Webmaster Revenue Tutorial

Earning revenue on the Internet will be a combination of various efforts. In particular, I highly recommend reading the associated articles on traffic, affiliate programs, then perhaps hosting and advertising. Once you have done so, come back to this page and use it as a guide. After all, the reason many people become a webmaster is to make money!

Build Quality Content
It has been said so many times that it probably isn't even heard anymore. Build a web site that you would want somebody to send you to. That means it won't use popups, force you to give your email address, hide the useful information behind so many advertisements that you can't find it, or use any other techniques that frustrate the surfer. Do you go back to sites that do that? Do you tell your friends to go to sites that do that? Do you link to sites that do that? I suspect not.

Now that you have some idea what not to do, you also need to know what to do. Think about your travels on the Internet. Usually you are looking for information, for advice, for help, for links to sites that can give you those things. You want to make sure what you are reading is easy to understand and that it gives you what you need to get the job done. So, pick something you have some knowledge about and start writing. You may be able to supplement your site with material from article libraries, but have you looked at the quality of that stuff lately? Don't imagine it will fool anyone into thinking you have anything worthwhile to offer.

As an aside, I joined a private label article program recently. I was very excited to get my first package of articles, only to find that they are of incredibly low quality. The information in the articles is wrong, poorly written, and of course very short. I'm sure there are some better programs than the one I joined, but I have to admit I am still getting value out of it. I use the information they send me to write better articles, with more factual details, for topics that I otherwise would not have thought of. It's a muse really.

Anyway, some things to consider as you build your site. Where are you going to get quality content? Who are authorities in the subject matter you are creating? How much content do you need to bring people back to you? Remember, content consists of written material, appropriate media, dynamic items such as RSS feeds or blogs, and last but not least, links to other associated sites. What have you done to encourage people to bookmark you and come back? How does your site compare to other sites on the subject?

Developing Traffic
Once you have created a quality web site, it's time to promote it and get people to visit it. Hopefully, by reading the traffic resources mentioned above, you've already picked and chosen your content and keywords carefully! If so, then you should start to see free traffic arriving from Google or other search engines once they have indexed your site.

However, that isn't enough. You still need to acquire links to your site, even if they don't generate a lot of traffic, to help your ranking in search engines. Improving your ranking will increase the revenue value of some of the strategies discussed later in this article. Grassroots methods of acquiring links include posting comments in blogs, participating in relevant forums, submitting your site to appropriate directory categories, posting in newsgroups, linking to your site from your other sites, trading links and perhaps even creating your own blog dedicated to the topic.

Other methods, which do require upfront expenditure, involve purchasing links on established sites - you may be purchasing a link for pagerank (PR) purposes or for traffic purposes. Paying for featured listings in directories. Advertising using PPC or CPM models on Google Adwords or other networks. Spend your money wisely, if at all. If you are just starting out I strongly recommend doing the hard work of using grassroot strategies instead of trying to shortcut the process with money. The amount you can spend is unlimited, but the results may end as soon as you stop spending money.

Monetizing Your Site
You may be surprised that it took so much reading to start talking about monetizing your site, but realistically, you have to start at the beginning and you have to create something valuable before you can monetize it. If you look at all the crap on the Internet you will see that many people have tried to skip these steps. With all the get rich e-books and other material, people are starting to think there is some magic way to skip all the hard work and generate insane profits. There is not. If you haven't done the material above, then don't bother trying to make money from your site.

There are various strategies, discussed in detail below, for earning revenue off of your site. These include Adsense style ads, affiliate sales, direct sales, selling links, newsletter marketing and any number of other schemes. All of these methods, except possibly direct sales, require you to sign up with service providers who will review your site and accept you into their program. A quality site with established traffic is exactly what they want.

Adsense Revenue
By now you will have noticed text and graphic advertising served by Google, Yahoo and other competing networks. These ads are context sensitive and adjust themselves to the content and keywords found on your web site. If you choose your content and keywords well, then the same keywords that generate traffic for you will generate value for advertisers, as reflected in the cost per click that you are paid for showing their advertising.

There is more to it than just slapping any old ad units on your pages though. There is a lot of work involved in finding the best ways to integrate the ads into your pages to help entice users to read and thus click on them. A few tricks include placing the ads near navigational elements, using pictures to draw reader eyes towards the ads, and placing ads at the end of a page so that they are available when the user is looking for the next place to navigate to. Experiment a bit and find out what works best for your users.

Affiliate Programs
If you have a target market that doesn't do a lot of clicking on ads, then you may need to adjust the advertising that is displayed. Of course, one way of doing this is the find affiliate programs that allow you to sell products and services that will relate to your readership. I generally point people to Commission Junction, but there are other affiliate networks. A popular one for digital products is ClickBank.

Some affiliate programs will pay you per sale while others will provide payment simply for getting a user to sign up for something. For example, if a user fills out a loan consolidation application form, you may earn a few dollars. It can take a lot of time to find offerings that fit your readership. At the same time, you do have to watch out for less than honest advertisers that may not work very hard to ensure you get credit for customers and contacts originating from your site.

Direct Sales
If you have your own products, or a shopping cart system and a drop shipper, then you can sell products directly on your own site. There will be additional hassles involved, such as finding a company to process credit card orders, finding a company that will drop ship orders originating from your site, and so on. This is a lot of work for an entry level person, so I'm not going to offer a lot of advice on the topic. However, eliminating the middleman does allow you to keep profits on sales for yourself instead of earning a sliver of commission instead.

Selling Links
With the advent of pagerank (PR) and the importance of getting traffic from organic search results, there has been a relatively new development. This is the ability to sell a link to a web site from your site. Usually these text links are sold from a high PR site or a high traffic site to some other site. If you sell a static search engine friendly link, allowing the purchaser to choose the keywords used in the link, you may command a fair amount of revenue.

A company I have used to do this is Text Link Ads. You need to have a site that can run server side scripting, such as PHP. Anyway, you place the code on your site, and they will sell people the ability to place a link to their site on yours. Interestingly, I went to check my account and there was an ad pending my approval as I was writing this. I don't know for sure how long the ad will run, but one of my sites will now be earning me an few dollars a month.

While this isn't a get rich quick method, I believe that quality sites will eventually have their links sold, which will earn enough to provide for hosting with some left over. The higher your PR and the higher your traffic, the more will be left over, but you get the idea. Over time I think this method alone, without all the other advertising methods, could be a nice way to invisibly monetize a large number of web sites. I highly recommend giving them a try.

Newsletter Marketing
I lot of people swear by this method of marketing, though I have never used it. I don't like receiving commercial email and for that reason I don't use it as a means of generating revenue. However, the idea is simple. Using one of the email management providers out there, gather a list of email addresses and send them regular updates.

In these updates you can provide useful information as well as some advertising for your own products and services or others. At the very least, having a popular newsletter will allow you to contact a lot of people and get the message out if you have something to say. It can generate traffic from your own readers and it can generate wider traffic if you provide information that they find worth sharing.

I might give this a try eventually, but I haven't yet.

Further Studies
Obviously, this page is only an introduction to these topics. I would strongly suggest that you join the Digital Point forums, or others, and start talking to other people in the industry. They will give you advice, hints, tips and links to all kinds of sites, products and services that you otherwise would never hear about. There is no better way to get connected in the Internet era.

Now, seriously, don't pay for any ridiculous ebooks or other programs that promise huge overnight revenues. If you want webmaster revenue, then you have to earn it just like everyone else... and I've given you enough information to do it!