Make Money
From Your Content Site
By Derek Vaughan
If you're a Webmaster whose site receives even a modest amount of
traffic, you've no doubt dreamed of the untold riches that lie
untapped in your traffic stream. The burning question is: "How can I
make the most money possible from my Website traffic?" This article
will help you answer that question, as we explore several of the most
common and profitable methods that are currently being employed to
convert page views into dollars:
*Traditional banner advertising
*Pay-per-click (contextual) banner advertising
*Subscription revenue
*Affiliate and CPA programs
*Text links
We'll finish up with a review of the finer points of online selling.
Traditional Banner Advertising
One of the earliest and most prevalent forms of monetizing site
traffic is the ubiquitous online banner. Originally most popular in
the 468x60 pixel version, banners are now available in many different
sizes and shapes. In fact, the Interactive Advertising Bureau now
lists 16 standard ad units in its guidelines. It's not hard to find a
site that uses banners: CNN displays a 728x90 banner at the top of the
page, eBay uses a 468x60 banner spot at top of listings pages, and AOL
displays banners of various sizes throughout the site.
Business Model and Mechanics
The basic business model of the banner is simple: the Website vendor
sells page views (impressions) to the advertiser. There are 2 basic
banner ad payment models: paying as you go for every thousand
impressions delivered, and a flat fee that's charged regardless of the
number of visitors who actually see the ad.
Under the pay-as-you-go model, the most common metric is
cost-per-thousand (impressions), also known as CPM. Prices will vary
depending on targeting, volume, term of commitment, and market forces.
Typical CPMs for less targeted inventory can range from $0.25 to $5.00
per thousand impressions. Therefore, a media buyer who wishes to
purchase 100,000 impressions at a $5 CPM will sign a contract for
$5,000. Targeted impressions are worth much more to an advertiser. If
your site attracts car enthusiasts who are an attractive demographic
for a local or national car dealership, you can expect to command 10
times the rate of untargeted ad inventory. Typical CPMs for targeted
inventory run between $10 to over $100 per thousand impressions.
It's also common for a site to charge a media buyer a flat fee for an
advertising spot. Depending on the placement and traffic, the fees can
be quite high. For instance, a fixed placement on the home page, in a
prominent spot, with a 100% share of voice on a targeted site is quite
desirable.
The advantage of running banner advertising on your site is that you
may be able to get paid purely on the basis of page views, thereby
monetizing all your available inventory. The drawback may be that not
everyone is willing to pay simply to be seen: often, advertisers
demand a response to the advertising. Media buyers may be looking for
a per-click type of payment arrangement.
The main disadvantage of running banners on your site is probably the
adoption of maintenance responsibilities for someone else's creative
units, and the responsibility for a banner's performance even if the
banner is poorly designed, or the advertiser's Website doesn't convert
well.
To make real money from banner ads, it's essential that you have a
clear idea of how many unique visitors visit your site, and how many
page views they generate -- data that any decent Web analytics program
will show. You then have a basis on which you can establish realistic
expectations of how much money you might earn.
Next, decide where on your site you're going to display advertising
banners. I would suggest testing ads both at the top and bottom of
your pages -- this is a proven model that has worked well for large
publishers. Once you've decided on ad placements, you should set up an
ad server to display the banners, and keep track of pages views and
click throughs. I would also suggest developing several banners that
'sell' the ad space, which can run when you have excess inventory. The
banner might say something like, "See Your Ad Here -- Contact Us to
Advertise," and link to your advertising rates page.
Once your ad server is set up, sell! This is a hurdle for many; we'll
address it later in this article.
Pay-Per-Click (Contextual) Banner Advertising
With the emergence of Google's AdWords and AdSense programs, the
business of pay-per-click banners has exploded. This type of ad unit
offers the tantalizing combination of ease-of-use and payouts for each
and every click, regardless of whether that visitor converts to sale
or not. It's no wonder this unit is so popular with the likes of
Slashdot, which shows PPC marketplace links on the right-hand side of
the site's main categories and posts, and Go.com, which uses Yahoo!
Search Sponsored Results to power its search function. And these are
just two among many, many other sites.
Business Model and Mechanics
As the name implies, pay-per-click banners are ad units that pay out
each time they're clicked (with obvious fraud prevention engaged to
prevent self-enrichment). These ads are sometimes called 'contextual'
advertising, as the ad suppliers will often regulate where specific
ads are placed, to ensure that they're relevant to the Web page on
which they're viewed, and the audience that sees them.
