Reader Questions Archives

Monetizing a Website – Reader Question

January 24, 2013 by scott Leave a Comment

I received a question from a reader around monetizing their website and I wanted to include my (short) response for others to think about in their planning.

Question from a College Sports Site:

In your opinion what are some of the ways in which we could go about monetizing the site? I have received several inquiries from Sports Books and fantasy sports sites that want to advertise on our site and I have also received inquiries from sports ad networks, as well as affiliate offers. I am not too familiar with Internet advertising, so any advice or resources would be appreciated.

Also, from everything I have read, a premium service / section to our site is definitely something we want to consider. Do you have any suggestions or ideas on how best to approach this? Besides premium sports picks, what other “value added” products and services could be offered?

Some Advice on Monetizing a Site

The easiest way to monetize the site is to put google adsense ads on the site, but the dollar value is pretty low – however there are no sales people, no additional work on your end. You also have no control over what gets shown in the ads and can be a poor user experience if you get random, re-targeting ads.

Affiliate marketing is the next best way – Commission Junction or some of the other ones. This is also a pretty low time commit on your part, but the trick to maximize the impressions is to pick the most relevant offers and test multiple publishers. If you are a good performer (quality AND quantity) you can raise your per sale payout.

The next level is to bring-in very specific advertisers which means you need to negotiate placements, inventory, reporting, etc. More work, but you have more control.

Building your opt-in list is critical as this is a tremendous way to stay in touch with your audience and promote specific opportunities.

A pay area or subscription area on your site can be a good revenue source, but you need to put the extra effort into creating and merchandising that content.

Hope this helps!

Site/Blog Naming Question – General or Niche?

March 8, 2012 by scott 5 Comments

This question was submitted by Tim who is working on developing a new site around a particular topic – college football. My response and is below – feel free to comment. If you have questions on anything SEO, SEM, Landing Page or Internet Marketing related – drop me an email from the contact page.

Scott,

I am working on creating a college football blog and have been brainstorming various names. My initial idea was to use the keyword “college football” with some other word, or maybe use “Saturday” with another word. However all the feedback I am getting from friends and colleagues is why limit myself to just college (or Saturday) by specifically naming the blog something that suggests only college football, when I could instead name it something related to football (in general) and then have the ability to expand in the future by adding the NFL.

Which do you believe is the better course of action? At this moment the blog (and my interest and expertise) is 100% focused on college football. However I have already received inquiries from others who would like to contribute NFL content.

Thank you for your time,

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Hi Tim,

Thanks for the email. You have several considerations here:

1) Putting critical keywords into your blog name will help you with search engine visibility on a lot of levels: inbound links, the power of the works in the domain and the clarity to the engines and visitors about what the blog is about.

2) While it is always tempting to go as broad as possible to get “as much traffic as possible”, it’s really hard to break into multiple keyword/content markets. The more you can focus on a single niche, especially for a new, small site – the faster you will find success.

I think focusing on a blog name that includes college and football in the name is the best approach unless you are ESPN :-).