Bluehat SEO has a great idea up on how to make $100 per day. He proposes creating some free screensavers and packaging them with the software from ZangoCash. Zango pays $0.45 per user download, so this could add up pretty quickly. The post very clearly lays out how you could get this up and running, and how to promote the site.

I probably will not be jumping on this anytime soon. Zango has a relatively shady past, including an large fine from the FTC. The idea is good for stimulating further thoughts. In the comments of the original post, people bring up some other good ideas such as putting URLs for sites with PPC ads on the screensaver.

While I have been working on the SEO work that I outlined in How Not to Suck at SEO, my mind has been buzzing with ideas for making more money online. A few of the things sites that have sparked some ideas are:

Shoe Money Interview on SEOMoz – Very interesting info on Shoe Money’s business operations and strategy. I especially like his emphasis on experimentation and constantly learning.
Top Google Whores – A compilation of some folks making a TON Of money from Adsense. One of the sites listed was a myspace resource site that is making over $100,00/month.

I have a three-step process for making changes to my sites. Although the process is very simple in theory, I have found that it helps to keep me focused.

 

1. Experiment. Even if you think that your site or blog is perfect, there are always new things that you can try. I have found that the short term hit in performance that you may see is more than worth it. For example, in the past few months I have tried running ads from Adsense, YPN, Adbrite, and Text Link Ads to see which perform the best. I learned something from each of these experiments. Some things you might want to experiment with are:

Jasmine, who used to work with at Kiwibox, recently launched Glamourite.com, a blog devoted to life in New York City. Along with 10 “Glamourites,” Jasmine chronicles nightlife in the big city. While I know very little about nightlife, I know about making money online. I recently gave Jasmine some suggestions to improve monetization on her site, and she graciously allowed me to post my ideas.
Monetization Ideas

• The adsense ads on the site have a gray border around them. I would alter the adsense code to make the border of the ads white, and therefore blend the ads into the site a lot more. From my experiences, this will significantly improve click through rates on the ads.

TechCrunch has a post that touches XuQa’s monetization strategy. The social networking site has developed a mini-economy centered on earning peanuts. One way that users can earn peanuts is to complete CPA offers.
While I was a part of Kiwibox, we made a big push to allow users to earn “KiwiPoints” by completing offers and surveys. I was amazed at how well targeted offers could perform. Another site with a great implementation of this strategy is NeoPets. They were one of the first big communities to do a great job monetizing users through CPA offers. I have heard from survey vendors that they can just unleash huge amounts of users to complete surveys in exchange for points.

In browsing through my favorite webmaster related forums, there are occassionally a few posts that stand out as hidden gem. This post on Niche Selection and Site Creation Process is one of those gems. I especially like the tips that people give on all of the tools they use to evaluate new opportunities. SEOBook’s keyword suggester and NicheBot were two of the best that I saw. Personally, I also have used Symbiotic which has a nice database of Adsense prices.

I will keep pointing out these hidden gems as I find them, and I plan to write a case study about the process of finding a niche and monetizing a new site.

In my post about a framework to make more money from your site, I wrote about Revenue Generation Methods as a key driver in site revenue. While I was checking del.icio.us today, I noticed a great blog post titled Beyond AdSense: A Business Model Checklist. It features a rather extensive list of revenue generation methods. Hopefully, some of these may strike some great ideas on how you can make more money from your blog or website. I especially like the concept of using a site to promote professional services. Someday, I could see using MonetizeTraffic to promote consulting services.

So you want to make more money from your blog or website?  This can sometimes feel like a complicated problem without a clear place to start. One of the things that has stayed with me since college was that the best way to attack a seemingly daunting problem is to establish a framework for the problem. While this may seem overly simple to some, I find that it has helped me to make improvements to my sites.

For increasing revenue from my site, I like to frame the problem as:

Revenue = Traffic * Monetization
Traffic = f(Search Engine Optimization, Quality Content, Viral Nature of Site)
Monetization = f(Revenue Generation Methods, Ads Per Page, Ad Effectiveness)