If you’re blogging or curating content for a personal website, then chances are you’re trying to find as many ways to monetize your site so that it’s all worth it. Makes sense. Just know that before you can really monetize your site, you need a decent amount of traffic. You can’t expect to be bringing in big bucks if you don’t have a large amount of eyeballs looking at your content.
There’s a reason that the asking price for commercials that air during the Super Bowl is upwards of $2.5 million for 30 seconds. In 2017, there were 113.7 million viewers for the big game on average and a total audience of 172 million. That doesn’t even count the audience that will check out those ads on YouTube. Moral of the story, the more viewers you get, the more you can expect in return and the more you can demand for advertising, etc. It sounds simple enough, but you wouldn’t believe how many people reach out to me with a couple hundred views a day and wonder why they aren’t able to live off their website or blog.
Another important note:
Viewers equal the amount of people that come to your site every day.
Views or pageviews equal the number of different posts/pages on the site a viewer looks at.
So you may have 200 pageviews a day but only 80 viewers, because each person checks out 2 – 3 pages on your site. Pageviews are important because it’s great to know people are looking at multiple pages on your site, but you want to increase your overall number of total viewers.
Okay, now tips for how to monetize your website:
1. Google Adsense
First and foremost you should set up your Google Adsense account. It’s easy to set up and it’s a nice way to collect some coins even if you don’t have the largest traffic yet. It can be frustrating early on however because you can see as low as $.01 per day if your traffic is in the low hundreds. And even if you get to thousands of views you will have good days and bad days. So Adsense may not be the most reliable, but it is an important source of income. And it is consistent.
2. Shareaholic
WordPress offers a shareaholic plugin for your site for simple integration. Shareaholic is a simple advertising option that allows you to have another option besides Google. The rules are also much more relaxed. Shareaholic also provides opportunities to share your own content to potentially get more views.
3. Infolinks
Infolinks is another site that provides advertising partners for your site, much like Google Adsense, but with also fewer rules and guidelines. Infolinks may not be as pretty depending on your set up, but the money will come in. They also have a plugin, which makes for easy integration on WordPress. As of writing this there were 6 different advertising options and you can use all 6 on your site for the most potential funds. Be mindful however because clutter may make people reluctant to come back to your site. Too many ads may also slow your site down. So while the money comes in, you may lose some hits as a result. You have to make that decision for where you are in your business.
4. YouTube Cross-Content
Creating a YouTube channel and posting visuals of your blog content is a great way to monetize. YouTube is a search engine on its own so your videos will expose you to a new audience and if you monetize your videos you will get money from YouTube directly, which connects to your Google adsense account.
When you post videos on YouTube be sure to post those on your site, but also include the link to your site on the YouTube site as well, where you provide your video summary.
5. Sponsored content.
These come in several forms–you can post links in your stories to paid advertisers or you can do promoted posts for artists and brands. For extremely new blogs or content creators this gets tricky because you are promising the advertiser—whether it’s a brand or an artist–that you are introducing to your audience. The audience has to be worth the cost for you so be smart about promoting the stories so that the brand or artist doesn’t feel like they have wasted funds.
Another option for sponsored content is placing links in your stories. It may take some time to get to this point, but once again, the more hits you have, the more likely that you will be able to get sponsored content.
You can also post sponsored content on your social media sites. That is of course assuming that you have a decent following.
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
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