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Computer Help
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How to have successful advertising site |
Whenever someone asks me about creating an
advertising site -- one that makes all its money through paid advertisements for
other companies' products -- my first reaction is always to ask, "Why bother
going to the trouble of creating a site if you're just going to use it to
advertise OTHER people's products instead of your own?"
People are often surprised to hear me say this... but the truth is,
creating an ad site that actually makes good money involves a LOT of work.
It's not as simple as putting up a web page and then hoping that advertisers
will flock to you in order to get their ads on that page!
In order for an advertising site to be successful, it needs
1. A LOT of traffic
Advertisers are only willing to pay for space on your site if they know
you can get their ads in front of HUGE numbers of qualified leads.
In order for this revenue model to work for you, you need to have a lot of
highly targeted traffic coming to your site.
Remember, on the Web, all conversions related to advertising are traceable,
which means advertisers will know exactly how many people click on the ads on
your site, and how many of those people actually convert into customers. They're
not going to pay you unless you send them enough paying customers to cover their
advertising costs. So what does this mean for you?
It means you have to be able get your site listed at the top of the
search engine results, in order to guarantee high traffic numbers. And that
means devoting many hours a month to optimizing your site and using strategies
such as article sharing, blog writing, and forum participation to build a huge
web of links all pointing back to your site.
Again, I have to say -- that's a whole lot of work simply to advertise other
people's products!
Of course, you can also put Google Adsense ads on your site -- but since you're
only going to make pennies a click for those ads, unless you're getting
thousands of highly targeted visitors to your site a day, all you can expect
from Google Adsense is a little extra pocket money each month.
2. A HUGE content-rich presence on the Web
The more advertisements that appear on a web page, the less effective any one of
those advertisements will be. After all, they'll all be competing with each
other for your visitors' attention.
That's why -- in order to be successful -- an advertising site should have a
huge number of content pages, with just one or two advertisements per page at
most. That way, you'll be able to offer valuable content to your visitors
without overwhelming them with the number of advertisements you put in their
path.
If you bombard your visitors with ads -- and don't provide them with any useful
information otherwise -- they will leave your site and never come back.
Not only that, but the search engines (who LOVE web pages that are loaded with
valuable content -- and HATE web pages that have nothing but ads on them) will
knock your site to the bottom of their listings.
So... how large does your site need to be? The ones that are actually making
good money using Google Adwords and other forms of advertising tend to have
anywhere between 1,000 and 300,000 pages.
These aren't just websites... they're full-scale information empires!
And it's not like the owners of these sites just throw up a whole bunch
of content pages and then hope for the best... they spend all their time on
keyword research to find the juiciest keywords out there, and then fully
optimize their pages so that they appeal to both the search engines AND their
human visitors.
As you can guess, this is more than full-time job.
3. A large and responsive opt-in list
You will have a far better chance of actually getting people to click on your
clients' advertisements if you include them in a weekly e-newsletter that you
send to your opt-in list.
Of course, first you have to develop that opt-in list...
... Which means including an attractive opt-in offer on your web pages that
encourages people to join your mailing list, and then sending them tons of
valuable free information so they look forward to your emails and actually open
them -- and, hopefully, click on those ads.
4. A community-centered, user-friendly site
One of the best ways to make an advertising site profitable is to increase its
"stickiness" by turning it into a popular community hangout.
You can do this by adding a
forum to it and encouraging your
visitors to talk to each other about their shared interests, and the problems
they're hoping to solve. This has the added advantage of getting your visitors
to create content FOR you.
You also want to make sure your content is as accessible to your visitors as
possible!
Remember, the success of an advertising site depends on the ads being
seen by as many people as possible. If you make your visitors jump through a
bunch of hoops before they are able to access your site's content, how many of
them are going to stick around long enough to see the ads on your web pages? Not
very many, I'm afraid.
So, should you abandon the advertising model altogether?
As you can see, creating a profitable ad-based site requires a LOT of work. And
if you're going to do all that work, you might as well go one step further and
create your own product to advertise on your site.
That way, instead of making just a few dollars or even pennies per ad, you
get to keep ALL the profits from the sale!
However, if you find the idea of creating your own product to be particularly
daunting, there IS an easy way to make money online that doesn't involve having
your product.
I'm talking about affiliate marketing, of course. Typically, you'll make far
more money as a company's affiliate earning a commission for each sale you
help them make than you will from traditional advertising.
Why? Because businesses are willing to pay FAR more money for actual
sales!
But ultimately, you will earn the most money by selling something you have
created yourself.
However, that doesn't mean you should completely IGNORE advertising. When
you're first starting out, you might find it a useful way to generate a few
extra bucks to supplement your income as you work on developing your business.
You could start by building information-rich content pages that have a
moderate amount of advertising on them -- and then replace those ads over time
for plugs that promote affiliate products.
Then, as you listen carefully to your audience and discover the products they're
most interested in buying -- as well as the products they'd like to buy, but
aren't having any luck finding online you can work on developing your own
product that has its own special appeal and explode the profitability of your
business!
By putting links to your site on high-traffic web pages, you can make sure that
Google finds your site in a matter of weeks instead of months.
This doesn't mean you should put your URL all over random websites on the
Internet. In fact, if Google finds a link to your website on a web page that's
using malicious SEO strategies, it can actually do you more harm than good.
So your goal is to find websites that have what in the SEO world is called "High
Authority" and to get your site listed on their site.
What is the easiest way to identify a High Authority sites? Page Rank. The
higher the Page Rank a site has, the more value you'll get from a link at that
site.
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Computer Help
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