Hi folks,
I’ve had a couple people ask me about monetizing websites with Adsense and although this isn’t something that can be explained in one article or even a 3 hour conversation, I decided to put this little post together.
Ingredients: Content, Traffic, Loyalty, Psychology
When it comes to monetizing a website, it’s all about content. Fresh content leads to viewers learning new things, which results in returning – regular readers are always more valuable than unique users, as the blogger gets the chance to build loyalty, thus allowing the blogger to steer his/her regulars. I would start off with WordPress, WordPress is extremely search engine friendly, which allows you to gather unique visitors. Once you have a pool of people coming to your blog, then you can work on the loyalty thing. Just always remember that good content is what will get your regular users!
Of course plugins and the likes will attract people, using related posts plugins encourages readers to click around your website, popular posts plugins steer users to the most common posts, top commenters plugins create competition on your blog, and so the list goes on. Having a user arrive, take a read and leave is NOT the aim of the game, what we want to do is have the user arrive, and have the user stick around. If a person takes the time to read more than one article, the chances are that the user will return again.
Adsense psychology is so critical. Something I tried a long time ago, was writing some code, which changed the colour of Adsense. At night time I would make the Adsense stand out a great deal more, whereas during the day, I went for a blend effect. Although I don’t apply this strategy on iMod, I do apply it on other websites and it does work – Just remember that the best thing to do is see where your visitors are coming from in order to setup timezones correctly – Don’t forget to do this ;)
Analytics is Googles statistics software and any blogger who wants to make money needs to learn Analytics. Analytics will allow you to see where your traffic is arriving from, which search engines they’re arriving from and most importantly, which key words they are search for to arrive at your website. If you notice key word trends, you must realise that these are the popular topics and therefore write about them more often. When writing related posts, link back to the older posts which have similar content, this will allude to users reading more than one article and then hopefully returning in the future!
Last on my list of 101 tactics is comments.. always take time to reply to coments, answer questions with correct information, but always try to ask a question back so the user feels commited to replying, this is a strategy which won’t fail. Coupled with this tactic, grab a plugin such as ‘subscribe to comments’, which will allow users to log a post and when another person comments, the user would receive an email notification – this is probably one of the most popular tactics around.
Ok, before I see myself going on forever, which is what could easily happen, I’m going to dash. It’s been an incredibly long day and if I stare at this computer anymore, I think I will go mad! Please feel free to ask questions and I’ll do my utmost to reply promptly!
Best of luck!
Adsense count: $35 off reaching the $500 mark! (good example of linking back to a previos, topic related post) *wink*
With few words you said more than enough. Thanks.
No questions? Wow, I must have covered a great deal ;)
What you are saying in your post is that content is king. Seeing just how much user interaction you’ve got on your blog means that you’ve built up your user base nicely.
Thanks for all the tips, I’m going out there to create some lekka content now :)
Totally, content is king. However, I must say that content is even better when planned around a strategy :)
No problem about the tips, there are a number of marketing articles on my blog, please do take a look around..
I think I will go mad! Please feel free to ask questions and I’ll do my utmost to reply promptly!
Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life.
Totally agree!
When I don?t have an inspiration to blog, I cleanup my folders in my PC and do defragmentation in my system?
Not a bad idea, keeping things neat is a good move. I subscribe to RSS feeds, they usually provide inspiration :)
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