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.

Wicked Fire Forums – A very lively forum about making affiliate marketing. You find lots of posts about CPA offers and adsense arbitrage here.

My Outsourced Life – I read this article when it first came out, but it crept into my thoughts this weekend. I am in the process of finding a few processes in my web businesses to automate/outsource, and I am really thinking about using the Your Man in India service mentioned in the article. I will definitely write about my experiences if I go through with it.

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:

• Advertising Programs (contextual, pay per impression, affiliate, etc.)
• Ad placement and Size
• Related ebook sales
• Creative partnership or link exchanges

2. Track. Experimenting is great, but in order to know if you are headed in the right direction or aimlessly wandering, you need to be able to track your experiments. My method of tracking usually depends on the nature of the experiment. For my Adsense tests, I set up custom channels for each version of the ad that I would like to try, and then I will rotate the ads using PHP code. This can also be done with javacript.

To keep track of the days when I make the changes, I mark the days in my yahoo calendar. I learned to do this the hard way after being unable to remember when I started some of my experiments. To get a good idea of how the test is performing, I try to run each test for at least a week.

3. Optimize and Repeat. Once you have tracked your changes, you can alter your site based on your findings and repeat the process. Over time, a series of small changes can really add up into something big.
If you need some further inspiration, you can learn about how I used this process to boost my Adsense click through rate by 34%. Good luck with your experiments!

This is post is a part of the ProBlogger group writing project. I encourage you to check out all of the other great posts from around the web.

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.
• To be more aggressive with the ads, I would use the adsense injection plugin for wordpress. It will randomly insert an Adsense box ad unit into one post on the page. Having ads this close to the content can generate some very good click through rates.
• I might also experiment with the adsense link unit ads that will show a search term instead of an actual ad. I have read that they can perform well. I would put them in place of the gevalia affiliate program on the right side bar.

Traffic Ideas

The site has a ton of interesting content, and I think it I think it would help to do more to expose visitors to additional content.

• I would using the related post plugin. After each post, the plugin will automatically provide links to related posts on the blog. It is a great way to get visitors deeper into the site.
• Post the 10 most popular posts up in the right or left sidebar to encourage visitors to explore the site.
• Generating traffic from other New York focused blogs would be great for Glamourite’s traffic. I would start a series of posts to highlight/review favorite nyc blogs or favorite posts in some of these blogs in order to drive some traffic their way and get their attention so that they eventually link to Glamourite.
• Setting up a myspace page and linking to it from the site would be a good idea. A lot of Glamourite’s target audience is probably on myspace, and it wouldn’t hurt to build up a friends list there.

Content/Partnership Ideas

• Every Thursday, I would have each of the glamourite ladies write a sentence or two about a weekend thing to do and then put it together in one post. This type of regularly scheduled content will help to build the audience and may help to garner linking attention from other sites.
• If the site becomes more events focused, I would syndicate RSS event listings from flavorpill, eventful, and upcoming and post them on the site. This would provide new fresh content with minimal work.
• For partnerships, I would start discussion with a club promotion site like clubplanet or velvetlist to work out a deal where one of the glamourites could attend one of their events per week and post about it and/or include it in the weekly things to do post mentioned above in exchange for some promotion.

The ideas above work on both the monetization and the traffic side of the site. These changes would boost key drives in the monetization framework that I have written about before, and should have a strong positive impact on the site.

I plan on doing more case studies in the future. If you would like your site to be reviewed, please email me at paul@monetizetraffic.com.

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.

From my time at Kiwibox, I have some experience launching programs to reward users for completing offers. If you are interested in getting some help with setting up a similar program on your site, you can contact me at paul@monetizetraffic.com.

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.

I am also a big fan of the idea to “Sell Intelligence.” For one company that I used to work for, I developed partnerships with two market research companies where we helped to field a panel for custom research reports. This alternate revenue stream was a great complement to our existing advertising and affiliate programs. As this blog grows, I will write in more detail about some of these revenue generation methods, and I look forward to hearing from visitors about creative methods they are using to drive revenue.

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)

Let’s walk through the framework.

The first equation shows that Revenue can be thought of as the traffic to your site times the rate that you monetize visitors to your site. If your blog receives 100,000 page views and you monetize the site at $3.00 per thousand visitors, then your blog’s revenue will be $300/month.  If you want to increase revenue to your site, there are essentially two variables that you can adjust.  You can increase traffic or you can increase the rate that you monetize your site.  When working on enhancements to my sites, I like to focus my efforts around one of these two variables.

So how do you improve either the traffic or monetization of your site? As noted in the framework above, I consider traffic and monetization to each be composed of driven by 3 key drivers

Key Traffic Drivers
1.) Search Engine Optimization. A well-optimized site can make a huge difference in search engine traffic. This is an area of interest to me, but not something that I am particularly good at.
2.) Quality Content. Sites with quality content should receive more traffic over time. The impact of quality traffic can be further amplified by the third key driver.
3.) Viral Nature of Site. Some sites just have a great viral quality about them which greatly amplifies their traffic. Of course MySpace and YouTube are great example of this. I can’t tell you how many times I have referred my friends over to videos on YouTube.

Key Monetization Drivers
1.)    Streams of Revenue. Well monetized blogs or websites often have multiple streams of revenue. For example, on some of my sites I have sponsors, use AdSense, and some affiliate links.
2.)    Ad Density. I think of ad density as the number of ads on a site. A delicate balance is usually required here. Too few ads will leave money on the table, and too many ads will drive away users.
3.)    Ad Effectiveness. You can have tons of the AdSense and affiliate links on your site, but they have to be relevant to the site to generate clicks and/or desired affiliate actions. Contextual advertising has made this much easier than it used to be, but I think many sites have opportunities to increase the effectiveness of the ads which they run.

Throughout the life of this blog, I plan to touch upon many of these key drivers, with special emphasis on the monetization side. This is my first pass at the framework, if you think I left out any key factors, feel free to leave me some feedback.