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Grant - for the actual mechanics of monetising your site / blog, there are a few things you could try;
Oh, SPOILER WARNING: there's a chance that the ridiculously long screed below is the dullest thing ever posted here. For those of you not fascinated by the intricacies of online commerce, please stroll on by with my sincerest apologies.
- selling the adspace on your site, typically on a Cost Per Thousand impressions basis. For this you need to know who your audience are and find a merchant looking to advertise to them and then run their banners at $X per thousand times they're seen. Wouldn't recommend it unless you have a very specific audience that's hard for merchants to reach or if you're MSN and have a gajillion page views every second. You can do it yourself or get an adnetwork to rep your site for you.
- use Google Adsense to run ads into your site linked to the content you've got on there. You earn from this on a Cost Per Thousand (known as CPM) or Cost Per Click basis. Upside; does't require any resource from you. Downside; may not make you a millionaire. Barbelith runs AdSense to non-members. You'd have to ask Tom about whether it's a success and what control you have over the ads shown.
- But, if you wanted to take it seriously and turn your online enterprise into actual revenue, you can't beat affiliate marketing. Practically invented by Amazon way back when, the affiliate industry is now worth billions and is growing faster than any other marketing channel, online or offline.
Simply, you join a reseller network of websites at no cost and use copy and creative provided by a merchant to promote their products to your audience. You get paid by that merchant on a CPA, Cost Per Action basis; that Action being a Sale, Registration, Lead, Enquiry, Brochure Request, Test Drive, Click, whatever. All of this is facilitated for you by an affiliate network whose job it is to manage the campaign. The model suits either 'bedroom marketeers' or full-time affiliates. Many of the latter have made themselves extraordinarily wealthy through a business that you can run from home with a PC between playing with your kids and watching the football.
As with CPM or CPC advertising, this CPA marketing relies on large volumes of traffic to make it work but has the potential to deliver revenue far in excess of the other methods. How you generate this traffic is up to you. Some affiliates will either be lucky enough to have their own organically generated audience of dedicated visitors but most will use their own resources to deliver it, perhaps through email marketing or a complex web of sites linking to sites linking to other sites. Far and away the most popular method is to promote on behalf of a merchant in the Sponsored Links on Search Engine Results pages. Anecdotally, no-one clicks on those paid-for links, preferring the more relevant results thrown up in the middle of the page but the truth is that over 20% of traffic from search results goes through the Sponsored Links.
The numbers stack up like this - it's pretty compelling:
- You promote, say a bank who agree to pay you c.£100 for every loan application you deliver them. That's just an application, regardless of whether it's approved or not.
- You buy some space in the Sponsored Links, bidding on the term "Loans", just to be original. There were something in the region of 10 million individual searches for 'loans' in the UK in October.
- Say 2% of them click through your link to where you're promoting that bank.
that's 200,000
- Say as few as 1% of those go through your site and apply, that's £200,000 you've made. (Before you take out the cost of that sponsored link - not cheap)
From one merchant. On only one of their products. In one month.
Most affiliates won't be able to afford a month-long sponsored link like "loans", admittedly, but many affiliates will be able to for a week, a day, a few hours or, thinking laterally, on "round the world cruise", something that may well require a loan.
And again, that's only on behalf of one merchant and only using one search term. There are an infinite number of keyphrases you could base your strategy around and thousands of online businesses running affiliate programmes with no limit to how many you can promote. Devote a page to each. Put all your Ladies' Fashion merchants on one page, present your audience with a choice and watch that click-through conversion rise to 5%.
This requires a bit of work, of course but if you prefer not to market for merchants specifically, you can still run programmes in the adspace of your blog with very little resource and if you've picked your campaign well, it's very possible that some of your audience will go and buy, giving you a revenue stream you didn't have before.
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Hmmm.. succint, no? To anyone who made it through that, I hope it made a bit of sense. To everyone else - so, so sorry!
And yet more apologies for anyone who found that a bit... salesy. |
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