The bounty paid out on each click is usually determined by the value
of that click as set by the advertiser. This is a nice way of saying
that you really don't know what you're going to earn from any given
click until you check the back-end reporting.
Don't neglect checking out alternatives to Google's AdSense program.
While Google is large and established, many smaller services actually
share more of the advertising revenue with you. For example,
bidvertiser.com is one alternative that pays out at a much lower
threshold ($10) than Google. Also, if you specialize in Webmaster or
Web hosting-related traffic, a new service at Webmaster911 offers much
higher revenue sharing than Google currently offers.
Subscription Revenue
Any site that has recurring or frequently refreshed content may be a
good candidate for a subscription revenue model. News sites fall into
this category, with the Wall Street Journal and CNN offering some form
of subscription service for their online content.
Business Model and Mechanics
Subscription-based services migrated from the offline world to the
online world. The most common forms of subscriptions were originally
used for newspapers or magazines. The end-user of the news or
information service typically pays a weekly or monthly recurring
service fee (subscription fee) to have full access to the publisher's
content. The practical implementation of this model online may work as
follows.
A publisher offers additional coverage, or premium content that is
only available to subscribers. Under this model, the content is
usually in a special password-protected area of the site. A new
subscriber may gain access to the content by filling out an online
form including (usually) credit card information for billing purposes.
Once the credit card transaction has been authorized, the subscriber
is emailed a unique and secure password permitting access to the
subscription-only content. Typical subscription fees are in the range
of $10 per month. For example, CNN charges $12.99 per month for its 'NewsPass,'
which permits access to premium streaming video content on the site.
The Wall Street Journal currently charges $6.95 per month for access
to online content for those not already subscribed to the print
edition.
A hybrid of the pure subscription model is simply to charge an
increasing fee as access to higher level services increases. This
model is common in online forums, where additional charges are levied
to access certain forums, or users' signature lines are expanded at
higher fee levels.
Affiliate and CPA Programs
Affiliate programs have existed from the infancy of the Internet.
Amazon.com was an early adopter, and was able to convince many
Webmasters to offer relevant books for sale on the site in exchange
for a share of the profits -- today, Amazon has an extensive affiliate
program. Affiliate programs have matured considerably since then, and
there are now many more options for making money from your site
traffic.
Basic Business Model
Affiliate programs essentially work like this: the Website owner
(affiliate) offers the merchant's goods for sale on the affiliate
Website. When a visitor clicks through the affiliate link, an
identification code is associated with the visit (usually via a
cookie) and in the event that the visitor takes the appropriate action
(visit, conversion to a lead, conversion to a sale) then the affiliate
is paid by the merchant. The merchant or affiliate network will also
usually provide tools for the affiliate to monitor various metrics,
such as the number of visitors sent to a merchant site, the number of
clicks or sales generated, and the earnings accumulated.
Affiliate relationships may be established either with each merchant
directly, or through an established third-party affiliate network. The
two most popular third party affiliate networks are Linkshare and
Commission Junction.
Linkshare boasts that it has created the largest network of affiliate
partners of any program provider -- over 10 million partnerships -- in
addition to becoming the first affiliate network provider to achieve
sustained profitability. Linkshare also lays claim to being a pioneer
in online affiliate marketing. The Linkshare network is touted by the
company as the largest pay for performance affiliate marketing network
on the Internet.
Heidi Messer, President and COO of LinkShare Corporation sums up the
service this way:
If you are looking to partner with the Internet's top brands, then
LinkShare is the affiliate network to join. Find programs for Fortune
500 and other leading companies such as American Express, Avon, Dell,
Office Depot, Apple Store, 1-800-Flowers, and more - only at
LinkShare. We don't use cookies to track, so you don't have to worry
about blocked or disabled cookies. And with our proprietary
SynergyAnalytics application, LinkShare affiliates have a wealth of
information and reports not available anywhere else to help them
optimize their relationships. We're the leaders in the industry, and
will continue to pave the way in both service and technology to foster
profitable relationships online.
Text Links
In this era of ferociously competitive search engine optimization,
competitive online marketing, and the race to appear first in the
search engine results, an active market has arisen in the buying and
selling of text links.
The beauty of text links from the Website owner's (or seller's)
perspective is this: in order to boost search engine placement, the
link must go directly to the Web page that's being optimized. There
can be no tracking mechanism, or third party ad serving to interrupt
the click. Therefore, these links are not scrutinized in the same
manner that more conventional advertising is. It's simply not that
important how much traffic comes through the link, or whether it's
really being noticed by site visitors at all. This means you can have
the links tucked away at the very bottom of your pages in a footer,
and use a small font. The links can be very unobtrusive to your
regular site traffic: as long as your Website meets the buyer's
criteria, they will continue to pay for the link. Of course, as the
likes of the TopXML and phpbb sites show, text links can be cleverly
integrated into a site's design to provide a prominent advertising
feature.
