🤮 🤵🏼 🤟🏿 How to monetize a site: methods, procedures, services 🚣🏿 💹 🏔️

Many see website monetization as a way to avoid office work. They like to work at home, be their own boss and develop their own work schedule. A website that makes money can be the first step in creating a fairly successful business. To do this, you can independently build a site or purchase an already ready one. In any case, it will be a tool to achieve maximum income.

The experience of many has proven that any site can become a revenue generator, even without advertising, although this requires tremendous dedication, since before monetizing the site, you will need to focus more on creating a decent base of regular visitors who will become the first financial donors of the project.

Content creation and traffic attraction

These elements are the foundation that you must complete before monetizing the site. The content of the site depends on its subject. Energy content is the main motivator for creating mesmerizing material. Without this, the site will be uninteresting and with zero traffic, a complete failure for bloggers, after which they simply stop working.

An important factor is the high level of quality of the content. This process is easy to control, just look at the site statistics, the results of social networks and user activity. It’s good when visitors can share content on social networks, waiting for the release of new material. And you can also use the proven and true methods of obtaining traffic.

The methods of generating traffic that are carried out before monetizing the site:

Email marketing - access to potential visitors through email. Today it is not as fashionable as the application of other methods, but it works reliably. A successful email campaign should be simple, attractive, and include a strong call to action.
Social media marketing is the forge of electronic marketing. By creating posts on popular social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the blogger collects the audience who will visit his main site. Social networks are very valuable because they allow users to quickly distribute new content, making it popular.
Search engine optimization, which is carried out before monetizing the site, is the basis of the fundamentals, its concept is so comprehensive that no website can elude its "all-seeing eye." This practice provides a higher ranking site in search engine results.

Experienced opinion: no strategy will provide steady traffic. To attract visitors to the site, you need a base of excellent content and a subtle combination of several strategies.

Monetization of a site by advertising

The main set of strategies includes the use of paid advertising. This is one of the oldest ways to generate money. You need a website, traffic and free space to subtly insert sponsor ads. Modern display ads are as follows:

Advertising images are mainly banner or rectangular ads displayed around the content of the site.
Text - Ads created by algorithms that make them relevant to the content of the blog.
Pop-up banners - move across the screen above the content of the site.
Wallpaper - change the background of the site, fill the entire page.
New windows - appear in front of the text of the site, display a complete ad for visitor review.
Flash is a moving ad in the form of multi-rollers and text.
Videos are small clips that can be triggered automatically or played by blog readers.

The prices of each type of advertising to monetize the site can vary greatly.

Pay per click

An alternative is pay per visitor or pay per click model. Here they pay depending on the number of people who come to the site and click on the ads. Bloggers have a chance to make a big breakthrough in traffic and get a decent income from 1000 impressions.

Selling Ads Using Google

Google AdSense allows bloggers to use the site’s monetization service for advertising. The user receives the code from Google, and then places it on his site in the place where he wants to advertise, then processes all the other functions of successful promotion without the participation of a blogger. He finds relevant ads and holds an auction of ads to get the highest paid ad on the site.

A blogger gets paid when someone clicks on these ads. This is a simple mechanism for monetizing an information site, but at the same time, the owners transfer to Google part of the control over it. If they are ready to accept this transaction, earning hundreds of dollars a month, having a sufficiently large audience, then they accept the agreements, having previously read the AdSense Terms of Service, and then clearly execute them so that the site is not banned by the advertiser.

Google AdSense shows ads that are important to user site content and pay the owner a percentage of revenue for each click. AdSense policy allows you to place up to 3 blocks per page in real time. This program is one of the most popular methods of monetization due to its simplicity. Google processes all advertising visits, and every month the owner of the site receives a check or direct deposit for the income generated by the site.

