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Monetization

How a Magento based e-commerce website would lose customers?

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Image representing Magento as depicted in Crun...
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A website is mostly designed and developed to get more customers to the business for growth and sales. Magento based e-commerce websites do the same job by encouraging online shopping and promotion. E-commerce websites are designed so that customers come to shop as per the need to contribute to the business. If the website is not up to mark, customers would never turn up which might lead to losses. In this article, we would discuss why a Magento based e-commerce website would lose customers. [Read more…] about How a Magento based e-commerce website would lose customers?

Ways to Monetize Your Website (Infographic)

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Skimlinks, a company that helps online publishers earn more money through automatic affiliate marketing, has released a new infographic aimed at helping website owners discover new ways to monetize their efforts.

The lighthearted “Ways to Monetize Your Website” flowchart asks an array of questions with the goal of recommending methods of monetization that may match best with your audience. The methods highlighted include banner ads, classified ads, in-text ads, sponsorship, do-it-yourself affiliate links, automated affiliate marketing, premium memberships and branded merchandise. [Read more…] about Ways to Monetize Your Website (Infographic)

Creative Techniques To Help You Profit From Seasonal Blogging

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2010 World Cup FootballAlthough many of us are blogging for the long-term in very specific niches, there exists many more dynamic opportunities to achieve blogging success as well as various styles that can be adopted. Over the years I have learned that there are some of us who have not really mastered the quality of patience and do have difficulty being committed to tasks and goals that require long-suffering dedication that leads to success.

So I have a few ideas through which I can offer some inspiration for the short-term blogger and how you can take advantage of the various changes and seasons of popular events. [Read more…] about Creative Techniques To Help You Profit From Seasonal Blogging

Why eBay Partner Network Makes 22 Times More Money Than AdSense On My Blog

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Updated on March 5, 2009: I noticed a huge discrepancy with my Google Analytics pageviews versus the impressions being reported by eBay Partner Network.

I did some digging and found that eBay counts link impressions not page impressions. For example, one of my posts has 22 links to eBay. This means a pageview is actually 22 impressions to eBay.

Needless to say that changed my calculations. I reworked the numbers and found that instead of 200% in the original post, eBay makes me 22 times more money than AdSense! Or in percentage terms, 2,100%. Of course, with this new knowledge, I’m very motivated to put eBay links on all my relevant posts, not just my most popular ones 🙂

I’ve been pretty excited the last couple days. I finally found an income stream for my gaming blog that actually makes a decent amount of money without hurting the usability of my readers.

At first, I tried AdSense but the ads I got were very irrelevant. My gaming blog is about a collectible card game called Magic The Gathering. As a card game, the word deck is huge keyword. However, that word was a problem since it would show ads about building a physical deck for your house. Also, since the title of the game has the word magic, I would get ads about magic tricks and how to cast actual spells.

I estimate that 70-80% of my ads were irrelevant. As such, I knew my readers were having a poor reading experience on my blog. I even hated looking at my site. The big intrusive irrelevant ads were a turnoff. I tried smaller ads but my income sunk too much. But even with the big ads, my income was not very good. Relevance is huge if you want to make money and very few people were clicking my ads.

My sister has a dating blog that gets less than half the traffic as my blog. But she has earned more with AdSense since her blog shows more relevant ads. After a while, I couldn’t optimize AdSense to make more money. My income was so low that I decided to drop the program and look for other ways to make money.

I tried affiliate programs from online retail stores but I couldn’t find a quality program. Surprisingly there was no info product I was comfortable with endorsing that had an affiliate program. I was close to giving up. I thought I would have to focus solely on creating my own products to make decent money from my blog. I’m working on my own info product but it will take a couple months to complete. I wanted to make some money right away without resorting to AdSense.

To add to my frustration, my blog was reaching new traffic highs every month for the last couple of months. I had recently reached the 1,000 daily visitors milestone.

eBay Partner Network

As a last ditch effort, I turned to eBay’s cost per click (CPC) program called eBay Partner Network (ePN). I knew they could be a great income source, since they have a lot of traffic and there is an active eBay market for the cards I blog about.

I sent my application but immediately regreted it when I read this article about how to get accepted in the network. Yeah, I know. I should’ve read the article first! My excitement and impatience got the best of me when I found out that eBay had a CPC program.

In my application, I wrote a 50 word blurb about my site. I didn’t put any effort in explaining why my site was a good fit for eBay. Needless to say, my site was rejected after a couple of weeks.

I then wrote them a 380 word email message asking them to reconsider my site. I explained my business plan and gave multiple traffic stats. I even included my experience as a search specialist and blogger. I knew my site was a good one for eBay so on the second try, I spent the extra effort to communicate that fact.

