How To Monetize Your Content Marketing

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Updated 13 years ago

Most successful internet marketers will agree that content is king.

But regardless of how great your blog, review, or article content is, you’re not going to make much money on it unless you’ve got the right monetization practices in place.

This article will show you a few proven, easy-to-implement tactics that you can use to monetize your content site.

Opt-In Forms

The most important aspect of monetizing a content website is to collect names of visitors. Why? So you can sell to them more than once. It’s much harder to attract a visitor the first time, but easier to sell to them over and over again once they become your “friend” by subscribing to your list. Be sure to have an opt-in form on your site, and give visitors something with a high-perceived value in order to collect as many email addresses as possible.

Then you want to remain in touch with them. Send them informational newsletters mixed in with affiliate product recommendations. People who received something from you in the past are more likely to buy from you again, so treat your list with respect; always offering good information, and recommendations for excellent products.

Banner Ads and Text Links

Merchant banners used to be the only thing that visitors could click on to get to the merchant’s site. But eventually, so many banners were popping up all over the place that people became blind to them and developed what was called banner blindness. That being said, however, people will still click on banners if they are interesting enough, or have interesting text in them. They just don’t click as often.

That’s when text links became popular. They are still the major form of profits for many affiliates. It’s not hard to write an interesting article for a blog or website and put links to merchant products in the text of the article.

As always, you’ll need to do your keyword research to get targeted traffic that’s looking for what you have to sell.

Charge a Fee to Place Banners on Your Site

With affiliate marketing, you get paid when someone clicks on your banner or text link and buys something.

However, if you’ve got a site that is highly specialized towards a particular niche, and gets a high amount of daily traffic, consider selling advertising space on your site.

Usually this type of advertising is in the form of a banner placed in a highly visible area of your site. Many times, companies who buy these banner placements are more interested in getting their brand image recognized than in making a sale.

In order to make this type of advertising work, you need a decent number of page views, or impressions, on your site. You can then sell banner advertising based on how many people will probably view the banner.

You can charge for this service in two ways:

The number of impressions the banner gets per thousand. You can charge anywhere from $0.25 to $5.00 per 1,000 impressions, depending on how popular your site is.
A flat fee for a particular spot on your blog or website. A highly desired position to sell is a spot on your home page, above the fold. You’ll need to do some research on what others are charging, but again, if you offer a top spot on your site, and have a good amount of traffic, you should be able to make some good extra income.

NOTE: Before offering either of these services to merchants, be sure you can prove how many unique visitors your site gets.

Add AdSense Ads to Your Site

Don’t forget to use Google AdSense on your pages. While it’s debatable whether AdSense ads take away more in affiliate revenue or provide more in AdSense revenue, it’s worth testing.

With AdSense, you can choose to display banner ads, text ads, or both. The nice thing about AdSense ads is that they’re easy to install. Google does all the work; the ads that appear on your site are relevant to your site’s topic.

Use Social Networking

There are a huge number of social networking services available now. Many of them are free to use. You’re probably familiar with Facebook and Twitter, but here are two more that will help get your content out to other sites:

Google AdSense for Feeds - Google AdSense now has a way to put ads into your RSS feeds! With Google AdSense for Feeds, you can “Distribute your content; earn revenue by displaying relevant text and image ads in your RSS feeds.”

Find more information at: https://www.google.com/adsense/www/en_US/feeds/index.html
HubPages - With HubPages, you earn money by publishing “Hubs” (content-rich Internet pages) on topics you know and love. You earn recognition among users of HubPages (known as “Hubbers”) through a ranking system known as HubScore. And their affiliate program allows you to earn 10 percent by referring writers to HubPages.

Find out more at: http://hubpages.com/tour/affiliate/