Adsense Tweaks
Adsense is one of the most popular ways to immediately monetize a website, but just throwing a few ads on the site and crossing your fingers isn’t the best way to make money. The key to improving your Adsense revenue is to try new things, then analyze, analyze, analyze. Try different sized ads. Move the ads around on the page. Do they work better in a sidebar? At the top of an article? In the middle, between paragraphs? At the end?
Even something as simple as color can make a difference. Typically blue works best, as most people associate blue with clickable hyperlinks, but perhaps using a different color that matches your site design will look attractive and increase your ad-click rate. As you experiment with different ads, make sure you record and analyze the results. Moving an ad around and doing nothing with the results is just as bad as leaving the first ad you threw up on your site the same. Look at what your click-through rate does with each tweak and see how you can get the most out of Adsense.
Affiliate Sales
Taking advantage of affiliate programs can improve your income in a huge way. Amazon’s affiliate program is simple to use: provide a link to one of their products for sale with your affiliate information embedded in the link, and get a cut of the money if the item is purchased, or if they purchase any other qualifying item within 24 hours. Though this was recently made unavailable in certain states, if it’s still available in your location, Amazon’s affiliate program could be well worth adding to your site’s monetization strategy.
There are many tools to help get you started with this income stream. For example, if you are using a WordPress-based site, there are various plugins you can use to automatically add in your affiliate links to products shown on your website. These tools will greatly reduce the amount of work you need to do while helping increase your revenue. Other affiliate sites, such as ClickBank, exist as well, and affiliate sites can be a great income boost to your site’s bottom line.
Direct Advertising
People are advertising on your site, they’re just paying Google to do it. Why not have them pay you directly? Instead of relying on Adsense for your revenue, going straight to the source of the ads will allow you to potentially earn much more than the pennies-per-click you may be getting from Adsense.
Take a look at the people linking to your site. Look at the companies that sell products related to your site. Look at the companies advertising on your site through AdWords. Google the keywords your site is targeting and look at the sponsored links. These are the companies you should start to contact. They’re already paying to advertise their products, and if you can show them you can offer superior value by driving customers to their product, it will make your customers happy, the advertisers happy, and make you more money. Win-win-win.
Focusing on these three simple things can quickly improve your website’s revenue. Note that they are simple, not easy. Whether you need to be analyzing different Adsense placements, adding links to affiliate products, or contacting advertisers, it will add some increased work. However, you’ve already put so much work into creating your terrific site, and now it’s time to capitalize on it!
Mike Stafford is a personal blogger and a content contributor for insurance companies offering loans for bad credit risk clients. He strongly recommends that you compare loans online before choosing your lender.