So what criteria do buyers look for, and what are they willing to pay?
You can check the spot market for text links at sites like http://www.linkadage.com/Auction/XcAuctionPro.asp.
Another benefit of text link selling is that you don't have to really
maintain the 'ad' at all. As long as the link is active on the page,
you've done your part. This is much less labor and resource intensive
than building an ad server into your site, rotating ads, and keeping
creatives up-to-date.
Finally, as if it weren't already a great deal, you can have up to 20
text links on a page without suffering any negative consequences in
the search engines. So, even if you only sell your links for $25 each
(read: cheap) you can still net $500 per month just for letting the
links sit there.
A Word on Selling
Let's face it: even the most attractive inventory won't move unless
someone gets out there and sells it. That someone may have to be you,
if you're an entrepreneur. Many people view selling with disdain, or
they hate the rejection that goes hand-in-hand with the selling
profession. You've got to get over this in order to be successful in
translating your page views into dollars. If you can't do it yourself,
then work out a commission-only arrangement with someone who can sell
your inventory.
Jean Landry is a sales executive with The Globe and Mail, Canada's
National Newspaper, daily offering readers from coast to coast
unparalleled national, international and business reporting, analysis
and commentary. The Globe and Mail has nearly 1,000,000 readers each
weekday and even more on weekends: their online version at
globeandmail.com attracts over 2.5 million visitors per month.
Jean offers the following key selling points for Webmasters:
Know your audience. Conduct a user survey and collect research when
your visitors sign up for newsletters, pdf's, and registrations.
Carefully profile your visitors. You may think you know who your
visitors are, but you'll need to prove it to people, especially when
HP says they want to buy up 10 million impressions from you for
$50,000/month -- they'll most certainly want more than who you think
is coming to your site.
Know your competition. Find out what your competitors are charging for
their ad space, what ad unit sizes they are offering and what
advertisers want. You may keep an eye on your competitors, as well, to
determine their inventory churn or rollover. If you go back every 2 to
4 weeks and you see new advertisers all the time, it either means the
site has a really aggressive sales person, or that it can't return
results for advertisers, so clients are canceling.
Understand the language and understand the benefits and uniqueness of
online advertising as an advertising medium. What's a cpm? What's a
clickthrough? What does CPA stand for? A few months ago, we
interviewed people for an online sales position and candidates
couldn't answer those questions. Spend a little less time watching TV
and a little more time reading Clickz.com, eMarketer.com, and
MarketingFind.com, or check out adglossary.com. Industry knowledge and
research can really help you move your inventory and sell online
advertising. For example, I bet you didn't know that Internet accounts
for about the same % of media time for consumers as TV now -- each
accounts for 30% of their media usage time! However only 4% of media
budgets are going towards online, while about 25% are going towards TV
...sounds like a pretty good opportunity to reach a huge untapped
audience doesn't it?
Be creative! Online advertising is boring and predictable and doomed
for failure if all you are going to sell is the standard 468x60 banner
at the top of your Web page. Ever heard of banner blindness or banner
burnout? It means your visitors tend to ignore the most common or
basic forms of advertising online if you don't put some thought into
their delivery and placement. You need to think about offering content
sponsorships on your site, targeting your ads to geographic regions,
day of week delivery, etc. Think strategic and offer strategic
advertising solutions. If you have a section of your site dedicated to
Web design, why not think of a creative way for a major brand's new
Web service to sponsor it with customized buttons, content, or an
online custom quote service?
Be aggressive in your sales...but be professional! And remember online
advertising is not new, it's not trivial, and it shouldn't be given
away for free or always be performance based. Don't be pushed around
by arrogant media buyers who think that they can bully you into not
paying their balance just because they didn't make 15 sales (not to
mention the fact that they never signed a cost per acquisition
agreement -- CPA).
Summary
Converting Web traffic into sales revenue takes persistence,
experimentation, and great salesmanship. The methods mentioned in this
article: Traditional Banner Advertising, Pay-Per-Click (Contextual)
Banner Advertising, Subscriptions, Affiliate and CPA Programs, and
sales of Text Links are proven models for creating cash from visitors.
Select the techniques and models that are a good fit for your Website
and personality -- then get started making money! Good luck converting
your site traffic into a viable revenue stream.
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