Monetize Your Site

If you put ads on your website and have enough traffic you will make some (small) money. There will be someone who occasionally clicks on an ad, and these clicks will add up. If you have enough traffic you will pay your hosting and domain name expenses. If you have more traffic you will, perhaps, make a little money.

Targeted traffic will enhance your earning potential. Targeted traffic is more likely to click on the ads that you offer. Adsense does a good job of matching the ads to the content. If you choose to use affiliate ads or banners you will need to present offers that will be of interest to your visitors. If your site were about women’s fashions automotive parts ads probably would not work for you. You want to present ads that may be of interest to those most likely to visit your site.

You can get targeted traffic in many ways. Most of the ways fall back to proper use of keywords and on page SEO. You need keyword rich content presented in a search engine friendly manor to get organic traffic. If you choose keywords that your target audience is likely to use as a search term many of your visitors will be well targeted to your offers. The use of keywords applies  both to organic traffic and any form of paid advertising. This is why some people have great success with PPC advertising like Google Adwords.

Are you using keywords on your pages, in your headings and titles, and in your off page campaigns? Tell me what has worked for you by leaving a comment.

I have been doing some studying on our project, to make some money from the web. There was a caution from an Internet marketing pro that hit home. That caution is to not be  so worried about the cosmetics of your sites that you do not promote the sites. He told of a site that had the potential to be a very good site, but they spent so much time developing the site that they went broke before the site could get off the ground.

You must have traffic to make money. There is good traffic and not so good traffic. The good traffic is well targeted to what you offer. People turn to the search engines when they are looking for a product or service. Therefore it is important to come up on the first page of search results for a term or terms that people who are looking for what you have to offer may use in their search. Social networking can drive traffic numbers to your site, but that traffic may just be out of curiosity and they may not be in the market to buy anything at all when they visit your site.

A site needs to be put together with its traffic potential in mind. Keyword research will go a long way to that end. In order to have good, targeted traffic, your site must rank well in the search engines. You need to produce a site that can rank high in the search engines. Among other things you need to look at the competition for a niche that you are thinking of using. If there are several strong sites in the niche  you will have trouble getting on the first page of the search results. There may be hundreds or thousands of sites catering to a niche, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should not choose that niche. If there are a lot of weak sites in the competition you may still be able to rank well for the niche.

For all of you faithful readers that have been waiting with baited breath for my next epistle, the day has finally come. I have put up a new page on the main site this evening. The title of the new page is shared with the title of this post. I have gone into the necessity of targeting traffic to your site. In future episodes I will suggest methods to use to target your traffic. Click to see this article.

While I was knocking about the site I did some minor updates to the site to bring it in line with my latest design standards. These changes will be only slightly visible and should have no effect on the operation of the site, but I want to maintain all of my sites using my current best practices. Since I was doing something with the site anyway I made these adjustments at the same time.