By Murray Newlands
Content monetization is when you, quite simply, make money off your content. After working in online marketing for over 10 years, I have become an expert on content monetization, but I know that there are plenty of good bloggers and website owners who have good content but do not know how to make money off of it. As a result, I am showing three great methods for making money off your site!
Putting ads in links
Companies like Infolinks allow you to make money off your text content. This is a great place to monetize content because you probably already have articles if you’ve been blogging for a long time.
In-text monetization companies work by creating JavaScript hyperlinks on the text itself, instead of relying on a noisy banner ad. When the link is hovered over by a cursor, a pop-up appears and users can click on it, and you get paid each time they click. The pop-ups are small and are easy to close out so they do not get in the way of reading your site.
Let’s say you have the word “watch” in your blog. Someone interested in scuba diving might get an add for a watch that doesn’t crack under pressure. A swimmer might get an advertisement for a watch that stays waterproof in up to 12 feet of water. A businessman might get an ad for a Rolex.
Per month Banner Ads
Banner ads can be a great choice for both part-time and full-time bloggers, but each one should choose different payment methods.
Monthly banner ads are ads whereby you sell the advertising space for an entire month at a flat amount. It works well for small sites that will not have a consistent click-through rate and cannot afford the variance of having a few bad months. However, a lot of advertisers do not like to do monthly ads because they have trouble seeing how effective they are. The only real way to do it is to use a query string unique to each site, similar to affiliate ID’s in affiliate marketing.
Pay per impression, pay per click, pay per action
PPM (pay per thousand impressions, or per 1000 times somebody views an ad), pay per click, and pay per action are all fairly similar in that the amount you get paid is not just a flat number.
Pay per impression
Pay per impression is when you get paid each time somebody views an ad, regardless of whether they actually click it. Like monthly ads, companies do not like to do pay per impression anymore, but they still will if they need to create brand awareness and it’s aimed at a highly targeted site.
Pay per click
PPC works by a company paying you each time somebody clicks on an ad on your site. It’s very popular because big companies like Google use it and it is easy to track, even though there is no correlation between the click-to-conversion rate and how much you get paid.
Pay per action
Pay per action is when you get paid a commission on each lead (trial registration, email sign-up, etc) or sale you generate for a company. Many companies like this method because it encourages publishers to produce content that will draw people who will convert later in the sales cycle. Publishers like it because they can make a lot of money if they aim at the right people, although this method has higher variance than most other methods.
Disclosure: My company, Influence People, does blogger relations work with INTENTclick.
Thanks Gloria for all the great information!!!
You’re welcome!
Advice for SMBs, PPC is a very engaging and promising tool for firms, but since it is a SMB, you better not use it, it is very costly but the results are not as promising as what they are advertised, since end-users still tend to rely on organic results.
I agree, PPC can deliver results, but at a potentially steep cost if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you’re a small business owner who wants to try PPC advertising, it’s wise to get expert advice!