This is the second blog post in our series on How to Monetize Your Website Traffic. These blog posts focus on the seven successful strategies to monetize your site:
- Selling Services or Products
- CPC Networks and Pay Per Click Advertisers
- Affiliate Marketing
- Article Marketing
- Ezine Promotion
- Sponsored Blog Posts
- Site Flipping and Domain Parking
The previous blog post focused on Selling Services or Products and CPC Networks and PPC Advertisers. This blog post will focus on Affiliate Marketing and Article Marketing.
#3 Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is still going strong and it’s possible to make a good income with it. It’s basically recommending a product, and if a sale or lead results, you get a commission.
Changes in recent trends include narrower niche focus and “specialization” (not to be confused with identifying your specific target market).
Whereas one used to pick a domain name that covered a wide sub-topic range (E.G. “baking.com” in order to fit a good variety of baking-related keywords in posts, it’s now considered more effective to specialize right at domain name level (e.g. “shortbreadrecipes.com”).
Because of the prevalence of Google AdSense and advertising, it’s also wise to avoid over saturated niches dealing with subjects such as:
- Dating
- Acai berry
- Weddings
- Insurance
That’s not to say you can’t promote products associated with these broad niches: Just that you have to be a lot more specific in order not to drown like a grain of salt in the ocean.
The best affiliate marketers take their traffic seriously. They track and observe, and do their best to provide that traffic with great recommendations. They also don’t hesitate to point out flaws and drawbacks in products, building trust by always putting the visitor’s needs first.
It would be wonderful to think that the best affiliate marketers also try every product they recommend, but the real truth is, many choose products based on the highest conversion rates balanced by that marketer’s experience and instincts. (They’re seldom wrong, and never lie about using the product.)
Keywords: Finding and using the best keywords is a crucial part of affiliate marketing strategy and how to monetize your site, but all the great long-tailed keywords in the world won’t help if:
- You don’t put consistent, steady time and effort into promotion and supporting strategies
- You, yourself, don’t have a list – which you can then turn into your affiliates to help promote your best products. (Information products particularly lend themselves well to this strategy.)
Most super affiliates who really do make six figures and upwards also recommend that you focus completely on building your affiliate marketing business and don’t allow yourself to be distracted.
You can perform as an affiliate marketer in one of two easy ways (ideally, actually, you should consider doing both):
- Find individual products that your list will thank you for finding and promote it directly from the product seller’s affiliate system
- Join a reputable affiliate network and promote multiple products
You’re probably already familiar with Clickbank, but here are three more top affiliate networks with solid commission rates, to get you started:
Amazon (categories cover almost every niche and sub-niche!)
Commission Junction
Pepperjam
Just remember – especially with networks such as Clickbank – to cloak your affiliate links, to prevent unscrupulous visitors from stealing your commissions by changing that link to their own.
If affiliate marketing flows easily for you, this is a path you might seriously want to consider. If you’d rather just have a secondary, passive stream of income – a couple of hundred extra dollars a month, perhaps – then it makes a great addition to primary sources of income such as selling your own information products or services.
#4 Article Marketing to Monetize Your Site
This is one particular traffic monetization strategy no online entrepreneur should ignore. Write niche related articles driving people searching for your keyword first of all to the directory where your article can be found: And then through your Resource Box at the end of the article to your site, where they can be sold a paid product.
Article marketing can help you:
- Quickly increase page rank
- Quickly increase authority expert status
- Get known in your niche for solid content and answers
- Promote products, your brand, your services or yourself
- Drive targeted traffic to your site – traffic that buys your products or through your affiliate links!
The strategy itself is simple.
Below is a “put-into-practice” variation you can try to monetize your site.
- Sign up for the directories in the list which follows this step-by-step section.
- Study their guidelines and either print them out (so you can refer to them while proofing your article) or make quick, point form notes on any specific formatting.
- Research a great, long-tailed keyword relevant to your specific subject.
- Write five unique, original 1500 – 2500 word articles, using that keyword.
(a) In your article title
(b) Within your first sentence - Conclude each article with a simple, clear “Resource Box” that runs along the lines of: “You can find out more on how to [solve the reader’s specific problem: E.G. “remove stubborn skin tags and warts”] by visiting [website URL].
- Submit one article to each of these directories.
Of course, it’s a good idea to submit small batches rather than single articles stories (check each particular directory’s guidelines for number restrictions), using related keywords in some of the article batch mixed with repeating your strongest keyword once or twice for a couple of your other articles.
Putting the above strategy into practice to monetize your site and repeating it at regular intervals is a great, easy way to get a feel for article marketing – while driving a constant flow of traffic to your site (and offers!)
Article directories exist to provide unaltered original articles (containing your Resource Box and links) to websites. They are syndicated via RSS feed – which means your “reach” is immense, once an article is published.
Here are three, high-ranking article directories to start submitting articles to.
Plus there are always new directories appearing, some of them easier to gain acceptance to than the traditional ones. Keep searching the world wide web for new ones.
In our next blog post we will cover the fifth, sixth and seventh strategy of Ezine Promotions, Sponsored Blog Posts and Site Flipping and Domain Parking as three more ways to monetize your website traffic.
Here are the six posts on the topic of How to Monetize Your Website Traffic.
1.
Monetize Your Website Traffic
2.
Monetize Your Site with Affiliate and Article Marketing
3.
Traffic Monetization Strategy
4.
Monetize Your Site and Advertising
5.
Monetization Website Traffic Checklist
6.
