Making Money Online Mini-Course: Look for Creative Ways to Monetize Your Website and How to Get the Most Value Per Visitor

More articles on monetization:

* Look at the big players in your niche to see what their business model is

When you make money online with Google Adsense, that is great stuff, because it is so “hands off” and you do not have to deal with customers at all and so on. It really is a fantastic model to work with and there are a lot of advantages. It is very much “set it and forget it” and then you can just focus on content and promotion. Google does take a share of the pie but it is a pretty small percentage really (some would argue).

On the other hand, once your website is growing and making real money online, you might take a look at other monetization methods. Any smart internet marketer would do this. For one thing, Google is taking about 27% I think of the ad money, so you are leaving some money out there on the table.

Plus, in some niches, there is a lot more money to made than what Google AdSense can provide. It all depends on the niche.

For example, my main website has a very expensive service associated with it that generally costs quite a bit of money. Some people are covered for this with insurance and other people might pay cash. With AdSense, I am getting clicks each day and obviously the clicks are only worth so much, but they add up to a decent income. On the other hand, I can go to my top advertisers (which I have done) and negotiated a deal whereby they pay me for new sign ups. Rather than selling them leads through Adwords, I am now giving them my traffic directly, and if any of it converts, I then get a hefty commission. How much? My current deal is worth $2,000 per sale.

Now obviously I am not going to be getting a sale every single day at that rate. But if I can get just 2 sales per month, I will be beating the pants off of the old AdSense model. And the beauty of testing like this is that you can always revert to whatever works best. You are never locked into one form of monetization. You are free to explore and try new things, see what makes the most money, and then go with that.

One way that you might explore new methods of monetizing is to look at some of the leaders in your niche, and also look at what the Adwords bidders are doing with traffic.

To do this, go to Google and do a search for your main keyword. You can also repeat this experiment with some variations on your keyword and some long tails too.

So you might do a search for “making money online” and see all the different forms of monetization. Look at the first 5 websites that come up in the organic search results. What are they doing to make money? Some might have direct ads, others might use AdSense, some might have their own product for sale, some might be a membership website, and so on.

Then take a look at the Adwords and the paid results. These are people who are actually spending money for each click that they get to their website. If you watch these ads over time, anyone who does this in the long term is actually making good money with their business model, because they pay money for traffic, and continue to do so. So you know they are converting and profiting if they continue to advertise (otherwise they would lose money and simply stop running Adwords).

So look carefully at their business model and what they are doing to make income. They are obviously profitable IF they keep advertising for several months in a row. Watch your niche and monitor it closely and see what is working. Maybe someone is making a killing selling eBooks. Maybe it is membership sites. Maybe it is direct ads or selling leads. But whoever is spending big money to get traffic obviously is doing something that is working, so try to learn from that and possibly mimic it.

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