Here are two good posts related to website monetization.

Making Money In the Mashup Economy - An interesting post over at GigaOm about how some companies are monetizing all of the mashups that you see springing up all over the place. One key take away is that many of the people selling tools and services related to mashups are the ones making money. However, there is a great example of hypemachine which allows users to sample music. They monetize the site via links to the apple itunes affiliate program and advertising sales. I could also see them selling feature spots on the homepage to push certain artists. This might be a bit shady, but it could be a nice way to make some money and the payment could be disclosed.

Ringtones Experiment - BlueBobbo got tired of reading in all of the forums that the ringtone market is saturated, so he decided to run a test PPC advertising campaign. The results were surprisingly positive. I love test like this which dispel common myths. It just goes to emphasize that you would always be testing.

While browsing Valleywag tonight, I noticed a post about how social networking site TagWorld may be headed out of business. The scary thing is that they are still running an offer on ClickBooth that pays $.80 per signup. Over the weekend I was thinking about a few ways to promote this offer, but I wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole now.

This is just another great example of how publishers should always do some preliminary research on a company before promoting offers. Myself and countless other publihsers have been burned by this in the past, and there is no shortage of  shady affiliate marketers. Be safe out there.

The first week of 2007 is coming to a close, so I thought it was a good time to provide some links to help you get motivated for earning more in the new year.

One of the blog posts which helped me to get into the right frame of mind was Quadzilla’s You are the CEO. In the post he emphasizes the importance of viewing yourself as the strategic leader of your company, even if your company is just you and your computer. This means you should:

• Focus your limited time on the high value tasks in which you specialize.
• Have other lower value resources do mundane task (ex: get a personal assistant in India).
• Automate tasks as much as possible. If coding is not your specialty, I always recommend sites like RentACoder.

For some additional motivation, you can check out the 2007 goals of ShoeMoney and EarnersBlog. As for my goals, in 2007 I hope to:

• Increase company revenue by 20%.
• Increase my frequency of posts to this blog (2-3 posts/week).
• Improve the SEO on my core sites (20% increase in search engine traffic).
• Continue my experimentation with PPC advertising
• Write an ebook to promote an affiliate program

Good luck in 2007!

MonetizeTraffic is a new blog devoted to the strategies and ideas to make more money from your website/blog. The site will feature reviews of advertising and affiliate programs, techniques to optimize revenue generation, and case studies. The site will rely heavily upon my experiences running a number of web properties.

About Paul
My name is Paul and I run MonetizeTraffic along with a number of web properties. You can see some of them listed in the Projects box on the right side bar. I have been involved in making money on the web since I launched my first website in 1996. In addition to running my sites, I was one of the first employees of Kiwibox.com, a website for teen girls. At Kiwibox, I worked on business development, and I learned a lot about helping to run a large site. Over the years, I have also provided online strategy consulting services for a Congressional campaign and CollegeProwler, a college guidebook company. I still have a lot to learn about making money online, and I hope to share my learning experiences via MonetizeTraffic.

Contact Paul