Monetising your website is a great way to turn it from a cash drain into a money maker. Here are some of the ways you can get money from your site without turning it into a bazaar or smothering it with pay-per-click adverts.
If you ask anyone in business whether or not they’re listening to their customers, the answer will almost certainly be “yes”.
But the reality is often different.
But listening skills are very important – whether they’re face to face, on the phone or Skype or interpreting what someone really means in an email, text or Facebook comment.
High competition keywords are usually profitable but, by definition, difficult to rank for.
Almost any one or two word phrase will be highly competitive although chances are that you won’t see many adverts on Google for quite a lot of those phrases because they’re too generic and advertisers struggle to make them pay.
High competition keywords don’t necessarily mean there are a lot of searches for the phrase. It could just be that they’re high margin industries – for instance, anything a lawyer might be involved with – or that the lifetime value of a customer is high.
So how can you target a high competition keyword?
Article spinning works by rewriting words and sometimes sentence segments, using words that a computer thinks have the same meaning as each other.
It can be done manually – in which case you need a good writer and will likely pay at least as much as writing the article from scratch – or, more often, it’s done with software.
Manually spinning an article is maybe OK. But if you’ve ever tried it, you’ll know that it often takes at least as long to do this as it does to start over.
So most people who use article spinners resort to software. With mixed but usually poor results.
Landing pages get mentioned a lot in internet marketing. Some people think they’re the be all and end all of internet marketing.
But, unless you’ve taken steps to exclude robots, every page of your site is a landing page…
Articles – also known as website content – are the life-blood of the internet.
Even if you’re searching for an image or video, you’ll almost always use words to search. With the possible exception of Google’s image search where you can hunt for similar images. But you can’t do that with a video and you certainly can’t do it with actual written information.
The search engines are at their best when they are given words to index. They struggle to understand the spoken word – check through some of the automatic captions generated by YouTube, they often make the worst spun articles seem half way decent. And it’s highly unlikely that a search algorithm would recognise a Van Gogh picture unless it was given clues in the file name and alt text.
Which means you need to create written content to get the most from your internet marketing.
There are lots of different opinions within internet marketing as to how closely you should follow the money and how much you should follow your personal hobbies and interests.
Obviously if the two coincide, that’s easy.
But what if your hobbies are relatively obscure and the size of the market, even worldwide, is tiny?
Or if your chosen market is enormous and even the big companies struggle to dominate it?
Google indexes images well and you can drill down to find the best image for almost any imaginable purpose (and a few that are best left to someone else’s imagination, but that’s another story).
But can you legally use Google images on your website?
On the surface, internet marketing just works.
On the surface, you just do a few things and everything else just “happens”.
A bit like all most people see of an iceberg is the small part showing above the ocean surface.
Of course, there’s more to both. And since I’m not a marine biologist, I’m going to concentrate on internet marketing for the rest of this article…
The internet thrives on content but there are times when you end up staring at a blank screen, wondering what you should write about today.
This affects everyone at some stage or another but it should be a quickly passing phase. Otherwise you won’t get anything new created and your site will run the risk of stagnating.