Monetizing Your Website

What on earth does this mean? Well it means introducing advertising to your website to create new channels of income. Let us have a look at the good, the bad and the ugly choices out there.

A brand spanking new website, whatever its purpose is, will typically have a home page, a contact page, perhaps some links and a faq page. Depending on the purpose of the site, there may well be other specific pages as well. What it wont have, (unless it is one of those so called free sites where the host embeds advertising), are banners, links etc to other commercial sites.

So why would you want these anyway? Actually that is a good question, and one you should explore before considering monetizing your site. The last thing you want is for customers to be distracted from buying your product or service, or worse still being lured to a competitors site to buy theirs!

When considering advertising material, these factors are well worth considering.

1) Does the material distract or confuse the people visiting my site?
2) Is it in conflict with and product or service I sell?
3) Is it of a standard that matches or exceeds that present on my site?
4) Is the subject matter offensive, provocative or alarming to me, or my staff, or my customers?
5) Is the anticipated return, sufficient motivation to proceed?
6) What reputation does the advertiser have for paying commissions promptly and honestly?

My advice is that if your answer to any of the above is a negative one, then pass that advertiser over and continue with your selection process.

So under what circumstances do advertisers remunerate a site owner? Another good question, as there are quite a few formulas out there. Here are some of the common ones.

1) Good old commission per sale. A set dollar or percentage when a sale, originating on your site is made.
2) Commission per click. A fee, usually in cents rather than dollars, when a person activates a link from your site to the advertisers.
3) Commission per action. A fee when a prospective customer performs an action such as submitting an address form.

In all these examples you may find advertisers who will deal with you directly, or ones that use a broker to handles these matters. It really does not matter greatly to you as the advertising host, as long as the operation is organised and honest.

This brings me to the subject of the remuneration itself. You will find that some advertisers, or their brokers, will want to send you a check at the end of the month following the income event. Again, this is fine, as long as you are aware of the delay and have taken it into consideration. In addition some organisations set a minimum dollar amount that will trigger a payment. Probably the largest commission per click broker out there, has a one hundred dollar threshold, meaning that no check at all will be sent until the month following you balance reaching this figure. When you are starting off, this can take months or years! Is this acceptable to you? If not, avoid these types of deals.

Getting advertising dollars from your website is a great thing, as it happens without you doing much at all. Go out and explore this opportunity and all the best of good fortune to you.