The way that a website generates money is simple, and like every other product or service you are essentially providing value for more than it costs to generate. In this case that value is exposure and your customers are the advertisers. Through hard work and time you will have made your site popular enough that it gets seen by hundreds or thousands of people a day. That in itself is then worth money to advertisers and as such they are willing to pay you more than the cost of hosting and writing the content in order to advertise on your site.
The way that a website generates money is simple, and like every other product or service you are essentially providing value for more than it costs to generate. In this case that value is exposure and your customers are the advertisers. Through hard work and time you will have made your site popular enough that it gets seen by hundreds or thousands of people a day. That in itself is then worth money to advertisers and as such they are willing to pay you more than the cost of hosting and writing the content in order to advertise on your site.
This to me though is where the whole online business breaks down, and where a lot of people go awry. You see, if your advertising and your exposure is worth so much – then why would you want to give it away at all? If you’re selling something that’s worth more money to the customers, then why aren’t you using it yourself to make the profit that they’re making and cutting out the middle man so to speak? There is a lot more you could do with the exposure that could make you a lot more money, while at the same time keeping people inside your ‘network’ and strengthening the value of your brand. Here I’ll explain what I mean.
Selling Products
The advertisers on your site are willing to pay you a lot of money for the position that they get for one simple reason – they are going to being able to sell something to that traffic. In other word then, while they might have paid you a few cents in order to get the traffic to their page, they hope to sell something for $10-$1,000 which means it’s very much worth the money. Of course though they might still find that only 1 in 100 customers actually buy which means that the profit margins aren’t that high.
In other words then if you had something to sell yourself, then you could easily make hugely more money than either you are at the moment or they are. And there are plenty of things you could sell – from an eBook that would cost you no overheads to produce and you could easily deliver digitally, to a service, to a piece of software or an app.
Using the Advertising Space
Once you’ve done this you then have in place a much more effective system for turning your traffic into paying customers and that’s where you need to start getting smart and being bold. Pay for someone to make you a great advert online, and then write some code that links people to your checkout page. Now simply take that advert, and do a ‘search and replace’ on your website’s code in order to change every single piece of AdSense into your own advert that you can sue in order to make money much more effectively. Now instead of getting $3 for every ten clicks, you might get one sale – which can equate to a much higher profit so long as you have a good landing page and a good product that looks tempting.
And it’s not just on your website you can use this either. For instance if you have an app on Android, then instead of getting advertisers on there you can again link to your own product and make more money that way. Alternatively you could even link to your website through your app and increase your AdSense revenue rather than relying on the ad networks that work for apps. Think more imaginatively about your advertising space and recognize it for the opportunity that it provides.
This way you’re paying yourself for advertising… but you’re keeping the profit and the traffic too.
Ben Austin is a London based web entrepreneur who works for www.seo-positive.co.uk. He suggests making use of link building services to boost the page rank of your website.
For information about the services of an SEO agency, contact fishbat today.