Reasons for AdSense Failure

The service is very popular all over the world, therefore AdSense has made the system of work very strict. Here are a few reasons why Google will definitely reject a blogger’s offer of collaboration:

Unable to monetize a low traffic site.
Inadequate or inappropriate site content. Google pays great attention to the content of the blog. He will immediately reject the blog if the content is poorly written and has grammatical errors. The content should be not only grammatically correct, but also unique and valuable for users of the blog.
The page type and design of the blog should be thoughtful. For example, a page with a bright yellow background and white text cannot be read by users. Blogs that are poorly designed and difficult to accept by visitors are rejected by AdSense. The site should have a good and neat design that soothes the eyes and delights the soul.
The lack of a privacy policy, sections "About us" or "Contact us" will lead to a refusal to cooperate. Before applying for Google AdSense, a blogger needs to create these few pages.
A site does not comply with Google AdSense rules, if there is no unique and informative content, a lot of traffic, pages with original content, it has a poor user interface with clear navigation.
A site cannot receive traffic through illegal sources, have an excessive number of keywords or a poorly coded design. All such sites are rejected. Therefore, the owner must first obtain a complete guide and a list of prohibitions to consider before applying for Google AdSense.

Russian-language advertising service Yandex

Yandex is the dominant search engine in Russia with a market share of over 60%. Yandex also operates in Kazakhstan, Belarus and Turkey. The service has a full range of advertising products and analytics tools that will help optimize the site. Most of these tools have been translated into English to serve international customers and monetize the site with Yandex.

Like other major search engines, Yandex uses the auction model to place ads. A full range of ad management options can be found in the self-service portal called Yandex Direct. Search ads are based both on Yandex search results and partner search results. Almost all Russian consumers have a contextual advertising network online. A wide range of directions is available: weather, news, trade, cinema and others. Various thematic and demographic targeting options are available, which can be controlled on the Yandex Direct platform.

Advertisements are a great way to attract consumers who may be less familiar with the brand or offers on user sites. There are various targeting options for display ads. There are mobile advertisements. Yandex offers free bilingual (English-Russian) account management services for agencies and clients. These services include keyword research, media planning, creating and translating advertising copies, localizing existing campaigns and constantly optimizing them.

The service offers Yandex Market, which is the dominant site for comparing consumer goods in Russia. More than 18 million people per month visit him in search of goods.

Yandex Metrica is a powerful and easy-to-use web analytics tool designed to help optimize your site. The metric is available in English and Turkish. Tools for webmasters Yandex Webmaster Tools provides an easy-to-use resource for viewing detailed reports on the visibility of user sites in Yandex.

To connect the blog to Yandex tools, the site owner must have a Yandex account. The phone number is part of the check, to protect against bots. But before you start using the service, a blogger needs to consider that it is not suitable for monetizing a site from scratch.

To connect and start scanning the Yandex website, you must do:

Go to Yandex Webmaster Tools.
Click the Add button.
Enter the URL of your site and click the yellow “Add” button to continue.
Copy the verification code.
Log in to the website and “My dashboard”.
Click "SEO" and "General" and paste the code in the Yandex Webmaster Tools section.
Click “Save Changes” and check.

In the spring of this year, Yandex made major changes to the work of its advertising system. Now its location on the page is no longer fixed. There are new page layout formats called a stencil, which changes according to the themes and plans of users, offering many different formats.

Search ads get more traffic, and better ads get better click-through rates. At the same time, costs for advertisers will not increase, as well as CPCs for advertising platforms.

Affiliate marketing

If none of the above monetization options suits the blogger, for example, because the site is still young and does not have much popularity with users, he can try affiliate marketing, paid messages or his own advertising to generate cash flow. He advertises these products or services under a partnership agreement on his site, establishing a “partner link” to messages. When visitors click on it and then make a purchase, the blogger receives money.

Popular affiliate marketing programs include ClickBank, Commission Junction, Share-A-Sale and Amazon, which you need to register with before you can monetize your website traffic. Paid messages and "native advertising" usually take the form of "sponsored content" that the advertiser paid to participate on the site. Often these are commercials that connect their products or services. This method can complement regular content with a little "extra", for example, a positive review of the product. The disadvantage of this way of earning is that adaptive ads can be of poor quality and content, which can tarnish the reputation of the site.

