Archive for November, 2010

This is a blog post that was planned for some time, and then a friend asked me this exact question, so I knew it was time to pull it from the archives.

To make money online, you have to facilitate money changing hands. Making money with a domain is similar to making money with any other website in that you ultimately have to drive people to the domain and get them to take an action which ultimately results in money changing hands. It doesn’t even have to be their money, but an action has to be taken. The big take away here is that you need to have visitors to your domain – and lots of them – to make any money of substance.

That said, here are several ways you can monetize a domain and most are based on my personal experiences.

1. Contextual Ads. This is one of the most popular domain monetization strategies. The most widely known contextual ad network is Google’s AdSense. To make money with AdSense, you simply place a snippet of code on your website and ads are displayed. When visitors click on the ads, Google gives you a percentage of what that advertiser paid for the click. In essence, this is an affiliate program for Google AdWords (Google’s Pay Per Click platform).

How much money you make per click will depend on the industry your content represents. If advertisers are paying a lot for a click (such as lawyers), then you can expect to see a few dollars per click that is generated from your site. In other instances, where the cost per click is low, you will just see a few pennies per click.

If you have lots of content, this might be a good option for you, but if you are just starting out, you will likely be disappointed with your initial earnings.

2. Selling Advertising. If you want to have more control of the ads that are served on your site (because you won’ with AdSense), you can solicit advertisers for your website. What you earn will be proportionate to how many visitors your website has. Ads are typically sold in terms of “x” dollars per thousand visitors (known as CPM pricing). For example if your website gets 10,000 visitors per month and you have a price of $5/CPM, you would charge $50 per month to your advertisers. Ads can be sold in many formats including banner ads, text link ads, and in context ads.

3. Selling Affiliate Products. If you can find companies that are related to your website that have an affiliate program where you can get paid for sales referred to them from your website, this can be a lucrative proposition. Unlike selling advertising where you are paid up front, this is more of a performance based ad, where you are compensated whenever a sale is made or a lead is produced (depending on the program). I recommend using affiliate ads in conjunction with other types of ads because the returns can be quite significant. For example, one company I run affiliate ads for pays a $100 commission for referred sales and others pay ongoing monthly commissions.

4. Domain Parking. I have tried this with a few different companies and found that if I had enough traffic to make money with a domain parking program, I would make even more if I controlled the content. Essentially these companies run contextual ads on your domains and share the revenue with you. It’s pretty simply to put up a single page website using WordPress and you can keep 100% of the ad revenue or any other revenue you generate from the website.

5. Sell Your Own Products. If people are coming and buying they might as well buy from you. Ecommerce systems are easier and easier to set up, and you could be up and running in no time.

6. Lead Generation. If your domain has traffic that is geared towards a certain niche market, you could sell leads either through a lead company or by negotiating a deal with a business owner.

The more revenue your domain (website) generates, the more value it will have. You might even be tempted to sell a domain if you get a decent offer, but before saying yes, you have to look at a few factors:

- How much money the site brings in for you and how long it would take to rebuild that income.
- How long it would take to earn what they are offering you.
I like to get at least 24 times the monthly revenue for a sale, but there are times when selling for less than that makes sense (i.e. the market may not be around for a long time). I will address selling domains in a future blog post because there is a lot to be said on the topic.

If you have any further questions about monetizing domains, please feel free to comment below and I will respond as soon as I can.

If you had not noticed, Google has changed how they display the local search listings. Formerly, the listings were displayed at the top of the page with a map and the listings to the right of it (as displayed below):

With the most recent change, the map image is listed in the right column of the page and the actual listings from the top 7 or top 10 local businesses in the map, now occupy the main section of the search results page.

What does this mean for business owners? Well, first, some have reported changes in how their business is listed. Perhaps there was an algorithm shuffle, so some business have seemed to have fallen from the coveted map based search results, and others may now have better positioning.

Secondly, it may mean that business owners want to pay more attention to Google AdWords. I imagine some will speculate that Google did this for the sole purpose of boosting AdWords revenue. I am not sure, but I do know that I preferred the old format.

Let me know your thoughts on the changes, and of course if you need help getting found on the new platform let me know.

Per this press release, my company (AKA Internet Marketing) has just launched a 3 month Intensive Internet Marketing training course designed to help business owners and managers understand the ins & outs of Internet Marketing from A to Z. This course will cover:

- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Paid Search
- Local Search
- Blogging
- Social Media
- Email Marketing
- Viral Marketing
- Text Message Marketing
- Video Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
- Mobile Search

Now is the time to develop your online marketing strategy for 2011.
To learn more of enroll, visit:
http://www.akaim.com/internet-marketing-training-course.php

Even if you outsource, you can reduce those costs by learning what you can do in house. At a cost of $197 you cannot go wrong. The 3 month training includes:

- Lessons via email (with assignments to make sure you get the maximum benefit)
- Semi Monthly Webinars
- A One on One coaching session
- Q&A during the course and for 3 months following
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- Free software an tools

Over $2,000 in value for just $197

There are only 50 spots available in the next course which starts in December, so don’t miss this opportunity. Register by November 19th and you will get a free premium training session at the end of November.