Monetizing your Site - Don’t Get The Wrong Idea!
By Ikki on Jun 25, 2008 in Blogging, Marketing
Hi peeps,
Site Monetization has been and still is a big issue for most webmasters out there (including myself). No one can tell for sure if a certain technique will actually work for you. The reason behind this is the fact that every site is (in some way) unique so what works/worked for me may not be as good or effective for you. So, there’s no recipe for site monetization.
Should I Monetize my Site?
This is a question that have been asked a few hundreds of times in forums, sites and blogs. The answer people get is essentially the same: wouldn’t it be nice if your site could pay for itself?
When Should I Monetize my Site?
This one is, by far, the most frequently asked question about Site Monetization. There are two approaches:
Focus on Building Your Traffic First and Monetize Later
This approach focuses on starting a website with no monetization at all. Your efforts would be centered mainly in promoting your site and building traffic as fast as possible. Once you start recieving a substantial amount of visitors you can monetize your site and get the most out of it.
Pros:
- Since your site wouldn’t have any ads, you could draw your visitors’ focus to your contents which may lead you to build your audience faster.
- You’d keep all your attention on strengthening the quality your site which hopefully may bring more benefits for you in the future.
- Promotion might get you a couple of people interested in advertising on your site if your traffic gets strong enough. Instead of hunting for sponsors, they may be coming to you if you develop a good reputation in the net.
Cons:
- Ads can drive away some visitors from you. It’s a fact that a large part of the audience dislike advertisements. Imagine how you would feel if one day you find out that your favorite TV show is now displaying ads during the show. Not a pretty thought, huh?
- You’d be leaving some money on the table. Profits on the first days are low (near to zero, actually) but is still profit.
- You’d have zero experience with effective ad placement. Experimenting with ads with a big audience might get you a few bad comments from your readers.
Monetize From Day One
This approach involves building a website and monetize it from day one. While you may not get lots of money from it, it may be able to produce enough profit to cover the costs of manteinance (hosting fees, promotion campaigns, etc.) and even generate some extra bucks.
Pros
- As previously stated, your site may be able to pay for itself. All the revenue generated from advertisements could help you keep the site operational and cover any costs.
- You won’t need to re-design your site. Many sites that do not include monetization inmediatly will more likely require a re-design in order to make enough room for the ads.
- Your visitors will get a consistent user-experience. Since ads will be there from Day One, your visitors will get used to it and feel them as a part of your site.
Cons
- As I said earlier, most people dislike and even hate ads. You won’t get as much traffic as you could if your site was ads-free. Ads can distract your visitors and sometimes keep them from focusing on your contents, making it a bit harder for you to build audience.
- If your ad placement is not good enough you may not generate any income at all from advertisement. No clicks = No Money. No clicks = Unhappy Sponsors.
Final Words
Whether you choose to monetize your site from day one or build your site’s strength first and then monetize it is entirely up to you. However, if you decide to monetize your site from the first day please keep in mind that you shouldn’t expect to get much out of it. People with high expectations might end up dissapointed and having a wrong idea about monetization.
Monetize or not Monetize, that’s a question that you must solve by yourself.
What do you think?
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hmmm… i think it is better to have 5 websites with ads and 5 without ads so that on the first 5 you make money and also have good traffic on the rest 5 sites which dont have ads. Best of both worlds…;-)
A good trick would be to do manage Manual Advertising with Monthly or CPM based ads rather than Cost Per Click or Cost Per Sale which is kind of outdated and doesnt produce so much revenue as compared to Monthly or CPM based ads. If you can ask for $5 per month or $5 per CPM basis then you wont be leaving money on the table to Adsense and keep waiting for their $100 checks, also you can have the $5 in your paypal/alertpay even before you activate your advertiser’s ads on your site..
. Your advertisers wont be disappointed because they know that they are running CPM or Monthy ads not Cost-Per-Click so even if they dont get much visitors, their brandname would still have more awareness among your site’s visitors which is in itself also a good marketing trick for Advertisers because $5 per month on a website isnt costly enough whereas Cost-Per-Click could cost 1000’s of $$$ to advertisers and ultimately they would still get the same amount of visitors whether they run Cost-Per-Click or Monthly basis ads because ultimately only the people who want to use their brands will come to their site, others wont come even if they advertise on costly Cost-Per-Click campaigns.
Next you can have links to all your 10 sites on the bottom of each site, so that atleast 1out of 10 visitors to any one of your site would also visit all your other sites just in curosity/excitement to see your other sites and they wont regret in seeing the ads because they have themselves gone to your site, and you dont even need to ask them to visit it. Plus you will be generating Traffic and $$$ more frequently and effortlessly with managing Manual advertising on your sites.
I also believe that Any Site with lovely content/service and proper ad placement can still attract as much visitors as any good site does without ads. For example: when you visit Yahoo.com for getting a lovely free e-mail service, you may notice ads, but that doesnt keep you away from using their service and this way they make lot of money from their Manual Advertising system be it CPM or Monthly basis(not cost-per-click or cost-per-sale ads because they may advertise a Chevrolet car, but cant wait for revenue from cost-per-sale of the car). Also because they give away lovely service and thats why traffic comes to them and they dont need to ask people to come to their site by running costly Adsense Campaigns. Lets Leave Yahoo, As for less popular sites, they are approaching people/spreading brand awareness and/advertising for their service in social networking sites for free and enjoy the traffic they receive for free some examples are bigadda.com(owned by reliance) and ning.com advertise their brand on orkut.com(owned by google) for free-of-cost and still doing great business by running Manual managed ads.
What do u think ikki?
RainForestCoder(aka Abhishek) | Jul 27, 2008 | Reply
@RainForestCoder(aka Abhishek): Hi Abhishek,
This is, by far, the longest comment on my blog ever xD I’ll try to reply to all your points.
In my opinion, Flat-rate Ads are a nice way to monetize your site. You get paid by the week / month no matter what happens to your site during that period of time so if your traffic is low you get a good deal, and if your traffic increases then the advertiser gets a good deal.
As for CPM Ads, they work better on high traffic sites. Remember that this kind of ads pay for 1,000 impressions (Cost Per Milli) so if you have a “modest” site it’s more likely that you won’t get much revenue from them.
CPC Ads, in the other hand, are better for smaller sites because they do not generate enough traffic to profit by CPM. However, this approach also requires good ad placement and blending, otherwise you won’t generate any incomes from it.
Now, what you said about site interlinking can be a little dangerous when done as you described on your comment. You see, Google (as well as other SEs) doesn’t like link farms so it’s best to stay away from this kind of linking strategy. 3 way linking is a better option IMO because they pass undetected under Google’s nose. For example, say you have three sites “A”, “B” and “C”. The 3-way linking approach involves adding a link on site “A” to site “B”. Then, site “B” would link to site “C” and the latter would link back to site “A”. That way, you’ll drive traffic and pass link juice to all your sites without getting penalized for it.
Oh, I also wanted to say this: what a great comment, Abhishek!
Ikki | Jul 27, 2008 | Reply