As I’ve mentioned in the last few months, I am not really building any more websites for the time being. I believe I have built enough websites to manage (maybe too many), and I need to focus on generating revenue from these websites.
The best tip I can give to any web developer to make money is to be proactive in seeking out advertisers. Unless you have a really popular website, it’s most likely that you will have to seek out advertisers rather than waiting for them to come to you.
Visit competing websites and see who is advertising there and contact those companies directly. Install Google Adsense on your website and see what companies are advertising on your site via Google. If they’re small (not a lot of red tape in the marketing department), try to contact those companies and work out direct deals with them.
In almost every circumstance I can think of, you should make more money from direct advertising deals than you would with Adsense, affiliate programs, or some other type of indirect advertising deal. You need to be your own advocate when it comes to getting advertisers, and you should know all the details about your site that advertisers will want to know (traffic, pageviews, % of direct navigation, SERP for key terms…etc.).
It’s nice when advertisers reach out to you to advertise (and a credit to your website), but in many cases, you need to do the legwork to find advertisers and you need to convince them to spend their marketing budget on your website rather than elsewhere.
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Just as an FYI, someone saif it might be against Google’s TOS to contact advertisers directly, so do it at your own discretion.
Great post, Elliot.
Probably the one that makes the most sense of all the advice that’s being given about monetizing domains today.
AdSense makes sense as long as it strives to be the transparent middleman; but affiliate programs, lead generators, and the new parking platforms, don’t offer much in the way of transparency.
Cheers!
It really depends on the options and the niche.
I have made more money as an affiliate (20x more money) than selling ads in some cases. In other cases, I’ve earned much more money with an ad.
In my opinion, you have to weigh the available choices and test each product and its timing. Can you do both – market affiliate programs AND sell ads? I do agree that Adsense is probably the least profitable manner of monetizing a site as a general rule. On the other hand, Adsense takes the least amount of TIME to run on the site. Communicating with advertisers can become time consuming, as well as putting up and taking down their ads regularly. Affiliate marketing is not as passive as Adsense- many customers do not understand affiliate marketing and will come to me- the web owner and affiliate marketer- with their customer service issues.
As with everything else, testing and tweaking is the key.
Ellen
Ellen you have a typo in your link.
It doesn’t resolve because it’s going to RaisingSmallSouls.cm
instead of RaisingSmallSouls.com.
Thanks, Tri,
I always make awful typos on my laptop! I WISH I could type as accurately on my laptop as my desktop- then I could work on the couch!
Elliot or Webmaster, if you have a chance to fix that for me, that would be great- thanks:)
Nice point about contacting the Adsense advertisers on your site directly. I suppose you still need a healthy level of traffic before this will work but it probably is worth a try.
I have decided going forward to slow down the pace of new sites to focus on the ones I already have. Affiliates have been disappointing and Adsense still doesn’t generate anything substantial. Fortunately I do have some geo sites but they just aren’t set up with any lead generation program at the moment.
Elliot,
Thanks for the tips.
But I think it will be very hard for tiny website. 🙂
@Elliot,
Do you happen to have a sample letter you use to contact companies that are listed on Google\AdWords?
Sorry if I’m asking for too much 😉
Thanks,
Adi