Forum Moderators: skibum
Just wondering what are the best ways to make money online?
If you were running a fairly large community what would you do? I know you will need some data to go by so I will give you some general info and maybe you can help me.
PR7
20,000 Unique Visitors/day
6-8 Million Page Views
In House
Sell advertising CPC, CPM, Monthly or by the Year?
We just hired someone to take care of this and I would appreciate some tips on how to get advertisers on board.
Sponsorships
How does it work if a company would like to sponsor an entire area. How do you charge? Exclusive or allow others the same sponsorship?
Affiliates
What are the best ones? Who pays the best?
Subscriptions
We run almost everything Yahoo! has in terms of services and channels (well not almost but you get the idea). What are some good starting rates for advanced memberships for extra storage, exclusive areas etc. Charge monthly or by the year?
Content/Search Text Ads
What are the best Content Ads? We are running AdSense and I understand that OV is coming out with a Content Program in the next few weeks. Also, what are the best CPC search alternatives because you can't run Adsense or OV in search results? What's the best way to make money from searches?
We are very open to doing "all of the above" just need help with the details.
I look forward to all your help with this.
RobbieD - Could we get some idea what the demographics of your community consists of - age range, income, etc., and the type of site?
Well we service every age range, income level and our market covers just over a billon people world wide (although I'm sure not all of them have a computer yet ;)
We run a portal that currently has:
Chat
Clubs
Forums
News
Movies
Games
Email
Finance
Search Engine
Instant Messenging
Music
Articles (many different areas)
Downloads
Website building tools (geocities)
To name a few...
I would say that our audience is very captive, loyal and enthusiastic about our site. Most of our competition have deep pockets and they are not happy with what they see with this "little fish". A few have approached us with a "possible acquisition" mindset but nothing has materialized. (trying to find out our secrets)!
How can we take our revenue to the next level?
I hope this helps you all with a better understanding...
Question - are you doing Adsense?
Yes, and doing great with it so far!
Among other things, you have a loyal community, and that's a marvelous thing to have in order to benefit from an ecommerce agenda. Bear in mind that you don't have to lace your site with flashy banners. In the affiliate game, text based links tend to work much better.
Not knowing much more about your site, its not possible for me to suggest how you might best weave an ecommerce program into your site. But, I'm sure from what you've shared that it can be done in a tasteful and effective manner. Remember, targeting your audience is the key.
There are many threads here at WebmasterWorld on what works best, and I suggest that you do some research here. Right now, I don't have time to do it myself.
Suffice it to say that you may be sitting on a gold mine IMO and in my experience.
Based on what you've described about your site, IMO you have an excellent platform from which to generate significant revenue operating as an affiliate of some of the top merchants with affiliate programs.
Who would you say are the top affiliates?
Also, what if you don't have areas currently for some of these top affiliates. Should you just build areas and pages to complement these additions?
Thanks for all your help.
I also suggest that you do travel. Look up some of the prominent travel sites and join an affiliate program of one of them
But it is not as easy as putting a banner or a link, these days affiliate marketing need be to be done as an Art and a Science at the same time.
Try and Try (and look around) and sometimes you will discover good paths that delivers good cash (Sometimes for the bills and sometimes 20 times them!), but do not think you will not fail at first.
Fer
What do your customers want when shopping at your site? Remember that each customer might be looking for something a little bit different. Ask the customer who did buy from you why they did. Just as important, don't forget to ask the customer who didn't buy from you, why they didn't.
With these old rules you will quickly learn what your next move should be. Are your prices higher than the competition? Did your competitors sell them a service which you could or did not offer?
People will almost always pay a little bit more if you offer a little bit more. Sell Value! You must build value in your product. Remember the 3 M's it's 1)The Man 2)The Machine 3)The Money. If you do well enouph with numbers one and two, number three becomes much less of an issue.
What is true of selling online is the same as selling offline. Without knowing more specifics about your type of product I can only offer generalities. But make no mistake this advice is tried and true!:)
We run a very popular holiday rental company here in the UK. Where are you based?
If your site is about what I sell,
I will ditch Overture/Google/Lycos for you in a heart beat!
Banner-less and Button-less Ads
Otherwise known as "stealth advertising". Create (or even better, have the advertiser provide) an article that has valuable topical information tied into product/brand referrals from the advertiser.
Co-Branded Services and Category Pages
Give the advertiser the ability to co-brand sections of your site, or to display an additional header at the top of a page, through the use of an affiliate link placed on their site. This works best when providing a value-added service (such as a "domain search" page, etc.) to that company.
In the late '90s, I built and managed a very large community site LOADED with LOTS of free, fresh content that was the largest in its field (getting 75,000 unioque visitors a month back in 1998). I tried making money off advertising, selling memebrships, and affiliate programs, but ad rates were plummeting and I never did find a way to make any decent money off it. I eventually sold the site a few years ago for $25,000 (I think I got robbed).
Just my 3-cents worth (adjusted for inflation).
;)
The electronic world usually allows the storage of valuable information, hence we tend to know a lot about our clients. I would spend some time, crossing data to see if I can segment beyond demographics. Some lifestyle and internet habits information, will automatically give you some great ideas of how to make some additional money. The best part is that this ideas will be specific to your site.
In the same line of thoughts, you mentioned you had quite a loyal audience, this means that you should be able to find a way to ask/survay/pilot ideas about charging memberships or charging period, in a fairly easy manner. You wouldn't want to allianate your current customer base (at least not significanlty).
I am sure you can do this in-house, just with some good data management and someone who knows a bit about marketing research, you will be able to come up with great stuff.
In a few words, I am trying to say that you can lower the risk of any decision you make by going back and doing some analysis of already existing data, and the qualities of your own site, the good all "know what your clients want."
Saludos
My site revolves mainly around selling my product, which, depending on the package costs from 60-300 bucks. I also have a section for people who may not be interested in my product to make their own. Here, I reviewed about 50 products/services/informational resources and placed links to them. Luckily, about 75% of these have affiliate programs, so I won't be completely losing money by visitors using this rather than buying my product. I have a good deal of advertising space available in the form of 120X90 banners....but until I get advertisers these are targeted based on the content of the page to mostly Clickbank products (ebooks and information and such) Finally, I have an articles section with the same targeted affiliate ads, and at the end of the article i may put something like "People who liked this article may also be interested in......." and have a related affiliate link. I'm not sure how well this will work, but it seems like a decent money-making strategy to me. Anybody else?
These folks have created a system that scans the affiliate sites looking for content. It then scans possible product pages of folks who offer affiliate programs. It then does a contextual match between the individual content page and the individual product page. Then a content owner can add parameters that tell the system to show only top revenue producing offers or only show the most clicked on offers or whatever. This takes the manual, tedious, hunt and peck approach out of the search for the right affiliate offer to show.
You just sign up and it goes to work for you, keeps stats and other things. Almost that easy. By far, much easier than doing the work manually.
They give you the option of doing a rev share with one of there affiliate relationships or I think they charge a small usage fee (maybe $50.00 or something like that) per year to act as a gateway to match you with as many of your own affiliate partnerships as you can sign up for.
Bottom line is that you can now have maybe an advertisement from an auction site on one page and an advertisement from a ppc engine on another or maybe even have both on the same page but in different areas. even works if the ppc engine and the auction site don't have their own contextual advertising solution. Cool stuff. I don't think they have released it for public use yet though.
IMHO it's about darn time that someone actually helps the people who generate sales through affiliate relationships :-)
Eric
Thanks,
darkroom
EPC [webmasterworld.com] = Earnings per click