Without advertising

Sometimes bloggers consider the concept of making money through advertising a disgusting or counterproductive concept, and they are not alone in this opinion, especially when monetizing a young site. There are several drawbacks to advertisements:

Finding reliable advertisers takes a long time, and the requirements are not always acceptable.
Ads are not always paid much.
Income stream is unreliable.
Sometimes advertisers refuse to pay, citing cheating.
Ads can be creepy and intrusive.
They also slow down the site.

When this reaches the utmost non-acceptance, bloggers refuse such sponsors and begin to earn money from the site themselves, gaining a valuable audience.

Once the site has gained user value, the blogger will have several ways to turn it into a source of cash. Selling a product is a great way to monetize website traffic. It can be a product or service: books, T-shirts or something else that is in demand in the market. You can offer consulting services and post an online version offline.

Configure Paywall

This paid model is somewhat related to the earlier concept of "selling something." In this case, personal content is sold, not a physical product. You can block segments of your site for “members” who pay a fee for access to it. Or open mini-access to certain parts of the content, while each block of content will be inexpensive. You can try a subscription so that users pay a monthly fee for accessing content. Parts of the site may remain free for everyone to attract new visitors. However, “premium content” is available only to members.

If the content is in demand, you can get a sufficient number of participants who are happy to pay. There are several approaches to setting up this service. For example, politely ask the audience to donate to the site, reminding them that their patronage will allow the author to continue the interesting work on the blog pages. If the content provides value, then the audience will reciprocate, offering value in the form of monetary compensation. , , , , .

Before you monetize a site with paid content, you need to set up a donation button on your page. Then users will be able to directly pay for the goods through affordable electronic wallets, such as the Russian-language services Yandex Money, Qiwi, WebMoney or a foreign PayPal wallet. Perhaps the blogger will try to set up the page on a service, for example, Patreon. This will allow viewers to browse content creators and fund the ones they like best.

Paid Private Forum

Creating a private paid forum on the site is another great way to get extra income. This path, which can take a lot of time, and in addition, the blogger must have extensive experience. If he created his site using WP, he can install the bbPress plugin before monetizing the site on WordPress, and instantly create a forum on his website. Settings allow you to make this a private forum, and there are add-ons that allow you to manage a paid subscription.

To justify charging a fee for accessing the forum of their site, the blogger will have to provide something incredible, you will need a very strong USP (unique selling point) to justify the creation of a forum of participants. Premium content, special and good offers as a membership provide an incentive for visitors to register on it. This provides an excellent opportunity to generate sustainable income. The forum owner needs to properly evaluate access so that it encourages a large user base. Setting a high monthly fee will only repel users, and the forum will be inactive. Usually a monthly fee of $ 3-5 USD leads to good income with a huge group of participants.

Monetization of digital images

The blogger may be intrigued by the potential of e-commerce, but he has no idea what to sell. Most cannot sell any physical goods, but many have hundreds or thousands of amateur photos. They can benefit them, and not be abandoned and forgotten, aimlessly occupying microSD memory. And even if these images are somewhere in the “cloud”, then social giants should not be the only ones who can benefit from the creative result of a blogger. Fortunately, there are ways to monetize images through the site, for example, by integrating with Fotomoto, an e-commerce service for photographers.

Using Fotomoto's shopping cart, a customer can purchase digital or physical images. In the case of the latter, the service will make prints for him. To use the service, the blogger will need to create a Fotomoto account through a simple free registration.

This is far from the only way to create an image-based e-commerce website, for example, there is another good photo service for e-commerce websites - Photodeck. Numerous digital documentation in performative life is arguably the most underutilized financial resource.

It’s better for a blogger to try a few monetization options and then stick with the ones that bring him the most money. With all the available analytical and conversion data, he will be able to accurately determine how much each visitor brings. Some of the most profitable websites have multiple revenue streams, so don't be afraid to test multiple services for your website.

The site’s monetization features presented here are the foundation on which monetization strategies are built for any website. If the site has a lot of content and a lot of visitors, it does not matter what the blogger will do: sell advertising, T-shirts or the content itself. He will be able to do this because he has an audience to support his efforts.

Different audiences will respond to different approaches. A thorough analysis, along with some trial errors, will show which methods will work best to select the best site monetization and turn your online presence into a permanent source of additional income.

How to monetize a site: methods, procedures, services