I couple days later I was accepted into the program.

I immediately create a couple eBay links and placed them on my most popular pages.

After a couple of days, I looked at the numbers and was very happy to discover that eBay made 22 times more money than my previous AdSense numbers (based on CPM, or cost per thousand page impressions) 🙂

Plus, the best performing AdSense ads are the big square ads that take up a lot of space and make your blog look cluttered. On the other hand, eBay has text links that can be placed in the middle of your posts. Therefore, you add value and an income stream without making your blog look cluttered with ads.

My blog doesn’t have any ads right now and it’s a great feeling. I do plan to sell ads on my sidebar in the future but I’m glad I don’t have to put ads in the content section of my blog. That section is the best place to put ads if you want to make money but it’s the worst spot from the user’s perspective.

I’m excited about the future with ePN. I haven’t done any testing on my eBay links so I think there’s room to optimize and earn more money.

If you have a product driven site, I definitely recommend eBay Partner Network.

Performancing offers blog management services.

5 Ways to Turbo Charge Your Blog Monetization

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By now you probably know that simply plastering ads all over your pages and prominent donation links don’t really work. There really are no get-rich-quick schemes in blogging; turning your blog into a reliable income generator requires hard work, experimentation, and patience. Those are three aspects common among the five methods I share in this post.

Clipart of bills and coins
Image via Wikipedia

Optimum Ad Placement

Like it or not, your average visitor has learned to ignore parts of your website that seem like ads—even elements that really aren’t ads! The kneejerk reaction to this reality is an in-your-face approach towards ad layout, sacrificing readability for the sake of ensuring your ads are front and center.

If you’re committed to building a long-term quality audience however, you’ll need to find a good balance between content and ad visibility. [Read more…] about 5 Ways to Turbo Charge Your Blog Monetization

5 Ways to Turbo Charge Your Blog Monetization

by

By now you probably know that simply plastering ads all over your pages and prominent donation links don’t really work. There really are no get-rich-quick schemes in blogging; turning your blog into a reliable income generator requires hard work, experimentation, and patience. Those are three aspects common among the five methods I share in this post.

Clipart of bills and coins
Image via Wikipedia

Optimum Ad Placement

Like it or not, your average visitor has learned to ignore parts of your website that seem like ads—even elements that really aren’t ads! The kneejerk reaction to this reality is an in-your-face approach towards ad layout, sacrificing readability for the sake of ensuring your ads are front and center.

If you’re committed to building a long-term quality audience however, you’ll need to find a good balance between content and ad visibility. [Read more…] about 5 Ways to Turbo Charge Your Blog Monetization

Making money with Amazon even if you miss the direct sale

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Until recently, I’d almost given up on being an Amazon affiliate. It wasn’t necessarily hard to get people to click on links but they rarely seemed to buy what I was offering them.

However, times have changed. I can’t think of any of my family, friends or acquaintances that isn’t aware of the Amazon brand and hasn’t bought at least one item from them.

What I’m discovering more with Amazon is that, while the basic rules of affiliate success remain the same — including traffic, deep-linking, compelling and relevant enticement — Amazon is one of the few big names that rewards you even if your visitors’ first clicks don’t make a sale.

Granted, you only get 24 hours from a visitor landing at Amazon from your site in order to earn commission from items placed in their basket, but there’s also a 90 day window of opportunity if users add something to the basket on day one but don’t purchase it immediately.

I used to think that Amazon had less earning potential than pay-per-click advertising such as AdSense or Chitika, because someone not only has to click but also purchase before you earn any money.

Thing is, I’m finding that if I can get people to visit Amazon, I have a good chance of earning commission on everything they decide to buy, even if it’s not something I initially recommended.

Looking a what people order, a number of items are either the exact product I recommended, or something closely related. The other items are seemingly random.

So, with decent traffic and a positive push towards Amazon from a wide variety of your blog posts, you do have the potential to earn, letting Amazon do its usual great job of drawing people further into its site and towards the “Add to Basket” button.

I know some other affiliate programs also offer this kind of deal. It’s worth looking into. If you’re transparent about your links and recommend stuff that you own, or would buy yourself, then regardless of whether your visitors buy those items when they go to a merchant site, they’ll hopefully remember your site as a useful source for genuine product recommendations.

Income from Amazon is still far more unpredictable than from other forms of advertising I run on my blogs, but I now believe it has much greater earning potential too.

Now to drive the traffic in.

What’s your experience with Amazon or other affiliate programs and indirect conversions like this?