How you get traffic to your website will, in some part, determine the web monetization models you will choose. For example, let’s say you have a blog and get free traffic by writing regular content. You could monetize this website with adverts (Google Adsense), or affiliate marketing products, or both. However, you wouldn’t monetize our website with Adsense if you were paying for traffic. It’s much too expensive to pay for traffic and then try and gain money back through adverts.
Web Monetization Models – Google Adsense
Google Adsense only pays you each time someone clicks on your adverts. You will only earn tiny amounts for each click (depending on your content). If you’re paying to get people to your website, chances are you’ll lose money if you only monetize using this strategy. If you’re paying for traffic, you should ideally send it straight to a lead capture page or opt-in page on your website, and monetize with your own or affiliate products.
Landing Pages and Email Lists
Why send paid traffic to a landing page? A landing page has one purpose – to capture the email of your visitor. Once you have done this you can send them a marketing campaign and build a relationship with them. If you don’t capture their email address, you have only a few minutes to get them to make a purchasing decision.
This is much less likely to result in a sale from your website. People buy from people, not straight from a website. Especially a website they don’t know or trust. By offering value with an email series and building trust, you can extend the time period in which the customer can make a buying decision. But what about the web monetization model? Well you can monetize your website and email list with affiliate products or develop your own products.
Affiliate Products
Most website owners use either affiliate products, Google Adsense or similar advertising, or a combination of both. Adsense can make you a trickle income. If you have enough traffic this can build up and generate a nice passive income. However, you don’t want to be paying for this traffic. Adsense is good if you already have free traffic, or want to blog and create content to generate free traffic. Affiliate products, on the other hand, offer a means to earn commissions by recommending products and services to your visitors. Ideally through an email marketing list.
An affiliate product is any product on the internet with an affiliate program. Most online companies offer the ability to promote their products to a third party or affiliate. Affiliates earn commissions by recommending products and services which they don’t own. If they make a sale through their affiliate links, they earn a commission.
Web Monetization Models – Physical And Digital Affiliate Products
Amazon is the biggest affiliate company on the internet. Anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program and promote any one of the millions of products on the Amazon website. Physical products however don’t offer the same commissions as digital products. Physical products tend to pay out much less to affiliates depending on the affiliate program you join.
Digital products can pay out up to 40% commissions to their affiliates. This is because they are cheap to post and manufacture. There are no delivery costs and the products can be accessed over the internet instantly. Besides the cost to create them, they are relatively cheap and so digital product owners can pass on a large portion of the profit to the sales people (affiliate marketers).
Web Monetization Models – Business Models
Digital products allow affiliate marketers a means of monetizing their websites with various web monetization models. Some products offer a product ‘suite’ with various products within a range which they can offer their customers. This is a good idea for affiliates because it allows them to earn from several products by referring the customer to the first one in the range. Affiliates can then earn commissions again for:
- Multi-level sales – Sales made by their referrals
- Subscription products (memberships)
- Up-Sells – After sales products offered to existing customers.
- High Ticket products
For largely the same amount of work, product suites offer much more value for affiliate marketers. With single products, the affiliate is only paid once for their work. Digital products ‘suites’ offer a means to earn again and again for referring a single sale.
Web Monetization Models – High Ticket
High ticket products obviously offer the means to earn larger commissions on sales. A sale of a $100 digital product, for example, will earn the affiliate $40. A sale of a $1000 products will earn the affiliate $400. That’s ten times the commission! Although making a higher ticker sale may be more difficult, it won’t be ten times as difficult as making a low ticket sale. In many cases it will require the same amount of effort.
High ticket products are a good idea if you want to use paid advertising to promote your website or sales funnel. Even with the lower valued affiliate products, paid advertising can be so expensive that making a profit can be very difficult. With a product suite which includes high ticket items, subscription products and multi-tier sales, your return on investment is much higher. This allows you to spend more upfront in building a subscription list and promoting your range of products.
Web Monetization Models – Summary
So in summary there are various web monetization models which you can use.
- Adverts like Google’s Adsense program
- Physical products – Affiliate marketing
- Digital products
- Product ‘suites’
- Your own products
Depending on how you want to promote your website might determine to an extent how you want to monetize. Many website owners choose a variety of products which they can promote. You can create your own products too, like I have done with my ebooks. Then offer an opt-in giveaway on your website to encourage people to join your email list. From your list, offer value and build trust. Promote products to your list which your subscribers might find valuable.
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