You managed to get your site in the magical place where you created popularity, traffic, loyalty and community of fans. Your website contains a lot of information, resources and services that you provide for free, because this is only the person you are. You may not have planned to make money from your site, but now that you have an audience, you realize that this is possible, or you may need to start thinking about earning an income, because your site management costs have increased, and this & # 39; s begins to hurt.
Over the years, you have been diligent to build your community and wonder how you can make money using this audience (as marketers say, you want monetize your site). Perhaps you have some big dreams and are planning one day to receive advertising revenue in a new web project. This is a very common online business plan, which typically assumes that information and services will be free. Advertising can be one of the strategies for generating income available to you.
How much traffic do you need to make money?
In my experience, when you have about 500-1000 unique visitors per day to your site * at least * before you can start making real money. You can switch chimps from the first day of your 50 hits, but this article is aimed at those who have a wider audience, or perhaps builds a business plan (real or in mind) and would like to know how to monetize your site. If you get more than 1000 unique visitors per day, you may be earning money from your site (if not you should be!) But my points are still relevant.
As usual, I will illustrate my article using real examples from what I did to make money. After about five years, I was able to create a hobby site that started as a very local site dedicated to people in my area who played the game Magic: The Gathering. I wrote reports and made news for the game. Later, I expanded the site in Australia and eventually opened it to the world, despite the fact that it remained mainly Australian with a good piece of Asians and New Zealanders.
Banner Programs
At the time when I received 500 unique visitors per day, I decided to start playing with advertising methods. This was before the advent of Google AdSense (more on this later), but there were many available banner programs that were paid either at a cost per click (CPC) or per impression. A display is a banner that is displayed to the user once, a click is a click on the banner and a visit to the advertised site.
These networks act like the average person between a business that wants to advertise and people like me who have an audience and want to make money by showing banners. Unfortunately, these programs display banners that often do not fit your audience. I tried a few, but it was a short experiment that made me a few dollars if it were.
I recommend that you avoid any banner programs. If you're embarrassed by what I'm talking about banner programs, find Burst Media to understand how they work. For smaller sites, they just don’t make a lot of money. For large sites, there are many better ways to make money. There are people who make good money from these programs (I’m sure that program owners do it!) But in my experience, a small effort to find the right type of advertising can give much better results.
I decided that the best way to make money is to really use the demographics of my audience. I had a rather purposeful niche, a card game playing young men. I started by e-mailing all local and international card game stores and asked if they were interested in exhibiting my market. I instantly had the answers, but first I needed to create a pricing structure.
How much should you pay?
By this time, my site was approaching 1000 unique visitors per day, with about 300,000 hits per month. I did my research and I knew that advertising on sites is usually done through a standard banner measuring 468 × 60, so I’ll start with this. I also knew that many companies charge a so-called cost per thousand impressions or a cost per 1000 impressions. At that time, it was the most common scale for evaluating online advertising, and you could expect to earn anywhere from $ 0.10 to $ 10.00 per thousand impressions. I never liked this method of advertising, because it did not guarantee visitors. Charging with clicks is a much better method, but before that it did not become the main one. I decided that in order for my advertisers to have to offer value, I took a full approach. I started charging a flat rate of $ 30 per month to have a banner on my site that offers so many impressions that my traffic can provide. I signed my first few advertisers at this speed.
Banner Management Software
In order to “rotate” different banners on my site, I needed special software that would dynamically place banners. This allowed me to have more than one banner advertiser in one place, so that I could optimize my advertising space and make sure that my audience is not too boring to see the same banner again and again.
Let me save some time, phpAdsNew [http://phpadsnew.com/two] is the best banner management software. It is open source licensed and has all the features you have ever wanted at a price you can’t win, it's free. If you do not believe me and should not try to look elsewhere, try finding the PHP resource index.
There is a learning curve with phpAdsNew, and you need to install it on your own server. If you are like me and you do it like this, most of the time you should not have too many problems. Otherwise, you can try to contact your favorite ITGeek and get them to give you a hand.
Statistics is important
The best feature with phpAdsNew is that it allows you to provide a unique user login for your advertisers to check their banner statistics in real time. This means that at any time they can find out how many impressions and clicks they get banners from your site.
Before you start searching for advertisers, you should be well aware of the statistics of your site. Do you know how many unique visitors you get? How many hits do you get? How many impressions? Do you even know what the differences are between them? Try using this template for the final result if you do not.
Most web servers come with a statistics package. Ask your web host if you do not know. The most common are Awstats and Webalizer, which are often installed on many hosting packages. Check out these packages so you can accurately estimate the traffic to your site.
Increased advertising revenue
Now I had a foundation, and I was advertising my first advertisers. From this point on, I went to work, attracting more advertisers by sending email through North American online stores and other related sites. I saved an Excel file to keep track of which websites I emailed and their responses so that I can track them in a timely manner.
I created new positions in banners and started initiatives such as a newsletter to get more revenue. I created monthly packages that combined advertising newsletters and various banner positions and offered them for $ 500 per quarter. I increased the starting position for first place in nominal size to $ 50 and started offering a tower position for $ 50. Sometimes I had to limit the number of banners that I could use in general terms to avoid dilution. I had an on-site guarantee that offered advertisers at least 30,000 impressions per month (average 40,000-60,000) so that they always get a good equivalent cost per thousand impressions. I even had some advertisers buying rights to “own” a position for a certain period to make sure that no other banner ads would be displayed.
Sometimes I reached the point where I averaged $ 500 per month and reached the same level of $ 1,000 in one month. Some advertisers came and went quickly, but many remained loyal and in fact still advertise today, although I sold the site a long time ago. The niche for the site was so focused that it became the main place for Australia in this market, and inevitably some Australian advertisers simply fixed their banners as a branding. They knew that exposure from the site would help align their business as one of the most famous retailers or event organizers for the game. Some advertisers are no longer responsible for clicks on statistics and continued to advertise solely for branding advertising.
Google adsense
At some point, Google AdSense appeared, and I came to it with other early users to try. My results were fine. The money was not as good as the existing relationship with the advertisers I had, but the ads displayed were much more targeted than banner networks. I’ve historically stopped using AdSense, because it’s better to monetize ad space with my traditional advertisers. However, this was before Google went to work, providing such a variety of banner sizes and display options. Currently, Google AdSense is a viable source of revenue for many websites, so I definitely suggest that you explore it as a possible option to generate revenue, but remember that this is not the only means and you can earn more if you are searching for targeted advertisers .
Routine maintenance
I would not call the passive income from online advertising, but he is sure that he is close. The systems I used processed everything automatically. Although I had to manually create advertiser accounts, chase advertisers and control billing once the systems were in place, in particular phpAdsNew, I didn’t have much to do. Of course, depending on your website, the maintenance of your community is often work-related, but there are opportunities if you have launched the site, either use it, or you have plans to remove yourself from the maintenance role. In the end, I sold my site, but if it were not for the advertiser’s income, my asset would not have been valued almost as high as the final selling price. Investing in advertising is like investing in any asset, time and labor that you invest today will lead to gains in the future.
