Top 5 Ways to Monetize your Website or Blog

May 19th, 2007

You have a successful blog, lots of visitors, and comments. Everyday loyal readers return to read your latest blog rant. You’ve put in your cliche blood, sweat and tears and now you are ready to monetize your site. There are a lot of options out there, but what is the best one for your site? At Buxr.com, we are currently developing a highly configurable, and hopefully highly profitable affiliate marketing widget. The widget will be commission based, so your earning potential is unlimited. The Buxr widget is scheduled for beta release in early Q4, so please check back frequently for updates. But until our wonderful widget is released, let’s review some of the top income-generating options available.

Best Bets for Website Monetization

1. Google Adsense

The mother of all monetization, Google Adsense started it all. I’m not sure if it is was the first program of its kind, but it’s definitely the best available way to earn money with your blog or website. The reason? Well there are many, but my favorite is that Adsense pays you for every click, so you never have to worry about converting sales or selling a service. And Adsense ads are automatically highly relevant to your website, an important feature because as I’m sure you all know, visitors are more likely to click on an ad when it’s relevant to what they are reading. Google can ensure this relevance because not only do they have a huge ad inventory, like hundreds of thousands of ads, but they also scan (crawl) your site and determine which ads would be the most relevant to display based on your blog or site content. And Adsense also improves with time — it will automatically display ads that are being clicked on more often, rather than keeping unprofitable ads up on your site…. How nice is that?

2. Yahoo Publishers Network (YPN)

YPN is basically Adsense, except using Yahoo’s ad inventory. I like YPN really for only one reason — it supposedly pays more, though it’s generally more expensive to advertise on YPN than it is on Adsense. One of the reasons for this is likely because YPN had a transparent bidding system, which enabled you to see what everyone else was paying. This transparency drove up ad prices, and as a result put more money in publisher’s pockets. This will probably change (if it hasn’t already, I’m not currently using YPN), because Yahoo is moving to an “Adsense” like pricing system, i.e. advertisers won’t be able to see what their competitors are paying. Now for Yahoo drawbacks: Yahoo ad’s are often contextual but due to the lack of inventory are not as relevant as Adsense. I’ve placed YPN ads on many sites and have received only the broadest of contextual matches, for example, if I am writing about the Razr cellphone, the YPN ad might be for cellphones in general, or even electronic equipment. If you find the YPN ads on your blog or site to be relevant, then YPN may be a good choice since the payouts will probably be higher than Google Adsense.

3. Pay Per Post (and Review-Me)

A Techcrunch favorite Well, not really. Pay Per Post (PPP) is a marketplace where advertisers can offer bloggers money to blog about their product or service. PPP had a controversial beginning because they did not have a disclosure policy. After many complaints, and a rumored government investigation, they succumbed to pressure and now have a mandatory disclosure policy. That being said, PPP is a great way to make a few extra bucks. Simply login to PPP, blog about something and you will get paid after the post is approved. Keep in mind that posts will usually have specific text linking instructions (it’s all about page-rank baby!). Recently, Pay Per Post has even added payout segmentation according to page rank, Alexa rank and more.

The downside to PPP is that it can annoy your regular readers. Some may strongly oppose Paid Posts so be prepared to criticism. You don’t have to accept all Paid Review requests, be selective. If you are blogging about movies, and suddenly there is a post about real estate in Malibu, it can really throw a blog off track. From my experience, as long as you maintain a balance of interesting content and some relevant Paid Posts, you should do just fine.

I also want to mention a similar service to PPP, Review-Me. All Review-Me posts are required to be disclosed, and there are NO guidelines for substance of the post. It can be negative or positive or whatever, though the advertiser does have the right to approve or disapprove the ad. Another difference between PPP and Review-Me is that with Review-Me, advertisers initiate the relationship with a blogger, as opposed to PPP where bloggers choose which products to write about. If you have a quality site, you will probably do well with Review-Me. Younger sites will have more success with PPP.

4. Affiliate Programs (Amazon, CJ, Linkshare, Perfomics, Clickbank, etc.)

As an affiliate, you receive a commission for every sale made through an “affiliate link.” For example, if you promote Weight Watchers on your diet blog and someone signs up through your referral link, you will collect a commission. Affiliate programs are hugely popular and have been incorporated into thousands of websites. You’ve probably unknowingly clicked on hundreds of these referral links yourself. Affiliate links are great if you can incorporate them contextually into your website. If your blog is gadget oriented you will probably do better with an affiliate program, than say a political blog simply because of the merchants who participate in affiliate programs. For example, if you are reviewing an Apple iPhone, why not include a referral link to the Apple Store? Affiliate links are not right for every site, and you must actually convert that click into a sale in order to get paid. But if you find the right niche for your audience, affiliate marketing is a great way to highly monetize your site.

5. Text-Link-Ads (TLA)

Matt Cutts hates them, bloggers love them. Thanks to the Google Gods and the link economy they’ve created, you can sell links on your website. If you have a Google toolbar, does it show a nice long green line? The numbers 5,6,7,8,9 could mean big bucks in your future. Webmasters might be interested in buying text links (Text-Link-Ads) on sites that are highly ranked with the hopes that this favorable Google ranking will then improve their own. Links on popular sites with high page ranking can go for hundreds of dollars per month — any authority site can become a link selling gold mine. Best of all, you can sell as many links as you like. There are some risks to TLA, primarily that link selling and buying is frowned upon by Google which could some day mean a Google penalty. So while it’s unclear what the future holds for TLA, now it’s an easy way to cash-in on a hard to monetize site.

Conclusion:

Until the Buxr widget is released, there are really few choices to monetize your blog … OK I kid! There are many great options to monetize your blog, the key is finding the best fit for your site. For most websites with some traffic, Adsense and YPN will be the best bet. If you have a high traffic or commercial site, you will probably want to try some affiliate programs that are relevant to your content. Finally, if you don’t have much traffic, you will probably want to consider Pay Per Post and Text Link Ads, keeping in mind it isn’t going to be easy because you will need some Google rank to make any significant income.

Entry Filed under: General