was to really leverage thedemographics of my audience. I had a fairly focused niche, cardgame playing young males. I started by emailing all the localand international card game shops and asked if they wereinterested in exposure to my market. Instantly I had responsesbut I had to come up with a pricing structure first.
How much should you charge?
By this time my site was getting close to 1000 unique visitorsper day, with about 300,000 impressions per month. I had done myresearch and I knew that advertising on websites was usually viathe standard 468×60 banner so I would start with that. I alsoknew that many companies charged by what is called CPM or costper 1000 impressions. Back then this was by far the mostcommonly used scale for pricing of web advertising and you couldexpect to earn anywhere from $0.10 to $10.00 CPM. I never likedthis method of advertising because it didn't guarantee anyvisitors. Charging by click-throughs is a far better method, butdidn't become mainstream until later. I decided that in order tokeep my advertisers I had to offer value so I went for a blanketapproach. I started charging a flat rate of $30 per month tohave a banner on my site which offered as many impressions thatmy traffic could provide. I signed up my first few advertisersat this rate.
Banner management software
In order to "rotate" different banners across my site I neededsome special software that would dynamically place banners. Thisallowed me to have more than one advertiser banner in a singlelocation so I could optimise my adspace and make sure myaudience didn't get too bored from seeing the same banner overand over again.
Let me save you some time, phpAdsNew is the best bannermanagement software out there. It's under an open source licenseand has all the features you could ever wish for at a price youcan't beat, it's free. If you don’t believe me and absolutelyhave to try searching elsewhere try searching the
There is a learning curve with phpAdsNew and you do have toinstall it on your own server. If you are like me and you dothings like this yourself most of the time you shouldn't havetoo much trouble. Otherwise you might try contacting yourfavourite ITGeek and get them to give you a hand.
Statistics are important
The best feature with phpAdsNew is that it allows you to providea unique user login for your advertisers to check their bannerstatistics in real time. This means at any point in time theycan learn how many impressions and clicks there banners arereceiving from your site.
Before you start searching for advertisers you should be veryfamiliar with the statistics of your site. Do you know how manyunique visitors you get? How many hits you get? How manyimpressions? Do you even know what the differences are betweenthese? Try this stats terminology primer on for size if you don't.
Most web servers come with a statistics package. Ask your webhost if you don't know. The most common are Awstats andWebalizer which often are preinstalled on many hosting packages.Become familiar with these packages so you can accurately assessyour site traffic.
Increasing ad revenue
I now had the foundations laid and was serving the ads of myfirst few advertisers. From the point onwards I went to workattracting more advertisers by directly emailing North Americanonline card stores and other related sites. I kept an Excel fileto track which websites I had emailed and their responses so Icould follow up in a timely manner.
I created new banner positions and started initiatives like anewsletter to generate more revenue. I created monthly packagesthat combined newsletter advertising and different bannerpositions and offered them at $500 per quarter. I increased thetop prime banner position fee to $50 and started offering atower banner position for $50 as well. Eventually I had to limitthe number of banners I could take in the prime positions toavoid dilution. I had a guarantee in place that offered at least30,000 impressions per month (averaging 40,000-60,000) toadvertisers so that they always received a good equivalent CPMrate. I even had some advertisers purchase the rights to "own" aposition for a certain period to make sure no other advertisersbanners would be displayed.
Eventually I reached a point where I was averaging $500 permonth and peaked at $1000 in one month. Some advertisers cameand went quickly but many stayed loyal and in fact stilladvertise today though I sold the site a long time ago. Theniche for the site was so focused that it became the pre-eminentsite for Australia in it's marketplace and consequently someAustralian advertisers simply stuck their banners up as abranding exercise. They knew that the exposure from the sitewould help to align their business as one of the pre-eminentretailers or event organisers for the game. Some advertisersstopped caring about click through stats and kept advertisingpurely for the branding exposure.
Google adsense
At some point Google Adsense popped up and I was in with otherearly adopters to try it out. My results were okay. The moneywasn’t nearly as good as the established relationships withadvertisers I had, however the ads being displayed were a lotmore targeted than banner networks. I eventually stopped usingAdsense because I could better monetise the adspace with mytraditional advertisers. However that was before Google went towork providing such a variety of banner sizes and displayoptions. Nowadays Google Adsense is a viable income source formany websites so I definitely suggest you look into it as apossible option for generating revenue but remember it's not theonly means and you can earn more if you get busy chasingtargeted advertisers.
Ongoing maintenance
I wouldn't call web advertising income passive, but it sure isclose. The systems I had in place handled everythingautomatically. While I did have to manually create advertiseraccounts, pursue advertisers and control billing, once thesystems were in place, in particular phpAdsNew, I didn't have todo much. Of course depending on your website often themaintenance of your community is were the labour is involved,but chances are if you started the site you either enjoy it orhave plans in place to eventually remove yourself from themaintenance role. In the end I sold off my site but if it wasn’tfor the advertiser revenue my asset would not have been valuednearly as highly as the final sale price. Investing inadvertising is like investing in any asset, the time and labouryou put in today will lead to benefits in the future
Article Source: www.ArticlesBase.com
